Why is replay so bad and why am I still mad?

It has been a week and the Bobby Witt overturned call is still living rent free in my head.

Back when he was a columnist, current Kansas City Royals VP of Communications Sam Mellinger would frequently employ a line when discussing heartbreaking losses and the discussion that stemmed from questionable calls that went against your favorite team. His line was “complaining about the officials is the ballad of the loser.” I think that’s a succinct way to sum up what I find frustrating about endless talk about the officials. I’ve used the line often as a sword against people who I’m watching the game with that I think are spending way too much mental energy complaining about how the game is being called.

Given my own understanding of myself as a sports fan that’s so above the whole complaining about the refs thing, it has come as a shock to me how much mental space I’ve given to a call in a game that took place on July 12th against the New York Mets. If you’re reading this blog you probably know what play I’m talking, but if not I will give you a quick summary. It’s the bottom of the 8th inning and the Royals are down 2-1. Bobby Witt Jr. draws a one-out walk, and then attempts a steal against Edwin Diaz. He is called safe by the umpire, and is in scoring position with one-out and Vinnie Pasquantino at the plate.

Mets manager Carlos Mendoza calls for a replay challenge, and somehow this play gets overturned:

You know a call is a strange when the opposing team’s announcers are just as shocked as everyone else that the call was overturned. The Royals didn’t lose the game solely because of this call, but this clearly took the wind out of their sails for the remainder of the game.

I’ve spent way too much time lurking on social media, looking for an angle that definitively shows that Witt is out and I can’t find it. To my eye, Witt beats the throw, he’s called safe, he makes an incredible effort to stay on the bag the entire time, any angle that looks like he might have popped off for a split second has a lot of dust and ambiguity that seems impossible to count as “clear and convincing evidence.” In no world should this be an out, and yet it is.

I feel like this play is a perfect encapsulation of what I find so frustrating about replay in baseball. So it’s time for me to engage in some hypocrisy and bust out the ballad of the loser with as much conviction as I can muster.

What is the point of replay?

I remember being a big advocate of instant replay during the 2000’s and 2010’s, before MLB instituted the manger challenger system in 2014. And replay has certainly brought some good to sports in general, baseball included. This type of call, however, is not the reason why replay was introduced. Lindsay Imber wrote a great article for SABR in Spring of 2015 reviewing instant replay, and in her article she had this line:

Early in 2014, MLB stated that the purpose of expanded instant replay was “for critical game situations and obvious misses, not the ‘bang-bang’ play.”

While the play we are talking about was a critical game situation, it certainly was not an obvious miss. Nearly everyone who was watching that play live thought Witt was safe. I don’t consider it even a bang-bang call; it’s a close call but Witt clearly beats the tag to the base and does everything in his power to stay on the bag. Only in super slow motion from every conceivable angle possible can some people possibly be convinced that maybe Witt popped off the bag for a frame. But that’s even a maybe.

To me, the purpose of instant replay is to make sure that the next Armando Galarraga can lay claim to a perfect game. It was clearly a mistaken call and everyone knew it, particularly the all important TV audience. I agree with the principle that you can’t have a call stand in modern baseball that everyone watching can tell is wrong because getting calls wrong and driving away viewers would be bad for the sport.

This call though was the exact opposite of that principle. The vast majority of the viewing audience doesn’t understand why the call was overturned. One of the more convincing arguments (on the pro-out side) I read on a Reddit thread about this play argued that New York (where they have their replay center) has more angles than the TV audience to look at the call. That seems to be the case, but how does that serve the viewing audience, ostensibly who replay was inserted into the game for? We are supposed to take the word of MLB that everything that we can see with our eyes is wrong and they’ve actually gotten it right? It’s 2025 in America, having no faith in institutions is one of the few unifying themes across the entire county. I want to see whatever angle they’ve got if they are going to overturn a call like this.

Replay reviews like this that stray from the original purpose of overturning obvious missed calls make the game worse. The replay review almost always take too long in these moments (which includes this play, the full SNY cut is over two minutes). They reduce confidence in the game that we are actually watching and inject a lack of trust over most close calls; any of them could be overturned if the call against Witt is the standard we are adhering too, which makes the sport feel unfair. MLB needs to remind itself why we have instant replay and what its purpose actually is for things to improve on how we are experiencing replay.

The slide rule has been an issue for years

This issue of a stealing baserunner momentarily popping off the bag is not new. Here’s an article from Dave Cameron back when he was writing at Fangraphs titled “It’s Time to Change the Slide Rule.” The article came out in 2016.

The crux of Cameron’s argument is that it’s extremely difficult to maintain contact with the bag sliding into second and third base the entire time, but before replay we weren’t looking for that (unless it was an obvious overslide), so it didn’t really matter. With replay, however, we can now analyze the slide in painstaking detail that goes against the spirit of what we expect in a stolen base. If you beat the ball to the bag and don’t overslide the bag, you should be safe. Cameron proposes a vertical safe area over the bag that a runner is allowed to be in and still be considered on the bag.

Here’s the second to last paragraph in his article, and it rings just as true today as it did in 2016:

The maintain-contact part of the rule just isn’t something that makes baseball any better. It has added replay slowdowns to a play that wasn’t ever previously thought to have been called wrong, and it turns exciting close plays at second and third into boring dissections of frame-by-frame video, at no real benefit to the sport.

Unfortunately, we are still in the same situation with the slide rule that we were in 2016, and the “just slide better” arguments hold less water to me now than they did then. Witt has played in an era of baseball where this flaw was known, and you can see in his slide that he’s clearly trying to move his leg up to help keep contact with the bag. He’s got incredible body control, just ask Cal Raleigh. If he can’t perfectly keep his body on the base, then I’m not sure if anyone can every time. Plus, stolen bases are cool! MLB clearly likes having more steals, but this rule takes away from them.

As a nation, it’s time to learn some lessons from 2016 and change the slide rule now. I’ll see you at the protest.

So, why am I still mad?

Writing this article has admittedly been a little cathartic, but looking at that video for too long starts to make me feel like I’m back at the Midland Theater watching Kublai Khan TX perform; I just want to rage.

There are certainly factors other than the call itself that I find so frustrating. The Royals have underperformed expectations this season, and the problem with the team is on the offensive side of the ball. Runs have been very tough to come by, so when I feel like a potential run gets taken away unfairly, it’s doubly difficult.

The more I reflect on the call, however, the more it stands in for general frustration over the state of replay itself in 2025. This was a technology that was supposed to make our viewing experience better, and when it works it does. Often, however, it doesn’t work and when it doesn’t work it feels like a total failure. The fix seems like it should be easy and take us back to the original reason why MLB got replay review in the first place. I see no sign that the slide rule is going to be addressed and fixed now even though this should have been taken care of earlier.

Thank you all for allowing me this ballad, we can return to our regularly scheduled programming of yelling about Adam Frazier once again.

Shoutout to Jeremy Greco for the headline