Following the success of the MLB’s first experiment with instant replay in 2008, the league is planning to open a second replay center, this time in San Francisco. The first replay center was built in 2008 in the MLB’s Chelsea Market building, and was expanded in 2014 to include 900-square-feet of video monitors and other replay technology.
The newest replay center will be opened in MLB Advanced Media’s office near AT&T Park, but MLB commissioner Robert Manfred said that there is no date set for when the new center will be opened.
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“At some point you want to have redundancy, meaning if New York goes down, there’s someplace else you can go,” Manfred said of his rationale for opening up a second replay center. “The proximity to the Silicon Valley for a technology company like MLB Advanced Media is very important, and it just makes sense in terms of the economics to do it where we have an existing facility.”
Based off of the current office in New York, this new replay center will be operated by at least one umpire and one technician, although often more than just two will occupy the room.
And now, not every play that is subject to review will be handled in New York, but also may be dealt with on the other side of the country.
In today’s MLB, managers get one challenge per game, and they have a right to retain their challenge if the umpire’s call is overturned based off of their challenge. Umpires can review any play in the seventh inning or later, and they can review home run calls at any time.
The system has been met with mostly praise, given that the MLB was the last of the big four American sports to institute video replay into the game. However, it has also had a few critics, the most recent was Chicago Cub’s manager Joe Maddon following his team’s loss on Wednesday.
Maddon claimed that umpires have a bit of a conflict of interest, and are slow to overturn a fellow umpire’s decision. He wishes for some sort of “independent group” to look at the plays.
Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, Joe Torre, cited his initial reaction to the introduction of video review. “I sort of like the game the way it was,” Torre said with a laugh. “But there was a play at second base. And it was missed. There was a lot of conversation and stuff written about that play as opposed to the game itself. The one thing I didn’t want to have happen was to have something like that take center stage over the game itself.”