These rules are important, because they added a component of strategy. This means that data needs to be gathered to analyze the proper strategy. A few baseball sites have been gathering this type of information. The one that I will use today is the Retrosheet information.

Before anything further gets pointed out, it’s important to acknowledge that umpires are very good at their jobs. In 2015 only 48.86% percent of challenges were overturned, and in 2016 47.5% of calls have been overturned (the 2016 data only goes until June 30th).

With this new strategy, managers now have another added component to their jobs. They wield  more responsibility towards the game. Therefore, let’s look at how Craig Counsell and other managers have decided to utilize those challenges.

Counsell wasn’t the manager for the entire season in 2015, but he definitely used the most challenges out of the two Brewers managers. As mentioned before, in 2015 managers were successful in only 48.86% of their challenges. Counsell was right around that mark at 48% himself in 2015, but he only challenged 25 plays all year, which ranked 27th out of 74 managers who used a challenge. But, most of those are managers that barely used any challenges and are clustered at the bottom, where they’ve challenged less than ten plays, meaning that Counsell didn’t challenge many plays in 2015.

2016, however, is a different story.

Counsell has already challenged 22 plays and ranks 16^th. The reason I bring this up is because it seems as though teams should be challenging more plays.

As Jesse Wolfersberger wrote for The Hardball Times:

“So, should a manager challenge a one-on, one-out play in the first inning? According to my analysis, the likely answer is ‘yes.’ I found that the expected number of any over-turnable plays in a given game is less than one. Further, the expected number of over-turnable plays that go against your team in a medium-to-high leverage situation is far less than one.

Bottom line for managers: If there is a call that you have even a 50/50 chance of reversing, you should probably challenge, no matter the inning or the game situation. The odds are, there won’t be a better time to use that challenge later in the game.”

In total, managers only used their challenges in 28.1% of games in 2015, and the Brewers only challenged plays in 20.4% of their games.

This seems incredibly inefficient. In theory, teams should probably use their challenge at least once a game. It doesn’t even matter whether they get it right most of the time. Of course, if there is a close, and critical play in the fifth or sixth inning, the manager should use his challenge, but there are a number of times when managers don’t use their challenges. Basically, managers often go through an entire game without a single challenge being used, even though it wouldn’t hurt to try to challenge a play in the eighth inning (even if it didn’t really have a good chance of being overturned).

Who knows, maybe the people reviewing the game will make a mistake.

There are obviously aesthetic reasons as to why this wouldn’t be an enjoyable way of watching baseball. More replays means more delays, which means more downtime, and therefore, longer games. But, this shouldn’t be the concern of the manager and the team; their goal is to win games.

This is a flawed system, and it’s odd that managers aren’t abusing the ability of these challenges.

It’s in many ways like the forfeit rule. As Henry Druschel pointed out, teams can use the forfeit rule when a game is basically out of reach, “Teams are almost certainly harming their long-term win rates in a meaningful way by playing until every out of every game has been recorded. For example, the Red Sox encountered a grueling quirk of the schedule on Wednesday night, when they were scheduled to play the Orioles at 7:05 p.m. before traveling to Detroit and playing the Tigers at 1:10 p.m. the next day. When it began to pour in Baltimore at roughly 9:00 p.m., the Red Sox were leading 8-1 after six innings, but imagine if the situation was reversed, and Boston was instead trailing 8-1 with three innings to go. Their odds of coming back to win such a game would be something like 0.5 percent. In such a scenario, they could either wait in the clubhouse until the game was either resumed or officially cancelled, or they could forfeit as soon as the rain began, and head for the airport and Detroit right away.”

Teams jump through loops on end to try and get an advantage, and yet, there are still aspects of the game that are done inefficiently.

Expanded replay is here to stay. Once that door was opened, there’s no shutting it ever again. But, the way replay is done can always be changed and altered. Right now, we have a challenge system. It adds a layer of strategy, but for some reason, teams seem to be more concerned with getting the play right, than to use the replay challenges to it’s potential.

Bonus:
Here’s a look at which plays get challenged the most.

It was the exact kind of play people were dreading when replay came into existence. The runner was out at second base by a mile; in real time, there would be no separating this double play from the multiple routine double plays turned on a daily basis in Major League Baseball. The Reds had already blown their manager’s challenge and waited until both teams, the fans at the park and the viewers at home had already assumed the inning was over. Instead, the keen eye of the Reds’ video coordinator wound up winning them the game.

The problem is, I’m not sure how to solve these kinds of dilemmas in a way that leaves people satisfied given baseball’s reliance, dating back to its origin, of a strict adherence to the rules, no matter how convoluted they might be. Baseball’s rulebook covers well over 200 pages, and while that’s not quite on par with the One True Lawyerball that is American football (the NFL’s rulebook goes over 400 pages), there are many baseball fans (and players) who take pride in a knowledge of even the most obscure nooks and crannies of the game’s rules. Fans like Ted Cohen, whose essay “There Are No Ties At First Base” appears in the collection Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside The Batter’s Box.

Cohen was one of those players, like myself back in my Little League days, who used an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules to mask or make up for a lack of actual baseball ability or talent. He writes of his discovery that the rules declaring a “tie goes to the runner” in MLB’s official rulebook actually contradict each other. There’s Rule 6.05(j): “A batter is out when after a third strike or after he hits a fair ball, he or first base is tagged before he touches first base.” If it’s a tie, then the base wasn’t tagged before the batter made it, thus a tie goes to the batter. Simple enough.

But then he found Rule 7.08(e): Any runner is out when he fails to reach the next base before a fielder tags him or the base, after he has been forced to advance by reason of the batter becoming a runner. Now the dynamic is switched; the runner has to make it before the ball or the tag, thus a tie goes to the defense. And to really throw the whole thing for a loop, there’s rule 6.09(a): The batter becomes a runner when he hits a fair ball. Welcome to contradiction city, a philosopher’s hell.

Cohen writes:

“I was deeply troubled by this logical rot in the Official Baseball Rules. I had become extremely fond of the rules. They have charm and, so I had thought, precision. They do not have logical elegance, but that is part of their charm. They have the appearance of having been written by journeymen lawyers…

With all that charm, and with their natural appeal for my philosophical sensibility, the rules had won me over. Now I found them wanting at their core.”

In 1982, Cohen wrote to Major League Baseball in an attempt to get this contradiction resolved. He got all the way to the Official Playing Rules Committee, but finally, he received a letter from their administrator stating, “To setup a special rule, which in effect would allow for ties, we felt would be extremely confusing.” Rather than fix the rule, umpires decided they were happy to simply act as if a tie was a physical impossibility. It may not be an elegant fix, but it was definitely the path of least resistance for MLB.

This whole ridiculous kerfuffle highlights the inevitability of contradiction in a game that relies on a combination of an incredibly intricate and dense rulebook and the imperfect sensory systems of the human beings whose job it is to interpret them. But we demand truth. After all, that’s why there was such a demand for replay dating back at least three decades.

Replay, as Saturday’s game and many others have shown since the technology has been implemented, can’t solve all of these contradictions. If anything, replay has thrown a spotlight on contradictions we either didn’t know of or didn’t care about in the first place — runners bouncing off the base for a split second while the fielder holds the tag on them, the vagaries of whether or not a fielder makes a catch on the exchange from glove to throwing hand, or plays like Saturday afternoon’s double play that wasn’t.

Baseball has a lot to figure out with its replay system. Managers are given far too long to hang around and think about it before calling for the official replay. Calls that take more than a certain time (two minutes or so) to determine should automatically revert to the call on the field — if it takes longer, the evidence must not be that incontrovertible. Replay can be valuable, but when it so interrupts the flow of the game over differences that are only detectable with high speed, high definition cameras, we wind up with situations like Saturday night’s that reduce the game to a bureaucratic process and leave an entire fanbase salty.

But I’m convinced more than ever that there is no solution that could possibly appease everybody. That is simply the nature of baseball and its morass of rules and interpretations. Contradiction is inevitable, and someone is always going to end up with the short end of the stick. Unfortunately, that’s just baseball, replay or no.