Just two nights after seeing a fair or foul review go their way on a home-run ball against the Baltimore Orioles, the New York Yankees once again came out on top of a similar review on Friday against the Toronto Blue Jays.
This time, the ball came off the bat of outfielder Spencer Jones and travelled 385 feet — seemingly over the foul pole — into the right-field bleachers. As Jones watched his blast settle into the crowd, first-base umpire Dan Iassogna made the initial ruling of a good home run.
But as the Yankees rookie began his trot around the bases, Blue Jays manager John Schneider immediately signalled for a challenge.
The play did go to video under a crew-chief review, but was ultimately upheld as a two-run shot for New York.
"Man, I feel like this is a hot topic right now," Schneider said post-game. "We were talking about it earlier. Rajai Davis is here with the league, and he said when it goes 260 feet, it just becomes math based on exit velo and things like that.
"But it looked foul to me. I don't know if it goes over the pole. I haven't seen any Statcast or ball-tracking data of it, but from my view, it looked foul."
Davis, who played with the Blue Jays from 2011 to 2013, currently works in MLB's baseball operations department.
"I didn't know. I was just standing there watching it and then I saw it go up and around the foul pole," Jones said of what he saw on the play. "I was hoping the umpire saw the same thing as me, and I wasn't really sure because it's umpire's discretion on that. When he said, 'fair,' I was very excited."
Jones's blast opened the scoring on Friday and stood as the margin of defeat in Toronto's 3-1 loss at Yankee Stadium.
"It's one of those things, we didn't see a good replay, and it's pretty obvious that whatever the call on the field was, it was going to stand," Schneider added.
The play is a current topic among major-league teams after the Orioles had a Pete Alonso drive stay foul on Wednesday against the Yankees, which led to Baltimore calling for better technology around the foul poles across baseball.
“I think a simple fix is like football, you have the pylon camera with the plane, where it shoots right across the goal line,” Alonso said. “And I feel like, for us, we could easily have a laser or a camera that shoots straight up.”
At least one replay seemed to show Wednesday's ball on the fair side of the pole, but it wasn’t clear what angle that shot was from.
“On the dugout iPads there’s ball-tracking data with the field that the players see, so it’s really tough to have that (call) come back as ‘stands’ and have that visual in the dugout as well. It’s 2026,” Orioles manager Craig Albernaz said. “There are teams using AI on the iPads and other sports use ball-tracking data for challengeable calls. Don’t understand why we don’t do it.”
— with files from The Associated Press
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