Interview with Ross Larson, Instant Replay Coordinator

Interview with Ross Larson and Mike Teevan conducted by Bill Nowlin on October 2, 2015.

Major League Baseball’s Replay Operations Center (“the ROC”) is based at 75 Ninth Avenue, in the Chelsea Market Building. The building also houses MLB Advanced Media and other MLB offices.

Mike Teevan, Vice President for Communications, Major League Baseball: Ross is here every day. He and Justin [Klemm] work hand in hand.

Ross Larson: This is my second year in the department. It’s been pretty interesting. It’s everyone’s second year, even Justin’s, though he obviously has an extensive umpiring background. I do not. I have an operations background and that led me…I worked the Arizona Fall League and from there I went to help around the press box, so I got to meet several of the umpire supervisors. When this opened up, I reached out and they said they thought it would be a good fit.

What you see here mostly is our video technicians. We have about 25 or 30. On any given night, probably 20 will be working. The way the room is set up, we have stations. They’re numbered at the top — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We have six stations. They will each run two games. So, right here (#3), the video technician sits on the left. The umpire sits on the right. When they get on the headsets on the field, they’re on the headset with this umpire right here.

The technician will be here. They’ll be watching the games together. They’ll be watching two games at once.

If there’s a day game, that umpire will come in and then he’ll be done for the day after the day game. Either we have one or two extra who are not working a game at that time or they just worked a game earlier that day, depending on the day of the week.

The video technicians will come in about five hours before first pitch and setup everything. We check everything, every day. On site, everything gets unplugged every day — the cameras, the headphones, everything gets turned off.

We check everything multiple times before every game and multiple times in game as well. To make sure everything works. If stuff does go down, right next door are the guys who help us troubleshoot. Next door to that are guys who do other work for us. And then below us are guys who clip video for us. This is just the perfect area for it. We work hand in hand with every other department here.

This is what we call a multi-view, where we can see all the cameras at once. He’ll be on the phone with someone at the ballpark, saying, “I see the center-field camera pointing at the backstop. Is that what you see?” And they’ll say, “Yes.” And if not, something’s in the wrong place and we’ll troubleshoot that.

What one ballpark might call a mid-third base camera, another ballpark might consider a high third base. That’s been part of the learning process, working with the different ballparks, learning where the camera wells are, what they call them. The actual camera men are assigned to shoot different things sometimes. If you look at…when a close play happens sometimes…we’ll take in 12 angles usually — six from the home team and six from the away team.

BN: Working from their commercial feeds.

RL: Correct. Out of those 12, maybe five catch the play. The other seven — one’s in the dugout, one’s on the stands, one’s on the mascot or whatever. That’s been an interesting learning curve, too. Sometimes we’ll be like, “Did we not have a third-base shot on that?” There’s a third-base camera but he was looking at the trail runner instead of the play at the plate, or something. That’s been a good learning process for us, too, is to communicate. We’re starting to have those open discussions with the regional networks saying, “This is what you guys need. This is what we want. Is there any way we can both get what we want out of all this?” That’s a really nice thing we did starting this year where we’re really opening up discussion with everyone else we’re working with.

We’re very aware that we’re kind of seen as the people behind the black curtain but that’s not the case at all. We love having people in here. We just want to be sure that we’re communicating effectively all the time with everyone we work with, all the time, through media, through our technicians. Even down through the players on the team, with Joe Torre and whoever wants to communicate with these people.

BN: Everyone wants to make the right call. This just helps do that.

RL: Absolutely, yeah. The way it works is that this guy (points to umpire’s chair) is on the headset with the guys on the field, but he’s always welcome to turn to other umpires in the room and say, “This is what I have. Does anyone have anything different?”

Because we work every single game in here, I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there are some games that don’t have any replays. We never go a day without one. I think it’s happened once in two years. On a Monday or a Thursday without a full set of games, we might have one of those games with zero but on a day with 15 games we always have a few.

BN: Do you always have eight umpires assigned, even on those days that are very light?

RL: If we have an opportunity to give a day off, we will, but if there’s a situation like yesterday (three postponements), or if there are games added, or we know there could be rain delays, we’re going to say, “Hey, everybody’s working because a guy might have a terribly long shift and we’ll want to relieve him.” The way the scheduling breaks down has also been a learning curve for us; how do we get what we need without holding these guys here — locked in here forever.

I think they enjoy the break from the field during the summer. They like to rest their bodies a little bit, too, I think. And obviously they like coming to New York City.

BN: And also staying in one place for seven days.

RL: That’s longer than they usually do.

BN: I guess most crews come in for a full seven days. Do you have times they just come in for three or four days?

RL: If there’s an injury and they need to pull someone, or an unexpected doubleheader down in Philadelphia, they sometimes will say, “Hey, we’ve got to pull a guy” from here. But then they’ll always replace them with someone else. We’re never short-staffed here. It has been kind of a nice accidental thing about Replay, that we’re here as a resource to help out any last-ditch situation where they need to get someone to an East Coast city right away.

MT: The rainouts today affected how the umpires are staffed tomorrow. Sometimes guys get pulled out of replay and go elsewhere.

RL: We have a couple of what we call lines of defense. He and his technician are going to be sitting here watching the games. They’ll watch every pitch. They’ll be talking about what they do outside of baseball, what they do for fun. As soon as a close play happens, they’ll start rewinding and looking at it again and you’ll actually hear an alert go “Three!” and that means there’s a close play at Station Three. Most of the room’s aware at that point, and these guys are obviously aware. We also have extra technicians sitting back here at what we call the back wall. Those are not designated stations. Those guys will watch all the games going on and they’ll get extra footage when we have a close play.

We also have, in the room next door, what’s called the Logging Department. They’ll log everything from broken bats…they’ll have guys who will sit there and watch just one game and they’ll log every event, including close plays. They’re kind of our third line of defense. If they see a close play, they’ll hit a close play button and we’ll hear that same alert go off. So we have three sets of eyes on every single game, all the time.

BN: The umpires seem to be pretty generous in allowing the managers time to get the word from their replay coordinator.

RL: We’ll wait for him to either go “No” or “Yes,” and at that point we say, “OK, get ready. They’re coming in. Put on your headset. Here’s what we got.” They want to get the call right. I can’t speak for them, but I think that’s what it comes down to. They’re willing to give them that extra five or 10 seconds just to be totally sure. If it really is a close play, they want to make sure.

One thing our numbers show us is that when they come on their own, after the seventh inning, we have a lot more of those that come back, “Yeah, the call’s correct. Keep playing.” They’re overly willing to come check.

BN: It’s still a surprise to me to see a challenge in the first inning. I saw one about a month ago, the first batter of the game — safe/out at first base. He was called out, and the call was in fact overturned, so the manager didn’t lose his challenge, but still, what was so crucial about that?

MT: There was a 14-3 game after eight innings, and they challenged something in the ninth.

BN: There could be a reason for that — the manager considering the personality of one of the players, I suppose. And he still had a challenge in his pocket.

RL: Every team has a different strategy. It’s not up to us to decide what’s a right or wrong strategy. If they tell us, “Look at this,” we’re looking at it. There’s clearly some teams that are going to hold onto theirs just in case they need it later, where there are some that say, “Uh, let’s use it. If we don’t get it, at least we tried.”

BN: Obviously umpires get evaluated for their work on the field. I assume there have to be ways of evaluating the work of umpires in Replay.

RL: Sure. They all take it seriously. They all come in here and they’re all focused. They want to get the call right. They see themselves as an extension of the crew on the field. They’re the fifth man on that crew. So they want to be there for their guys there and make sure they’re in tune for what’s going on in the game. It’s being built into their evaluations, right, but we’re still learning how to exactly evaluate it. It’s all brand new.

BN: This crew here, working this game (pointing to the monitor) — Jeff Kellogg’s crew — do they know which umpire is sitting in this seat?

RL: If they don’t know beforehand, they’ll recognize the voice, definitely. But some of them will call in ahead and say, “Hey, just curious who we’ve got.” Or sometime this guy (umpire in the seat) will text them beforehand and say, “Hey, I’ve got your game tonight. Good luck.” That’s encouraged. Any kind of communication like that’s only going to help.

If we do get a particularly tricky play…the normal force outs and tag plays that we get, there’s not a whole lot of conversation. It’s “he tagged him” or he didn’t. The throw beat him or it didn’t. But if we get a hit by pitch or something where we need audio or they say, “Hey, this is what I had on this” — or it’s a boundary call thing, that’s when we’ll probably have a little more back and forth. “OK, what exactly did you have? We’re seeing this, but you have a better angle on this than we did. Did you have anything on that?”

But the normal force and tag plays, it’s usually, “Hey, what have you got?” “OK, we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll get back to you.”

BN: Do some parks have more cameras than others these days?

RL: Certainly. Sometimes there’s only one broadcast. Oakland or Houston, maybe, won’t be broadcasting their games sometimes. Half of these screens will be blue, and we’ll only have six. We’re at the mercy of those networks. We like it when there’s more cameras. It’s a big difference when you have Oakland and Houston playing each other versus the Yankees and Red Sox.

BN: What’s the maximum number of cameras?

RL: We have taken 12, no matter what. They may have 20-something there, and at that point, we can pull from the broadcast whenever they’re showing all the extra stuff. We have the 12 that we can pull on our own whenever we want, and then we’ll be watching for anything else they show.

BN: So you’ll also be in touch with the broadcast crews and if you want to request an extra angle, you can?

RL: We can’t request it. That’s up to them, to their producer as to what they’re going to show but we have to have faith that they’re going to show the best stuff. This guy will be manipulating the video frame-by-frame, and these guys will be looking at all the extra stuff and might say, “Hey, we found something new. Show this.”

On a given night, it is a bit of a rotating door in here. People start coming in around noon to 2 PM and then we keep getting more and more. The umpires come in and it gets really full until about 11 PM and people then start to trickle out. We’re here until the West Coast games are done, as late as 2 AM at times. Then we’ve got some record-keeping to do on the back end, and make sure everything adds up.

BN: Extra innings on the West Coast.

MT: There was a 17-inning game, I think, last year.

RL: Sometimes the broadcasters will say, “I wonder if they’re still awake in New York.” We’re here.

BN: The official scorer usually announces the time of each replay. One minute and 52 seconds or something like that. Do you know when they start the clock?

MT: It’s from the time the challenge is made. We’ve had good luck this year reducing the social exchange, compared to last year when the manager did the stroll and just waited to get the thumbs up. I think it’s down about 80 percent this year.

RL: There’s a lot less of that. It was not a sexy part of the game. They’re sitting here watching this all real time. We try to have as little delay as possible.

BN: (indicating the people who sit at the desk in the middle of the room) What do these guys here do?

RL: These are who we call our administrators. The head technicians or engineers in charge. The umpire supervisors will be right here. (A couple of extra chairs on the center desk, closest to the real wall.)

BN: One or two supervisors.

RL: It depends on the week, yeah. During the week, our director Justin Klemm will work most of the shifts. On the weekend, one of the umpire supervisors will come in. They go out and watch games in stadium and they’re responsible for several crews. They all split time doing work in here every month. They’ll each come in for a few days every month and help us out. It’s too much for just one guy to do all these, so we get help from the supervisors.

BN: Have you ever had a time the whole thing went down?

RL: We’ve never gone down. We have some backups in place. There’s something similar to this in San Francisco. There’s no umpires out there, but we do have some video guys out there who do the same thing so, God forbid a natural disaster strikes here, we could still do instant replay through the San Francisco location.

At each station, we have the rule book. A lot of times, midgame, the umpires will pull out a rule book. We endlessly play the “what if” game in here. Most of the time it’s force and tag plays, pretty cut-and-dried, but if we get a funky play, that’s been one of the benefits of this room — we’ll get everyone together and we’ll talk. “Hey, what if that ball had hit that rail right there? It didn’t, but what if it did?” We have a supervisor on hand who’ll say, “Thirty years ago, I had this play and this is what we did. I wish we’d done this” or something. It’s just been a great education, especially for the young guys who are in here. All of a sudden, you can have 200 years of umpiring experience in the same room.

Previously, I think they only got together in the winter for their annual meeting. Now, every week we’re getting together. It’s been a really great by-product.

BN: You get the war stories, but game- and play-related.

RL: It’s all baseball and as you know, you see new stuff all the time. There have been times we’ll see something and all eight umpires here will say, “I’ve never seen that play.” That’s another cool moment every once in a while.

BN: I guess no one knows every nuance of every rule.

RL: Charlie Reliford’s pretty close. He’s incredible.

MT: Charlie Reliford is the one who, for their meetings, will compile the strange plays from throughout the year. “OK, on April 25 if the Angels/A’s game, this happened….” He’ll then walk through every facet of it in front of the whole group.

RL: It’s really cool to see. And they all live for this stuff. We can sit here and talk about one play for three hours.

MT: They’re so passionate about it.

RL: As someone who had no umpiring experience before this job, it’s been very eye-opening. These guys, they live for this. The last thing they think about when they go to bed is umpiring and when they wake up, the first thing they think about is umpiring.

BN: And if they were in the wrong position to make a call, sometimes they don’t get much sleep.

RL: That’s very true. I lost some sleep over some plays last year and I wasn’t even directly involved. That’s another by-product. This is very real.

The room was designed by Booz Allen, who do a lot of government and military control centers, so that’s obviously what it resembles. It is designed to make you lose track of time, so we joke sometimes that it’s kind of like being in a casino. Pumping in oxygen, and you lose track of time. It may be sunny in LA but we forget that it’s 11 PM here.

I hope this has been helpful. We think we do a good job, so we like showing off when we can. There’s a lot of moving parts.

That schedule changes almost daily. By the time you go to the printer to grab it, it’s already out of date. When we have the supervisors in here and we see an injury happen, or a game gets canceled and re-scheduled, we see it live — phone calls happening. There’s a constant rotation of five or six guys who are in contact with each other.

MT: It seems like every year there are two or three guys who are hurt — their backs, often. Their knees.

RL: And then you’ve got to re-do weeks and weeks of the schedule. They’re out there every day. Some of them will work 20 days before they get a day off. It’s not like the players who get either a Monday or a Thursday off. These guys usually get neither. Maybe one or two days off a month.

I think the wives are the unsung heroes. They raise the kids all summer. Modern technology’s great for these guys, though. They can face-time their kids on an i-Pad when they’re traveling.

BN: And I guess some of them when they’re here they can bring their families to New York.

RL: And we can show them that when they come into Replay, we’re actually working.

BN: It must happen sometimes that, with overlapping times and extra innings, you’ve had 15 games going at one time.

RL: It has. This Sunday, all 15 games are starting at 3 o’clock and we’ll be running all 15 games in their entirety, all at the same time. [Last day of the season.]

The playoffs — high intensity, but there’s a little bit less going on.

BN: When you get down to the World Series, when there’s one game going, how many umpires will you have in here?

RL: We’ll have two. Two for one game, whereas usually we have one umpire for two games. We’ll double up. And we’ll have more supervisors than normal. It’s a little quieter. There’s one umpire on the phone, and when we’re done, we’re done. We’ll have one replay maybe in a game, or two, instead of seven, eight, nine in a day. It’s a lot less going on for sure.

BN: But many, many more people watching. And a lot more riding on it.

MT: It’s kind of appropriate that Game Seven of the World Series last year had that one replay in the third inning.

RL: Made it worth all the 200 days we spent leading up to it.

BILL NOWLIN, known to none as “The Old Arbiter” since he has never worked a game behind the plate, still favors the balloon chest protector for its nostalgic aesthetics. Aside from a dozen years as a college professor, his primary life’s work was as a co-founder of Rounder Records (it got him inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame). He’s written or edited more than 50 books, mostly on baseball, and has been on the Board of Directors of SABR since the magic Red Sox year of 2004.