What the replay system did was change the identity of one of those causes to something even more futile than it had been previously.Ī constant through the seasons has been arguing balls and strikes. In all three years, there are two main causes of ejections, with all the others well behind. The fractional cases in 2012 come from Ron Gardenhire arguing two related matters to get himself heaved. A category may contain its opposite e.g., not just arguing a balk that was called, but one that a manager wanted called that wasn’t. The table below counts every ejection cause that occurs more than once in its year, with the rest combined as “Other” to keep the table from taking up half the page. (The figures include postseason ejections, one in 2012 and one in 2014.) Putting the category breakdowns side-by-side should give us a reasonable view of why managers got the thumb before expanded replay and what changed after it arrived. The total ejections for each year are fairly close to each other: 82 in 2012, 85 last year, 91 this year. The replay system should have taken away a wide swath of those motivations instead of jawboning that went nowhere, managers could call for a review with a good chance of bringing a reversal. My main objective was to learn what the managers were arguing that got them tossed. I looked up every manager ejection, not only in 2014 but in the two seasons prior to that. To examine why I was wrong, I need more than feel. I made my forecast by feel, trying not to be too extreme one way or another. Had the current I foresaw really existed, the managers couldn’t have swum against it by random fluctuation. The trouble is, the environment obviously changed. Random variation could easily produce it for an unchanging environment. Now, a rate increase of a tenth of a percentage point is nothing decisive. I predicted a serious fall, and instead the rate crept up. In 2014, with expanded replay ostensibly taking away the reason for many of the manager-umpire rhubarbs, there were 90 ejections, for a rate of 1.85 percent. So what actually happened? In 2013, there were 85 manager ejections, for a rate as stated of 1.75 percent. I’ll predict an ejection rate in 2014 of 1.25 percent, against a 1.75 percent rate in 2013. The decrease will be less than 50 percent, possibly as little as 25 percent. For those disinclined to follow links, here’s the nut of my prediction:Įjections are going to fall, and substantially, but the bottom will not drop out. In Part Three of my “You’re Outta Here!” series on manager ejections, I speculated on how the replay system would affect the frequency of managers getting themselves thrown out of games. So let’s go back in time to embarrass me.
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