Maybe I don’t have the right take on the numbers, but if you ran a company whose employees got one out of every two decisions wrong, wouldn’t you think about getting a new set of employees?
For two seasons now, Major League Baseball has used replays to determine if umpires’ calls are correct. Managers can challenge calls – one a game unless the challenge is upheld and then they get another one – and the plays are reviewed in multiple replays in a studio in Manhattan.
Major league umpires, on a rotating basis, view the replays and inform the umpires working the game if the calls were right or wrong. A game umpire then signals safe or out or whatever the result is, and the game resumes.
The review practice has seemingly gained widespread acceptance, even among umpires. Delays for reviews, even in the age of speeding up the pace of games, have not resulted in intolerable delays. The average delay both this season and last, according to the commissioner’s office, has been one minute and 46 seconds, shorter than between-innings commercials.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But what about the review decisions themselves?
Entering games of the past weekend, 399 calls had been reviewed this season and 184 had been overturned. That means that 46.1 percent of the calls were found to have been called incorrectly.
Last year the Ninth Avenue review crew scrutinized 1,286 plays, including 11 in post-season games. The reviewers overturned 607. That’s 47.2 percent. Combined, the two seasons produced 47 percent of challenged calls overturned.
Joe Torre is MLB’s chief baseball officer and as such is in charge of all on-field matters. That includes umpires. I asked him on the telephone Friday if the ratio of overturned calls concerned him. Frankly, I thought it should.
“Concern me?” Torre asked. “No. If you look at plays with a naked eye, most are bang-bang plays. I don’t have a concern with it at all. The reason you have replay is so you don’t have wrong calls.”
But should MLB tolerate a ratio of every other call being wrong even with the raison d’etre of challenges and reviews being to get the calls right? Torre suggested another way of looking at the percentages.
“When managers are waiting to decide if they’re going to challenge,” he said, “and they decide not to challenge, they become correct calls. Those aren’t counted as correct calls, but the percentage goes down.”
Bruce Froemming, who umpired for a record 37 years, is an assistant to Torre and agreed with his boss on the percentages.
“Now many are challenged that don’t get challenged.” Froemming said in a telephone interview. “You could take that 46 or 47 percent down to 22 or 23 percent.”
MLB keeps comprehensive records of challenges, recording date, game, inning, manager, call, umpire, type of play, outcome, time of review and link to the video of the play. What isn’t recorded – and is virtually impossible to track – are the times managers consider challenging plays but opt not to.
That’s what Froemming meant when he talked about plays that “are challenged that don’t get challenged.”
“There’s a play at second,” Froemming, 75 years old, said. “The manager comes out and the umpire says ‘You want to challenge it?’ The manager says ‘Wait a minute. I got to wait for my man.’ Each club has someone watching. You wait and then the manager says ‘Yeah, we’re going to challenge it.’ The challenge came from the monitor. Or he looks in the dugout and says no.”
The system has produced another result, Froemming said. “It’s taken arguments away,” he said. “He goes back to the dugout and there’s been no argument. In the old days a guy didn’t go away and got thrown out of the game.”
Some of those instances produced more entertaining shows than the games themselves. A season and a half have passed without a hat-tossing, base-throwing, dirt-kicking display by the likes of Billy Martin, Earl Weaver and Lou Piniella. So many new managers have joined teams in that time we don’t even know if there is a Martin, a Weaver or a Piniella among them.
The replay rule prohibits outbursts by managers. Anita Piniella might have preferred that system to prevent her husband from embarrassing himself or her, but give me an old time Piniella tantrum any time over a minute-and-46-second replay delay.
For more serious reasons, I am not a fan of replay and review. For one thing, I prefer that a game be decided on the field and not in a studio on Ninth Avenue. For another, since managers, coaches and players make mistakes on the field that are not reviewed and overturned, why can’t umpires be permitted their mistakes?
I asked Froemming that question. He didn’t answer it directly but explained why they aren’t allowed to make mistakes.
“Technology is such that when you see a play you see it with the naked eye, and you say he got that play right. Then they go to replays and slow motion. You cannot get away from technology. Look where technology has come in the last 20 years. What’s it going to be in the next 20 years?”
Technology, though, doesn’t come with a guarantee and isn’t perfect. Major League Baseball last Wednesday apologized to the Kansas City Royals for its contribution to the Royals’ 2-1 loss to Cleveland.
In the eighth inning of a 1-1 game the night before, umpire Bob Davidson called the Indians’ Jose Ramirez safe at first base on what to the Royals’ manager Ned Yost appeared to be an out for a double play. Yost challenged the call, but the reviewer upheld it after studying replays for 3 minutes and 2 seconds, one of the longest reviews of the season.
Avoiding that out proved critical later in the inning when Jason Kipnis scored the tie-breaking run on Michael Brantley’s two-out single.
“This is one of those rare circumstances in which the super slow motion view was delayed and the replay official reached a decision without the benefit of that information,” MLB said in a statement.
“They admitted they missed the call,” Yost told reporters. “They had a breakdown in the system.” But he had no problem with the system, saying, “I think it’s a great system. There’s going to be mistakes for one reason or another. Things happen. Mistakes are made. Just admit it, apologize for it and move on. That’s what I try to do when I make a mistake.”
I wonder if Yost will retain that feeling if the Royals miss the playoffs by a game.
OF BUSH, TAYLOR, CHILCOTT AND MORE
MLB’s annual draft serves as a magnet to draw draft enthusiasts into a game of predicting the order of the first round. I am not among them. However, as MLB celebrates the 50th anniversary of its draft this week, I have enjoyed one man’s view of the No. 1 picks in each of the first 50 drafts.
- Darryl Strawberry, Mets, 1980
- Ken Griffey Jr., Mariners, 1987
- Chipper Jones, Braves, 1990
- Alex Rodriguez, Mariners, 1993
- Joe Mauer, Twins, 2001
- Bryce Harper, Nationals, 2010
- Gerrit Cole, Pirates, 2011
- Carlos Correa, Astros, 2012
Of the 42 picks Mayo felt were not the ones that should have been made, Danny Goodwin gained double recognition. A first baseman but primarily a designated hitter when he played in the majors, Goodwin was selected No. 1 by the White Sox in 1971 and No. 1 by the Angels in 1975.
He played 252 games in seven seasons, batting .236 and hitting 13 home runs.
Mayo’s suggested picks: Mike Schmidt and Lou Whitaker.
The Mets made two of the biggest blunders with their No. 1 selections: Steve Chilcott instead of Reggie Jackson in 1966 and Shawn Abner instead of Greg Maddux in 1984.
Chilcott never played in the majors, plodding through an injury-plagued seven-year minor league career. Abner batted .227 and hit 11 home runs in six years and 392 games.
In 1991 the Yankees, with a rare No. 1, chose a pitcher, Brien Taylor, who before he could reach the majors wrecked his shoulder and his career in an off-season fight defending his cousin.
Except for the last three No. 1 picks, Chilcott, Taylor and Matt Bush are the only No. 1s who never played in the majors. Bush, whom the Padres drafted first in 2004 instead of Justin Verlander, played in the minors but was better at drinking and fighting than he was at hitting or pitching.
In 2012 he was sentenced to 51 months in prison on a variety of felony charges. He may be eligible for release in October from the Florida prison where he resides.
In more baseball-related developments, the Mariners in 1981 drafted a pitcher, Mike Moore, rather than a future perennial batting champion and Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn.
The Twins and the Brewers passed up players who would win the major post-season awards seven times each. The Twins took Tim Belcher rather than Roger Clemens in 1983, and the Brewers chose B.J. Surhoff instead of Barry Bonds in 1985.
In more recent years, the Diamondbacks drafted Justin Upton instead of Andrew McCutchen in 2005, the Royals selected Luke Hochever and not Clayton Kershaw in 2006 and the Astros drafted Mark Appel instead of Kris Bryant in 2013.
This is the link to Mayo’s complete piece: http://m.mlb.com/news/article/128305526/take-it-from-the-top-redrafting-each-no-1
MEET THE METS AND THE MICE
You know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. If you don’t, ask the Mets. I just don’t know which they are.
The Mets, who are trying to reach the post-season without the aid of bats, announced a couple of weeks ago they were switching from a five-man to a six-man starting rotation, the better to conserve the arms of their talented young pitchers.
Six-man rotations have not been plentiful or popular in the majors. Teams have enough difficulty finding five decent starters, let alone six.
Elias Sports Bureau, defining a six-man rotation as the same six pitchers starting in the same order through multiple times, found that only three teams have gone five or more passes with a six-man rotation:
- Astros in the final two months of the 2013 season
- Royals in the final month of the 2004 season
- Mets in the summer of 1998
Consulting my 1998 daily book, I found that from July 28 through Aug. 30 of 1998 the Mets started Hideo Nomo, Al Leiter, Bobby Jones, Masato Yoshii, Rick Reed and Armando Reynoso five times through the rotation, from July 28 through Aug. 30.
The Mets’ record in that stretch was a commendable 21-14, but the second-place Mets lost a game in the standings to the first-place Braves.
This season the first go-round of the six-man rotation went from May 29 through June 3. The six starters were Matt Harvey, Jonathan Niese, Bartolo Colon, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Dillon Gee.
They compiled an aggregate 5.66 earned run average, and the Mets lost four of the games. Before they reached starter No. 3 (Colon) in the second rotation of the six-man rotation, Manager Terry Collins said, “Never mind” and announced he was reverting to a five-man rotation, putting Gee in the bullpen.