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ESPN Report: MLB Umps Miss 1 in 5 Close Calls

TheGallopinGoose · 2010-08-15T15:36:34+00:00

The Link In reply to: [hr]Researchers used broadcast footage of all games from June 29 to July 11 -- 184 in total -- and reviewed every call, with the exception of balls and strikes. The overwhelming majority of the calls (fair or foul, safe or out) were so obvious they did not require any sort of review. But the "Outside the Lines" analysis found that an average of 1.3 calls per game were close enough to require replay review to determine whether an umpire had made the right call. Of the close plays, 13.9 percent remained too close to call, with 65.7 percent confirmed as correct and 20.4 percent confirmed as incorrect. [hr] If you follow the math even further, this means that we can expect to see an incorrect call once every 3.77 games. This leads me to believe that instant replay would be a very easy thing to institute in Major League Baseball. Each team gets one challenge a game to review a call (fair/foul, safe/out, or home run/not home run). That way, there is no worry of constant reviews taking over a game. Even if it was just for the playoffs, this would be a great improvement: the above stat means that we would expect to see an incorrect call in every playoff series, and one challenge would take care of that.