WASHINGTON — In the wake of a botched triple-play call that might have cost the Mets a game against the Washington Nationals, the Mets have yet to hear from MLB, but manager Carlos Mendoza expects to at some point. Mendoza and the Mets see this as an opportunity for something positive and expand replay to prevent this from happening again in the future.
“I think you’re always open for anything, especially with so much technology these days,” Mendoza said Saturday afternoon at National Park. “You’re talking about a triple play. It’s first and second, nobody out, and before you know it, on one pitch, they’re out of the the inning.”
A certain crowd of baseball fans abhor replay review. They say the process is too lengthy and there are too many plays to review. Baseball never needed replay in the 1970s, why would we need it now?
This tends to be unrealistic, old-school line of thinking, and it puts the league in a bad spot. An umpire blows a call on the field and the TV cameras then slow it down and show it from three different angles.
This is, essentially, what happened Friday night when first base umpire Alfonso Marquez ruled that Jesse Winker’s line drive went straight into first baseman Nathaniel Lowe’s glove. The Nationals Park scoreboard showed the play on the scoreboard, with fans being able to see the ball hitting the dirt less than an inch in front of Lowe’s glove. Marquez defended his call to Mendoza on the field while it replayed for all of the fans to see right behind him.
“I really do wish that those could be reviewed regardless,” said outfielder Brandon Nimmo, who was the lead runner at the time the triple play was called. “It really would make things simpler. And they’ve really taken the replay and minimized the time it takes, so I don’t think it has to be that much time to the game if you just say, ‘Hey, let’s, let’s check that out real quick.’”
At its core, it’s about accountability. The umpires have a responsibility to get the calls right, but they’ll miss some because, well, they’re human, but replay reviews provide a guard rail of sorts for missed calls. It’s simply a safety net to ensure that when a call is missed, there is a way to right the wrong. Too many incorrect calls will sacrifice the integrity of the game.
The type of plays that can be reviewed and challenged are limited so that games don’t get bogged down by repeated breaks to look at the tape. But catch plays in the infield are not reviewable, so the triple play call wasn’t able to be reviewed.
The point of replay isn’t to interrupt the game flow and make umpires look bad, and it’s not to review every single ball or strike call or catch. It’s to make sure that the biggest plays of the game are correct, so that each team has a fair chance to win.
The Mets want to see replay expanded to include calls like the one Friday night.
Baseball was slow to adopt replay, having only been using it since 2014. The game has evolved, as has the technology used to review calls. TV cameras capture plays with an increasingly sharper focus. There will always be a group of people who want the game to look and feel the same as it did when they were growing up, and baseball perhaps thrives on nostalgia more than any other sport.
But the accountability still needs to be there. It has to be fair to the players, fans and the umpires. Adding new plays to the list of reviewable ones might be the only solution.
Michael Hill, the league’s senior vice president of on-field operations, hasn’t talked to Mendoza yet, but when and if he does, the Mets skipper will relay his position.
“After the experience last night, after going through that and [seeing] how it affects the game, I think there’s got to be a conversation here,” Mendoza said. “But again, the rules are the rules, and hopefully, you know, if something like this keeps happening, maybe they’ll revisit and make some changes.”
https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/04/26/mets-want-expanded-replay-after-blown-triple-play/