NEW YORK — Even with up to 24 video cameras, Major League Baseball didn’t have a precise picture showing whether Michael Massey’s glove slapped Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s left foot before it touched the corner of second base.
Lance Barrett’s initial safe call stood awarding the stolen base, and Alex Verdugo followed with a run-scoring single that gave the New York Yankees the lead for good in a 6-5 win over the Kansas City Royals in their AL Division Series opener on Saturday night.
“They just said there was nothing clear and convincing to overturn it, and if he had been called out, that call would have stood, too,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said Sunday.
In the first post-season game with five lead changes, the score was 5-5 when Chisholm singled against Michael Lorenzen leading off the seventh. Chisholm took off for second as Anthony Volpe struck out and when Chisholm slid into second, his left foot hit the dirt inches short of the base, causing him to pop up.
Second baseman Michael Massey jumped to snag catcher Salvador Perez’s high throw and swiped down with his glove as Chisholm approached the base. The glove hit the front left side of Chisholm’s cleats as the back left of the shoe reached the base.
After consulting on the phone with Royals instant replay coordinator Bill Duplissea, who was in a room filled with monitors off the stadium tunnel, Quatraro signalled for a video review.
Chris Conroy, the umpire in the Rockefeller Center replay operations center, spent about two minutes checking an array of video in rectangles on a large screen inches in front of him. Informed of Conroy’s decision, Barrett announced to the Yankee Stadium crowd: “After review, the call on the field stands. The runner is safe.”
Watching from the Royals dugout, arms folded, Quatraro shook his head.
“After viewing all relevant angles, the replay official could not definitively determine that the fielder tagged the runner prior to the runner touching second base,” MLB said in a statement. “Additionally, the replay official could not definitively determine that the runner failed to maintain contact with the base as the fielder was applying the tag.”
MLB’s replay regulations state the umpire in the control room has three options: confirm, change or “let stand the call on the field due to the lack of clear and convincing evidence to change it.”
“It’s kind of like a court system, right? You have to — clear and convincing and what does that mean?” Quatraro said. “Clearly we’re saying that there was evidence to overturn it. But we’re talking about a fraction of an inch at high speed and all that. I understand how difficult that is on everybody involved.”
Massey watched the slo-mo on the centre-field screen and maintained “you could see the daylight between his heel and the corner of the bag.”
“He was like, ‘I think I put down a good tag,’ ” Chisholm recalled after the game. “I said, ‘You did put down a good tag, but that doesn’t mean I’m out.’ It was a lot of fun going back and forth, but I knew I had it.”
Massey reviewed the replays after the final out.
“It’s frustrating because the video I saw looked pretty convincing to me,” Massey said. “In my opinion that’s one of those things if that’s something that’s not going to be overturned, then I don’t really know what’s clear and convincing and I’m not really sure the whole point of the system if a call like that is not (overturned). We tagged him. We could see clear contact. We could see the daylight between his foot and the base.”
But to Conroy it wasn’t clear enough to change the call.
“There is a little bit of dirt that gets in the way,” Massey said. “We are playing an imperfect game. It’s outdoors, there is wind, there is rain, there is dirt.”
