Royals surprised by repeat decision after loss to Yankees: ‘You could see the light of day’
NEW YORK – In the moments after the Royals’ 6-5 loss to the Yankees on Saturday night, Michael Massey left the field and parked himself in front of a screen in a room in the visitors’ clubhouse. Massey, the Royals’ second baseman, knew what question was coming when the room opened to reporters, so he wanted to take another look.
“Just to make sure I had the facts,” he said.
It had been about an hour since Jazz Chisholm Jr. from New York had tried to steal second place in the seventh inning of Game 1 of the ALDS. Massey jumped high to catch a high throw from catcher Salvador Perez and placed a tag on Chisholm’s left foot just as he arrived at the bag. The first call — from umpire Lance Barrett at second base — had been safe. But Royals manager Matt Quatraro signaled a challenge, and when the ruling stood, Massey wanted to do what MLB replay officials had supposedly done an hour earlier.
He wanted to study the angles closely.
“We tagged the photos and you could clearly see contact, and then you could see the daylight between his foot and the base,” Massey said.
The call loomed large in the narrative of Game 1. The Royals also grew irritated with the replay system. Chisholm would have been the second out of the inning. The next batter struckout. But when the next batter, New York’s Alex Verdugo, hit an 0-1 line drive into left field, Chisholm became the game’s winning run.
“I looked at it very closely there and after,” Quatraro said, “and I think we had a very good argument that that should have been overturned.”
The decision was not the only reason for Saturday’s result. Royals pitchers walked eight, and many of their wounds were self-inflicted. See: Perez came up against an out at home with no one out in the second inning. They also had a chance against the Yankees bullpen in the eighth and ninth and applied little pressure. Bobby Witt Jr. went 0-for-5.
“That’s not the reason we lost the game,” Massey said of the decision to play again. “We had plenty of opportunities to score points and take action, but we didn’t.”
However, it robbed them of a tie game in the eighth. It also left many in their clubhouse confused.
“We kind of see it one way,” MJ Melendez said. “Maybe they saw it differently. But I thought he was gone. Of course it’s a bit of a shame. In the end we should have scored a point anyway.”
Standing at his locker, Massey seemed most concerned about the purpose of the replay. Under MLB’s replay system, any disputed call is sent to the replay command center in an MLB office in New York. Staffed by Major League referees, replay officials can overturn the decision on the field, affirm the decision, or let the game stand due to lack of clear and convincing evidence. On Saturday, the call stood, meaning officials saw no clear and convincing evidence. After studying the repetition, Massey found it curious.
“We were going to combine the angles,” he said. “You could see the angle of his heel to the base. Again, there’s a little bit of dirt in the way. But that’s kind of my point. If we want to have this system and we play an imperfect game that takes place outside: there is wind, there is rain, there is dirt. So I don’t know how you can really be 100 percent sure that you can undo anything.”
He added: “The language on that is quite interesting.”
Was he gone? #RepBX #yankees #royals #KansasCity #NYYankees #mlb #MLBPostseason pic.twitter.com/C0gHb3OT0r
— TWINTIERS 🟡 ⚫️ (@TWINTIERS2) October 6, 2024
The moment in question came after one of the most chaotic games in postseason history. Before Verdugo drove to Chisholm, there had already been four lead changes. Both sides had chances for a knockout. He didn’t either. Chisholm had led off the bottom of the seventh with a single off Royals reliever Michael Lorenzen. But Lorenzen responded by striking out Anthony Volpe on a dirt sweeper as Chisholm took off for second.
Perez, the Royals catcher, grabbed the ball from the ground and shot high to second base. The throw caused Massey to jump. For a moment it looked like the high throw would allow Chisholm to get under the tag. But his pop-up slide seemed to leave him just outside the bag – inches.
It was the kind of close play that was familiar in October, when the unscientific nature of one man sticking a glove to another man’s moving leg at high speed allows viewers to study pixelated close-ups from multiple angles. In this case, one angle seemed to support Massey’s view. But the others were less than perfect. So much so that Lorenzen, standing near the hill, braced for bad news.
“I thought he was gone,” Lorenzen said. ‘The referee called him safe. I just thought, if it’s close, they probably won’t undo it. So I’ve already decided that I’ve got him at second base, and I’ve got to get the next one.”
As the challenge headed to the replay command center, Chisholm stood at second base and exchanged words with Massey.
“He says, ‘I think I made a good tag,’” Chisholm said. “I said, ‘You made a good tag. That doesn’t mean I’m gone.’ It was a lot of fun going back and forth. But I knew I had it.”
It was the kind of conversation that would never have happened 44 years ago, the last time these two clubs met in October. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was no repetition and no delay in transmitting video to a remote command center. However, there was always controversy back then, and that’s what the Royals were left with on Saturday. Quatraro said he was not given a proper explanation for the call. He watched the replays. He thought they had a “good argument.”
The replay officials didn’t see what he saw.
“If that’s something that’s not going to be reversed, I don’t really know what’s clear and convincing,” Massey said. “I don’t know exactly what the whole system is.”
(Photo of Michael Massey tagging Jazz Chisholm Jr. at second base: Adam Hunger / Associated Press)
