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Baseball 'control room' opens Sunday

NEW YORK — After deciding close calls on the field since 1876, baseball opens a high-tech control room this weekend where the fates of batters, pitchers, runners and fielders will be decided by umpires up to 2,600 miles away in the building where the Oreo cookie was invented.

Starting with the Los Angeles Dodgers’ game at the San Diego Padres on Sunday night, the U.S. opener of the 2014 season, players, managers and fans will turn their attention to the ROC — the Replay Operations Center.

In a dimly lit room of just under 1,000 square feet in the Chelsea Market in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, umpires and technicians will make the decisions that could decide games and championships.

More than $10 million has been spent wiring the 30 big league ballparks with Fiberlink cable that will transmit the images from at least 12 cameras at every site.

“I’ll see more games than the Fan Cave,” quipped Justin Klemm, a former minor league umpire and big league fill-in who was hired last month as MLB’s director of instant replay.

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