This will bring scoffs because Selig has a history of overstating, understating and generally mischaracterizing things in somewhat humorous ways, but I feel like he’s mostly right here in assessing instant replay:
Selig called the rollout “remarkable” but wouldn’t say whether MLB would make any adjustments during this initial season.
“We’ve had really very little controversy overall,” Selig said Tuesday at the MLB Diversity Business Summit. “Everything in life will have a little glitch here and there where you do something new. And are our guys on top of it? You bet. But I’m saying to you again, you’ll hear about the one or two controversies, but look at all the calls that have been overturned.”
Calls by umpires on the field have been confirmed in 33 of 89 challenges through Monday and overturned in 30. For 25 others, calls stood because of a lack of “clear and convincing” evidence. I feel like 30 overturns in 89 challenges is significant and good. We really are getting more correct calls now than we did a year ago and that is supposed to be the point. And it is quite literally remarkable, to use Selig’s term.
Of course implementation has been clunky, specifically as it relates to managers’ challenges. They shouldn’t be in the business of deciding this stuff. Baseball should be and it should thus be the one initiating reviews. It’s a situation where the back end (the actual review) works well but the front end (starting the review) is lame. The back end is more important so kudos for that going pretty well, but man, fix that front end.
