National Post (National Edition)
Upon further review, instant replay may hurt MLB more than it helps
Rule was meant to overturn egregious calls
From the on-deck circle to the right of home plate, Jayson Werth stared at the Nationals Park video board and saw the Washington Nationals’ season teeter on a ragged edge. He watched Jose Lobaton slide back into first base, ahead of Willson Contreras’ pickoff throw and Anthony Rizzo’s slap tag.
For 100 years, Lobaton would have been safe, the original and seemingly obvious call, and everybody would have moved on to the next pitch, unbothered and riveted to the eighth inning of a one-run game. As Thursday night became Friday morning, a ballpark engaged in near-forensic video study, squinting to see if Lobaton’s leg had come off the base at a moment when Rizzo’s glove touched him.
“It didn’t look great,” Werth said. “At the same time, since this replay thing has been in, half the time you don’t know what they’re going to do. I feel they’re flipping coins up there.”
In 2014, Major League Baseball implemented replay to circumvent embarrassment. It feared a game turning on an egregious missed call when technology existed to avoid it.
Other sports had introduced replay and it had become ingrained in how fans consume sports.
Sometimes it has bailed MLB out.
More often, replay reviews lead to the kind of unintended result that occurred in the Nationals’ season-ending 9-8 loss in Game 5 of their NL Division Series: The reversal of a non-controversial call to the naked eye that fundamentally changes a game, a season and perhaps the course of a franchise.
After minutes of huddling and communicating with umpires sitting in a control room in New York, umpires called Lobaton out. The park groaned. Werth tucked his chin to his chest and dropped his bat.
Rather than Trea Turner batting with two outs and two men on with the Nationals down a run, the eighth inning abruptly ended.
According to FanGraphs. com, the Nationals had a 28.6 per cent chance to win before Contreras picked Lobaton off and a 16.4 per cent afterward.
Still, MLB must decide if those plays and those reviews are how fans want to watch baseball and if they make for a better product.
With two outs in the eighth, Lobaton shot a single up the middle to put two runners on. Hoping to score the go-ahead run on a double, Lobaton wandered off first base with a long secondary lead.
Contreras makes more pickoff throws to first base than any other catcher in baseball and possesses perhaps the strongest arm among backstops in baseball. He snapped a throw to first base, Lobaton scampered back ahead of the throw.
With the video feed slow and zoomed in, a viewer could see Lobaton’s foot hit the base safe, his leg slide up the bag before Rizzo’s tag — and his leg lift off the base for a split second, just as Rizzo happened to slap the tag.
On a technical level, Lobaton was out. In the spirit of the game, had the Cubs earned an out? Lobaton beat the tag and an umpire’s eyes would have told him he was safe. Replay made for a correct call. It didn’t make for a better call, unless what we want out of baseball is for players to be rewarded for keeping tags on baserunners and perfectly controlled slides.
“Tough to say,” Lobaton said. “If it’s in your favour, you feel good. If it’s against you — I thought for sure I got a couple replays when I threw the guy out at second and I was happy. Today, I was like you see in the replay that it was just my foot just came off just a little bit.
“That was enough for the replay to show I was out. What can I say? It’s part of the rules right now. We have to take it.”
Baseball’s replay system is also circumstantial in how it is employed. Manager Joe Maddon may not have checked the call early in the game, when he had just two challenges at his disposal. In the eighth inning, he could ask for a challenge with no downside, without losing anything. “There’s no reason not to challenge right there,” Maddon said.