How are the Guardians REALLY as far as challenges go?

 There are literally stats for everything.

That is why I was not surprised to find stats on challenges per team and per manager...albeit not without a little digging, though.

Turns out that the success rate this year on challenges is almost exactly 50%.  The Guardians are at a 52% success rate with their challenges and, of active managers, Francona is currently ranked 10th in his ability to successfully challenge the umpire calls that are, well, challengeable.  

This was surprising to me because I thought we were really bad on challenges.  And we are not...for the ones that we do challenge.

But I guess I am just remembering the ones that were stupid challenges that had no chance of winning.  For example, there was one game where Ramirez hit a ball and went to second while a play at the plate ended up having the ball go into the dugout.  The Guardians challenged that Ramirez should have been given home as he was on his way to 3rd base.   The replay clearly showed that Ramirez had stopped about 15 feet past second base.  Manning even commented at the time about how it was a stupid challenge as Ramirez's stop meant he was not trying to run to 3rd and therefore didn't meet the criteria for being given the extra base. 

So, maybe the ones that went wrong or where we didn't challenge at the time are all I remember.  So maybe we are better than I thought, a lot better.  

There is, however, one category of challenges that are not kept track of: those situations where plays are not challenged that should have been.

Yesterday, for example, Bo Naylor clearly, to me from the replay, got hit on the shoe by a pitch that would have loaded the bases with no outs.  Instead, after a lengthy AB, Naylor struck out on a pitch at eye level. 

An example of where something wasn't done that doesn't really show up in the replay stats.  An occurrence that could have had an impact on the course of the game at that point.

I have memory of several other examples where we froze and did not challenge in time or chose not to challenge when we would have won, based on the slow motion replay on the TV.  At least two other times I thought our player was safe but the inning ended and the TV did not show a replay.  However, all of this is anecdotal as I can't pinpoint which games and when plus, even if I could quantitate it, I wouldn't have anything to compare it to with other teams.

So, my gut tells me we are not a very good team at challenges but the stats say we are slightly above average and that we use the challenge system a fair amount of the time (not the most but clearly not close to the least).

Hopefully the Guardians are charting these things in real time and have a log of all the times we SHOULD have challenged and failed to as well as all the times we did challenge and whether the challenge was obviously going to fail.