Pic of the Week

Mike Redmond, former Minnesota Twins catcher
and now manager of the Miami Marlins,
gives umpire Mike Winters the what-for
after Winters' out call was reversed on review
from New York on Thursday.

Let there be no mistake about it: Replay review is just as imperfect as the human calls on the field.

Particularly irritating are the correct calls reversed in New York, as was the case in the eighth inning Thursday in the Cincinnati-Miami game. A Reds runner was thrown out by 20 feet to end the inning but New York ruled him safe on the dubious grounds that the Marlins catcher had illegally blocked the plate. That call tied the game. The Reds then scored two more runs and won 3-1.

MLB issued a nonsense statement the next day defending the reversal as a judgment call. The judgment was on the field. The reversal was an overly literal reading of the rule. There was never any chance of a collision until well after catcher John Mathis had the ball.

According to Peter Gammons, the entire Marlins dugout heard umpire Mike Winters pleading with New York not to reverse the call.

The umpires rotate through the New York replay center, and I'm really curious who it was that screwed up this call. There's been a few of them, perhaps most notably a call that suggested that catchers cannot be on home plate when trying for a force out at home. That one got a quick admission from the higher-ups that the replay officials erred.

There was no such admission on Thursday's call. But there should have been.