Twins' secret weapon? Meet Joey Casey, the replay ace who decides whether to challenge a close call

Pablo López was in a jam. The Twins righthander didn't cover first base in time to catch Joey Gallo's throw and tag the base before Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson got there first, umpire Jeff Nelson ruled earlier this month, and now López faced a two-on, one-out situation with the top of St. Louis' lineup coming up.

But López escaped without allowing a run, an important factor in the Twins' eventual 3-2 victory, thanks in part to a Jose Altuve-sized Twins rookie, signed away from the Red Sox as a free agent last winter, named Joey Casey.

"Joey's done a nice job for us," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "He's had some big moments."

Don't bother looking for him in the boxscore, though. Casey spends each Twins game in a small room adjacent to the team's clubhouse, with a set of computer monitors in front of him, double- and triple-checking every tag, every catch, every play to make sure umpires got the call right.

Casey is the Twins' new video-replay coordinator, in constant communication with Baldelli and bench coach Jayce Tingler about what he sees on video — for instance, that López's foot touched first base a millisecond before Carlson's in St. Louis. The call was overturned, Carlson was out and López ended the inning one pitch later.

"It's pretty exciting to get a call changed and help the team on the field," Casey, 27, said. "When you decide to challenge, the wait for a decision can be kind of intense."

Intensity is what the job is all about, though, more so this year than ever. MLB's emphasis on speeding up the game has extended to the replay system, too. After any close play, the home plate umpire will look at the manager, who has 15 seconds — half as much time as when the replay rules were adopted a decade ago — to challenge the call.

"They start the clock right away. If I'm being honest, it can get a little frantic at times," said Tingler, who mans the phone with the replay room. "I'm telling Joey, you've got five seconds, you've got three seconds, we've got to make a call. There's a lot of pressure, and he's done a good job of handling it."

That countdown is why Baldelli and Tingler have ceded the decisionmaking responsibility to Casey. There's no room for nuance, no chance to talk it over, no tolerance for "maybe." Partly to avoid communication mix-ups in loud stadiums, Tingler asks for a one-word answer — yes or no — from Casey.

"If he says, 'Don't challenge,' maybe you can't hear the first word. Or I've been in dugouts in the past where they used a scale of one to five, with five being definite and one being a no, and the replay guy will say, 'Hey, it's a four. Maybe it's a three.' I didn't like that," Tingler said. "It's a big responsibility, but that's why we went and got Joey last winter. We have to trust his judgment, and we do."

It's not exactly the job the New Hampshire native expected when he graduated with a marketing degree from Providence College. "Providence didn't even have a baseball team. But I wanted to be in baseball somehow," he said. Casey worked in the sports information office in college, then got an internship one summer at the Cape Cod Baseball League, a wood-bat college league for pro prospects.

He worked with scouts that summer and dove into the technology aspect of the game, learning the Rapsodo system and other tech that pro teams use now. He became so adept that the Twins hired him for the 2019 season as a minor league video coordinator, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

"Boston was a good opportunity, and it was close to home," said Casey, who also does some technology-based scouting analysis before and after games. "But this is a great organization, and they offered me a chance to have an actual impact on major league games. I couldn't pass that up."

He met during spring training with Baldelli, Tingler and Derek Falvey, the Twins' president of baseball operations, to go over their philosophy on challenges.

"We're probably a little more aggressive than a lot of teams. We'll challenge some plays just because there's a shot" at them being overturned, Falvey said. "The accuracy rate isn't as important as getting a few outs back on close plays, coin flips. We don't set out to be 100 percent. Outs are critical, runs are critical and we've had a few instances where we've gotten the call to go our way on really close plays."

The Twins are 7-for-20 on getting calls overturned this season — below the MLB average but roughly equal to Baldelli's career success rate — and they are 5-for-7 since July 4. Casey said he has become far more comfortable in the job as the season has gone on.

"There was a lot of learning on the fly, especially with the clock speeding things up, but I've gotten pretty fast," Casey said. "When you can see a close play developing, sometimes I'm looking at the replay before the umpire even makes a call."