Roenicke among visitors to replay central

NEW YORK -- For the first 2 1/2 months of baseball's first season with instant replay, manager Ron Roenicke has had questions building up. Thursday morning, he sought some answers.

With the club in the Big Apple and the coaching staff possessing a couple of hours to kill, Roenicke and a handful of others visited Major League Baseball's Replay Operations Center in Manhattan.

"It was good. I'm glad I went over," Roenicke said. "We saw how the process works exactly when they get calls, what happens once they get that call, how the system works.

"My question always was why does it take so long in this process? Because we're trying to keep things rolling, and it seems like it's too much waiting around. I don't know how we're going to clean that up."

Officials at the command center pulled up a number of specific plays to discuss with the Brewers' staff, including one from Wednesday night's 3-1 win over the Mets. In the fifth inning, Mets manager Terry Collins challenged a play in which Taylor Teagarden was called out at first on a hard grounder to first baseman Mark Reynolds, who fed pitcher Wily Peralta.

The call on the field stood, but it raised a good question: When is the ball "caught"? When it is fully in the pocket of the glove or the initial moment of contact between ball and mitt?

According to what Roenicke learned Thursday, the latter.

"It's when it hits leather," Roenicke said. "But some [camera] views can't see when it's hitting that, so that becomes the tough part."