Cleveland Indians talk – trying not to talk attendance, Swisher’s intangibles, Francona and Ubaldo and more with TD – WFNY Podcast – 2013-05-09
May 9, 2013Dion Waiters: Mike Brown says I’m a starter in this league
May 9, 2013The Indians very well might not have been able to sweep the Oakland A’s this afternoon had Angel Hernandez and his crew of umpires made the proper call on a home run replay last night. That’s the statement from MLB and Joe Torre today.
“By rule, the decision to reverse a call by use of instant replay is at the sole discretion of the crew chief. In the opinion of Angel Hernandez, who was last night’s crew chief, there was not clear and convincing evidence to overturn the decision on the field. It was a judgment call, and as such, it stands as final.
“Home and away broadcast feeds are available for all uses of instant replay, and they were available to the crew last night. Given what we saw, we recognize that an improper call was made. Perfection is an impossible standard in any endeavor, but our goal is always to get the calls right. Earlier this morning, we began the process of speaking with the crew to thoroughly review all the circumstances surrounding last night’s decision.”
The result isn’t especially surprising as baseball continues to stand by the precedence of not trying to go back in time to re-write history. They didn’t do it for Armando Gallaraga’s perfect game and they weren’t going to do it for the Oakland A’s today. As an Indians-focused site that saw the benefits of both the two mentioned instances, I’ll leave the question of whether it should have been changed or not to others. I can say that if that had been the decision of Major League Baseball, I would have had a pretty difficult time griping about it on terms of pure fairness and accuracy of game officiating.
5 Comments
Makes me wonder what they would have done with exactly the same blown call in a game of great significance: last game of the season when the winner determines which team goes to the playoffs, or 7th game of the league championship series, and both scenarios assume there’s two off days before the next round starts.
The problem is, where do you restart from? CP got the next out to end the inning after a walk, but what if they had scored again? He had to pitch from the stretch with runners on, but if it was ruled a HR, he’d have been in the wind up. Too many variables to be able to continue at a later time.
Can we go back and play the hundreds of games were the Browns, Cavs, and Indians have gotten screwed by bad calls?
I think Perez pitches from the stretch to start the innings with no one on. At least he did last night.
No once was enough!