The Indians very well might not have been able to sweep the Oakland A’s this afternoon had Angel Hernandez and his crew of umpires made the proper call on a home run replay last night. That’s the statement from MLB and Joe Torre today.
“By rule, the decision to reverse a call by use of instant replay is at the sole discretion of the crew chief. In the opinion of Angel Hernandez, who was last night’s crew chief, there was not clear and convincing evidence to overturn the decision on the field. It was a judgment call, and as such, it stands as final.
“Home and away broadcast feeds are available for all uses of instant replay, and they were available to the crew last night. Given what we saw, we recognize that an improper call was made. Perfection is an impossible standard in any endeavor, but our goal is always to get the calls right. Earlier this morning, we began the process of speaking with the crew to thoroughly review all the circumstances surrounding last night’s decision.”
The result isn’t especially surprising as baseball continues to stand by the precedence of not trying to go back in time to re-write history. They didn’t do it for Armando Gallaraga’s perfect game and they weren’t going to do it for the Oakland A’s today. As an Indians-focused site that saw the benefits of both the two mentioned instances, I’ll leave the question of whether it should have been changed or not to others. I can say that if that had been the decision of Major League Baseball, I would have had a pretty difficult time griping about it on terms of pure fairness and accuracy of game officiating.
