For an old soldier of baseball’s labor wars, the game has lost its fire and intensity. Nobody fights any more. First, the owners and the players, who used to fight at the mention of the words “salary cap,” have negotiated two consecutive collective bargaining agreements without a work stoppage. Now the commissioner’s office and the umpires union have reached agreement on the use of television replays to make sure, if necessary, home run calls are correct.
John Hirschbeck, president of the World Umpires Association, confirmed Wednesday that the two sides had completed an agreement that basically had been settled in June.
“We were in agreement a month and a half ago, Rob Manfred and I,” Hirschbeck said in a telephone interview. “We just had to finish off some documents.”
The replay issue had flared up a day earlier when a spokesman for the umpires union, Lamell McMorris, told the Associated Press that “procedural issues” still had to be worked out. “Major League Baseball needs to step up to the plate and iron out these issues.”
But according to people on both sides, no such issues remained. A management official said Manfred, the owners’ chief labor executive, had been talking to the union’s lawyer, Brian Lamb, and that they had experienced no problems or hangups.
“It’s like any agreement,” Hirschbeck said. “When you come to the end, you want to make sure the details are right. Today we were able to do that. We were in agreement and just had to map out the last details. We understand replay will be part of baseball, and we were working with the commissioner’s office to make sure everything was right.”
The revolutionary replay plan will be used as soon as all of the necessary equipment is in place at all of the parks. Contrary to some previous reports, the umpires themselves will make all of the decisions – whether replays should be viewed and what the replays show. Officials sitting in an office in New York will not make the decisions. They will simply provide the replays for the umpires to see.
“The crew chief and two other umpires,” Hirschbeck said, “will go to a tv monitor hooked up to New York, see videotapes of calls fair or foul, on the pole, whether or not a fan reaches over the fence or if the ball hits on the line of demarcation.”
In other words, replays will be used on a limited basis. They will not be used to determine balls and strikes, safe and out or fair or foul on balls hit down the lines. Commissioner Bud Selig yesterday emphasized the limited use.
Selig used to be opposed to introducing replays into baseball. But new parks and a flurry of questionable calls this season prompted him to change his thinking.
“I’m still opposed except in the most limited forms,” he said in a telephone interview. “The new ball parks present a challenge. An umpire running out and the ball hit 400 feet away, it really is a tough thing to do. The more I’ve watched the more I think it’s valid. But I haven’t changed my basic mind about replay.”
Some of the new parks have yellow lines on the outfield walls that serve as a dividing line. If the ball hits above the line, it’s a home run; if it hits below the line, it’s in play.
“It’s just more difficult than in the old parks,” Selig said, “but even Fenway and Wrigley present challenges. If we can get it right, we should do it.”
Under the system replays of potentially controversial calls will be sent to a central location, baseball’s advanced media offices in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. The technicians there will make replays available to umpires for their viewing when necessary.
The chief of each umpiring crew will decide if it’s necessary. The crew chief will also be the one to decide the call after watching the replays.
“There were suggestions that umpiring supervisors would be there in New York saying what they saw and the umpires wouldn’t see the replay,” Hirschbeck said. “We said we’d like to see it because we have to make decisions on the field. It’s another aid in getting the call right, but we’ll make the decisions, not someone in New York. Manfred agreed.”
The umpires are right for wanting to make the calls. Baseball games have always been won and lost on the field. Well, almost always. When a game is protested, and the protest is upheld, as happened in the pine tar game between the Yankees and the Royals that I recently wrote about, the game, in part, is decided off the field.
But except for those rare instances, the field is the place to make decisions, and the umpires are the people to make them. Baseball got this one right, unless you don’t like the idea of replay. Like Selig, I didn’t like it, but after watching the umpires mangle those calls earlier in the season I suppose it’s better to get the calls right than to throw up your hands and say players make mistakes so umpires can make them, too.