1. Don’t put a stopwatch on the review process
Last night’s review took… a while. I suppose that’s also part of the annoyance, that it took forever to get a call and they still got it wrong. However: time-limiting the process could doom it all together.
These reviews are intended to help adjudicate close plays… by design and intent. Therefore, you must expect that the process should have some difficulty associated with it (last night’s home plate call notwithstanding).
In short, if you ever want to see a call overturned, then you’re going to have to wait it out. The evidence does need to be clear and it should be convincing… and for a variety of reasons, that could take a while.
Any artificial time limit on the process — whether 2 minutes, 3 minutes or something else — essentially gives the original call even more weight than it appears to get now.
But if you think review umpires are reluctant to overturn one of their brethren now, then just wait until you force them to be completely done with their work in 2-3 minutes.
You put that requirement on them and you may as well go back to Point #2 and scrap the system, for then only the most egregious Angel Hernandez calls would be overturned.
Yes — this was way out of the norm
Look: for all of this said, last night’s call was bad for a number of reasons.
I don’t actually blame the home plate umpire, for he had one view from a high angle (and therefore had to assume that Bohm’s foot wasn’t airborne over the plate) and he saw the play once in real time while also having to determine when/whether a d’Arnaud tag had been made.
That puts the onus on the replay review umpire, and I frankly don’t understand what he might have been looking at since he had the benefit of multiple angles and slow motion.
For me, it was clear from replay #1 that Bohm missed the plate and the dozen+ additional looks from the extra ESPN cameras only confirmed that. This should not have been a close call.
That said: let’s direct our anger toward the appropriate direction… to MLB and the MLB review system. This was a bad outcome and it’s hard to imagine how this can be justified.
For now, this simply has to join a lengthening line of wrongs done to the Braves over the years… and it joins the Hall of Fame of such bad calls:
- Hrbek lifted Gant
- Posey was out
- “Ordinary Effort” (the Infield Fly Rule play)
- Bohm was out
So keep up the pressure on MLB… twitter, facebook… whatever it takes. Without that nothing changes.