Girardi anticipates practicing new replay rules

TAMPA -- Yankees manager Joe Girardi and some of his coaches took part in a meeting Saturday to discuss the expanded replay system, which will be put into effect this season.

Girardi said the 2 1/2-hour meeting was held at the Phillies' Minor League complex in Clearwater, Fla., and representatives from the Phillies, Blue Jays and Yankees were in attendance along with MLB executive vice president Joe Torre.

"I thought it was very informative. I thought they did a tremendous job presenting it to us, how it's going to work," Girardi said Sunday. "There were some subtle changes made, I thought, from the last time we talked. There's some complicated issues with it, in a sense, if you're challenging two parts of a play. I thought they did a tremendous job presenting it to us."

The Yankees will get their taste of the new replay system on March 6, when they play the Phillies at Bright House Field in Clearwater, Fla. Girardi said New York will practice under the new rules throughout the spring, even during games where they won't be trying out the system. During those select games, Girardi said he and his coaches will essentially go out of their way to look for plays to challenge.

Girardi said it was his understanding that a manager can't ask an umpire to initiate a replay before the seventh inning. Each manager will have as many as two challenges per game, and umpires can prompt a review after the seventh. The new replay system will include the majority of plays outside of calling balls and strikes.

"Basically this is the way it's going to work: If you're for-sure for sure, you just go out and challenge. If you're not for-sure for sure, you go out, discuss it with the umpire and then he's going to basically ask you, after a while, kind of like if you were going to do an argument, 'Do you want to challenge or not?'" Girardi said. "By that time, you should have information from your replay people. And then you say, 'OK, I'm going,' or, 'I'm challenging.'"

Girardi wasn't quite sure yet whether he's looking forward to the new system, even after the meeting, but he is in favor of anything that will help the umpires get more calls right.

"Let me go through it a couple times to see how I feel about it. The thing is, unless you're really 100 percent sure, you don't really want to waste it. Some plays are so close and people are going to have opinions on plays that are so close and you really can't tell," Girardi said. "It opens [managers] up to more that we're going to have to answer for. But I think it gives our game the opportunity to have more things decided on the field, which I think is a good thing. It'll make it more interesting."