CHICAGO –Conor Gillaspie slid home after tagging up on a wind-blown pop-up, barely beating the lunging tag by Kurt Suzuki. Joe Mauer touched first base a millisecond after Alexei Ramirez throw arrived in Jose Abreu's glove at first base.
In both cases, Sean Harlin, the Twins director of major league video, jumped into action, finding and reviewing the play on his two-screen Hawkeye video setup and confirming each time that the call was correct.
So Day 1 of baseball's new replay rules was uneventful. Right?
"It was stressful," Harlin said. "But it worked out OK."
That was in doubt before the game, when Harlin, whose job is to advise manager Ron Gardenhire whether challenging a call has a high likelihood of success, took the Hawkeye system for a test-run. The system has two high-def screens (about 25-inch diameters, not huge) and eight camera angles visible on each, but teams had been given little training on using it.
As Harlin was getting comfortable with the setup, it twice blew a fuse. Electricians finally got the system working again, but it cost Harlin nearly an hour of practice time, and left the Twins nervous about how it would work.
"Am I going to get to go kick some dirt again?" Gardenhire said he wondered during the screens' blackout. But the system, and Harlin, operated smoothly once the game actually began, and neither team challenged a call.
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