ORLANDO, Fla. — Toronto Blue Jays president and CEO Paul Beeston really enjoys watching a good argument between a manager and an umpire.
His favourites?
“I always go back to Billy Martin and Earl Weaver – the two of them had great theatrics,” Beeston said Thursday after baseball’s owners meetings wrapped up. “They were kicking dirt on the umpire, or they were kicking it on home plate. The one I still think is best is when Lou Piniella picked up the base and threw it. Those were good, but those are few and far between.”
If the expansion of video replay approved by baseball’s owners during their meetings works to plan, such dust-ups may very well become a thing of the past.
While exact details of the new system won’t be finalized until the unions representing umpires and players also approve the plan, Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s chief operating officer, said if a manager comes out of the dugout to argue a call, he will lose the ability to contest a play.
The goal is to prevent managers from arguing to buy time for someone to check a replay ahead of a review request, but also to keep challenges from delaying the game.
So rather than watching managers engage in a pointless argument, the time would instead be used to ensure the correct decision was made. That’s a worthwhile trade-off, and though regrettably the occasional gem argument would be lost, at least we would all be spared watching another awkward John Farrell-umpire exchange.
“When you see (the entertaining managers argue) it’s good stuff,” said Beeston, “but at the very end of the day it’s an effort to get things right.”
The contours of the system are largely in place but they will be subject to some tweaking in order to gain the necessary thumbs up from both players and umpires.
The system will be based on manager challenges, up to two per game but possibly just one, with successful reviews not counting against the limit. The plays will be reviewed by an active or former big-league umpire in New York who will communicate with on-field umpires via headset.
Plays eligible for challenge right now seem set on fair/foul calls past the bag, out/safe decisions at first base and tag plays, with the boundary calls currently in place incorporated into the new challenge system.
Baseball’s rulebook will also need to be rewritten, with everything expected to be finalized when the owners next meet in January.
Purists aside who make the argument that human error is part of the game (don’t worry, you’ll still have balls and strikes to bicker over), the looming expansion seems to be a win for everyone.
“The biggest thing is getting the right call,” said Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista, who is active within the players union. “Everybody knows how hard this game is to call let alone sometimes have to make some calls on the go, immediately out of natural reaction without having time to think about it. It’s pretty amazing, but we’re all human beings and there’s always margin for error involved.
“This takes some of that heat, responsibility and expectation on umpires to get everything perfect. Replays are used in every other major sport, it’s about time we did.”
Other potential benefits include the reduction of friction between players and umpires (although the strike zone is the main source of that), and a mechanism for umpires to correct themselves when they realize they have made the wrong call after the fact.
Commissioner Bud Selig, long resistant to expanding replay, was swayed by the system’s merits.
“Someone had been kidding me the other day about how I’d really been against it,” said Selig. “I said, ‘Well you know, my father told me that life was nothing but a series of adjustments.’ And so I just made an adjustment, but I’m really very pleased. …
“The logic was overwhelming.”
POSTING PROCESS LIMBO: The ability for teams to bid on pitching sensation Mashiro Tanaka is in limbo after a proposal for a revamped posting process between Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball was pulled when Japanese owners failed to approve the plan in time.
Rob Manfred, MLB’s chief operating officer, said they had yet to receive a formal reply from their counterparts oversees, and that “right now we have to have some further discussion with them before they’re able to accept.”
“We warned them, told them, that if this sat too long there could shifting winds out there,” he added, “and suffice it to say there are shifting winds.”
Some within the industry wondered whether the threat was real or simply designed to spur the NPB into a decision.
Owners have long disliked the current system, in which teams submit blind bids in order to obtain the negotiating rights for a posted player. The Boston Red Sox paid $51.1 million before the 2007 season to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka while the Texas Rangers spent $51.7 million in the winter of 2011 for the rights to Yu Darvish.
Speculation has been that the posting bids for Tanaka, 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA for the Rakuten Golden Eagles this past season, could dwarf both figures.
Without an agreement, Japanese players wouldn’t be eligible to leave for North America until they became free agents after nine years of service time.
“If that’s the way we get Japanese professionals, I think the 30 major-league clubs are prepared to live with that result,” said Manfred.
“The concerns with the (current) system were that it’s a blind bidding process that led to inflated numbers, and that those inflated numbers make that market unavailable to a broad cross-section of our teams.”
The Blue Jays are among the teams who want no part of the system. They submitted a protective bid for Darvish in case his market collapsed, which did not happen.
PICK IT UP BOYS: Commissioner Bud Selig gathered owners, general managers and others the past couple of days and asked them to start finding ways to pick up the pace of games.
“I told them we need to be creative in addressing these issues,” said Selig. “The length of games all year but particularly in the playoffs and the World Series I didn’t like and was unhappy. I know we’ve moved into a new generation, but there are things we can do and there are things we will do.”