MLB to implement manager challenges, broader instant replay in 2014

Major League Baseball owners voted unanimously on Thursday to approve instant replay, according to multiple reports and MLB, with umpires serving as replay officials.

The plan, as it stands now, allows managers to challenge one call per game with the option to challenge an additional call if their first challenge is sustained according to Daniel Barbarisi of the Wall Street Journal. Also, after the start of the seventh inning, the crew chief will be able to initiate a challenge on any reviewable play. There will also be eight new umpires to accommodate a replay command center stationed in New York which will handle all reviews. Joe Torre expects most reviews to take between one minute and 90 seconds.

The bottom of the ninth inning of Tuesday’s Astros-A’s game at Oakland featured a frustrating scene. With two outs and a runner on first base, Chris Young hit a long fly down the left field line that went into the stands very close to the foul pole. The hometown fans signaled fair; the umpire said it was foul. The game itself was at stake. Fair and the A’s had won on a walk-off home run, foul and the game would go on, Young resuming his at-bat with the count against him 0-2.

A’s manager Bob Melvin came out and argued that the call should be reviewed. This wasn’t just a matter of partisan interest, but of accuracy: The ball was so close to the pole that the call could have gone either way. Melvin faced an uphill battle in getting the umpires to act, because this was Angel Hernandez’s crew, and Hernandez’s opposition to replay is well known. After the game was delayed roughly five minutes so that Melvin could lobby for a review that should have been de rigueur, the umpires came back with a call that Melvin must have known was inevitable: foul ball. To be fair to the umpires, the replay was stubbornly unclear -- the ball seemed to be on the foul side of the pole, but it also might have just nicked it and changed direction. Still, when you have a combination of a recalcitrant crew and a borderline call, there’s a reason to wonder if integrity went out the window on that particular call.