Replay central

NEW YORK — Baseball's replay central is an 18-by-24 foot room on the fifth floor of a former baking factory in Manhattan's Meatpacking District that's crammed with so many computers and television screens that it looks like NASA's Mission Control.

Five monitors stretch across the top of the wall, and beneath are eight 46-inch screens split into two rows. Each television can show one picture or be split into nine, 16, 25 or 100 angles at once.

In the third row are two white Macintosh computers with 19-inch screens, each adjacent to a 26-inch TV. And, finally, below that are dozens of buttons on a router panel. Some are blue, some green, some red, some yellow. This is where the technicians and supervisors will sit.

The room is called the NOC — the Network Operations Center for MLB.com. It's where video from the 30 Major League ballparks is already being collected, and will be made available to umpires starting Thursday to help them with home-run calls. Technicians can zoom in on replays, run them at any speed.

"Pretty soon, we'll wonder how we got along without it, and it won't even be noticed," Jimmie Lee Solomon, executive vice president of baseball operations in the commissioner's office, said as reporters got a tour Wednesday.

Baseball spent $2.5 million and two months installing fiberlink lines, monitors and dedicated telephones to link every ballpark with the NOC. Major League Baseball Advanced Media will now collect both teams' video feeds from each game and send them here.

For the 20 to 30 games each year with no telecast, MLBAM already is sending its own production truck, with six-to-eight cameras. And just in case there's a power failure at the NOC, the control room has emergency battery power just behind the wall and a generator on the roof with at least 12 hours of fuel.

The transformation is dramatic for a site where Oreos, Mallomars and Animal Crackers used to be cooked up — and the change is about as radical for MLB.

Baseball was the last replay holdout among the major U.S. professional leagues, one so conservative that National League president Len Coleman chastised umpire Frank Pulli for consulting a monitor in May 1999 before awarding Florida's Cliff Floyd a double rather than a home run in a game against St. Louis.