In baseball, there have always been two options for plays on the bases: safe or out. Next season, very likely, there will be another possibility: a challenge by the manager.

Major League Baseball announced Thursday that it planned to greatly expand instant replay, starting in 2014, with managers holding the option to challenge calls they believe the umpire missed. An umpiring crew watching video at major league headquarters in New York will have the final say on such plays, taking the burden off the umpires on the field.

“This is a historic moment for baseball,” John Schuerholz, the president of the Atlanta Braves, told reporters at a meeting of team owners in Cooperstown, N.Y. “We have moved forward with a plan that will give our managers an opportunity to help control the calls that are made that impact their team.”

Not all calls will be eligible to be challenged. The field umpires, for instance, will still have the final call on balls and strikes, hit batters and checked swings. But if baseball’s proposal passes a formal owners’ vote in November — and meets with approval from the umpires and the players union, which have long been in favor of such advancements — fewer games should be decided by missed calls.

Home run calls by umpires have been reviewable since 2008, but even with the addition of that wrinkle, baseball, until now, remained a sport in which mistakes by umpires were generally accepted as a regrettable, but human, part of the game.

In 2010, umpire Jim Joyce cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game by blowing a call at first base on what would have been the final out. Galarraga smiled after the play, and the two men eventually wrote a book together.

Under the new system, that same call could be challenged and overturned. The spontaneity of the moment — right or wrong — would be lost in favor of the more basic goal: that the final call is the correct one.

“We really tried to honor the legacy of the game, and mostly recognize that we’ve got technology that’s improving quickly, and we had a good experience with the home run and boundary replays,” former manager Tony La Russa, an adviser to Major League Baseball, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “It makes the competition more like it’s supposed to be, that the team that plays best and executes best has the best chance to win.”

Schuerholz and La Russa developed the new proposal with Joe Torre, the former player and manager who is now an executive vice president with MLB. For years baseball had been content to let the other major sports implement more extensive replay, choosing instead to essentially preserve the status quo and not risk adding to the already troublesome length of games.

Jim Duquette, a former general manager of the New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles, said that when substantial replay was proposed at a league meeting 15 years ago, more than three-quarters of the teams opposed it. In 2004, Duquette said, he tried to get the idea on the agenda of a baseball rules committee, which refused to discuss it.

“There was no feeling we needed to change,” said Duquette, now a host on MLB Network Radio. “But if we couldn’t get replay with John Schuerholz, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre on the committee, we were never going to get it. You can’t get better credibility than those three have.”

Managers will get one replay challenge in the first six innings of a game, and two from the seventh inning on. (An unused challenge from the first six innings cannot carry over to the later innings.) If a manager correctly challenges a call — that is, if the umpires watching on video in New York overturn the umpires on the field — he retains that challenge to use again.

Schuerholz said that baseball expected challenged calls to be resolved in about 1 minute, 15 seconds, which seems optimistic. But he added that managers are no longer allowed to argue reviewable calls, which he said comprised 89 percent of all incorrect calls. Baseball does not want team officials reviewing their own video to determine if a challenge should be made, although policing that would not seem to be an easy thing to do.

“We’re not going to see the end of umpire-manager arguments and ejections,” Schuerholz said. “But if it’s a reviewable play, they cannot argue, because we want to prevent stalling.”

As they explored ways to implement replay, La Russa said, he and Torre encountered some resistance from managers, who are busy enough during games. But they ultimately decided that the decision to ask for a challenge should be part of managerial strategy.

Still to be determined is the cost to owners of implementing the system, which could involve installing more cameras at ballparks. But if all parties approve the plan, as expected, managers would have training sessions with La Russa and Torre at baseball’s winter meetings in December.

Bob Costas, the longtime baseball broadcaster, and author, said he wondered about potential complications, such as calls at different ballparks being disputed at the same time, creating potential delays for the crew making the rulings in New York. But he said he agreed with the premise.

“On balance, I still think it’s better,” Costas said. “You can’t have a World Series game, or an important game in the pennant race, decided on an obvious missed call where literally every 10-year-old kid at home can see what the call should be.”