Sports News
MLB Limits Replays
Like everything else in this pastoral game, change comes about slowly in baseball. So consider this cautious step into the 21st century — instituting the limited use of instant replay as an umpire aid — a radical walk on the wild side.
Baseball, at long last, has joined every other major sport in America in its belated use of TV replays. Major League Baseball will crank up the replay system on disputed home-run calls only beginning Thursday night.
"Some people thought we ought to wait until the postseason, and that struck me as really being awkward," commissioner Bud Selig, a noted baseball traditionalist, said in a conference call. "I'd rather go into the postseason knowing we've already used it. To use one of my favorite lines, this isn't Einstein's theory of relativity. We have the best technology you can possibly have, and the procedures have been described in great detail. I wanted to do it as soon as possible."
So if you have the "best technology" at your disposal, why limit its use to home-run calls? Why not open the door to pretty much everything but balls and strikes? Why not have the option to evaluate close plays at the plate, questionable double plays or obviously incorrect calls at first base? (Can you say "Don Denkinger"?)
That makes the most sense to me, but I’m not technophobic. I have seen replay work in football, hockey and tennis to incredible success. Getting it right should be the most important thing. So while Selig should be praised for having the good instincts to push replay onto the fast track, his next task should be to convince some of his old-school buddies (and maybe even himself) that more replay is a good thing.
The trouble is, too many baseball traditionalists will have you believe that America’s Pastime is on the verge of some Terminator-like hostile takeover of dangerous machines. Instant replay, the purists tell us, is corrupt and dangerous. They are like so many brooding Sarah Connor warriors, convinced that instant replay in baseball will ultimately take away our free will, eliminate our will to live, and that anyone who wants to use it is not only hopelessly ugly, but nothing nice will ever happen to them, either.
At the risk of having all those insidious woes ruin my day, I just want to know why MLB can’t go even further. Why can’t baseball just say it’s way past time to institute replay as a useful tool for every non-ball-and-strike controversy? Why can’t a manager have the option to toss a flag onto the field and request a replay review of a play? Why does the replay call have to be left up to the discretion of the umpiring crew?
"The sport has a pace to it where you have to be very sensitive," Selig said. "Even if this works well — and there's no doubt it will — it's sort of like the wild card a few years ago. First, people criticized it, and now they want more wild cards. Just because something works well, you don't go on to do more."
Listen to that for a moment and fully absorb what Selig said.
“Just because something works well, you don’t go on to do more.”
Huh?
Why not?
We already have instant replay in every aspect of baseball and it works well. It works in every other sport, from tennis to football, and none of those sports are worse for embracing the technology. Yet even in the face of the most recent rash of highly publicized mistakes by its umpires that could have been immediately corrected by TV replays, baseball still has some reluctance.
Selig and the other replay obstructionists seem to fear what will happen to their game with more input from TV replay. They act like more replay will make their bodies combustible. Instant replay is not going to be that painful. It’s intended to help, not hurt the game. We already know that instant replay can fix the mistakes that imperfect men make every night and day.
We see it on ESPN on those endless highlight loops that run all day. Instant replay works. We know it works because we watch replay in action during every single major-league baseball game when in press boxes all over America, almost by instinct, baseball writers reflexively turn their heads towards TV screens to refer to televised replays. In bars and family homes everywhere in the baseball-viewing world, the average viewer does the same thing.
They do it in the ballpark, where the replay is shown to anyone with eyes and the ability to check out the replays, and we don’t just take a peek on disputed home run calls, either.
The idea in every game we play is fairness. The idea in every game we play is to get it right. So why are replay obstructionists so reluctant to use the technology to its fullest extent? The romantics respond with the cloying and cockeyed logic that believes that part of the pure perfection of baseball is its glorified imperfection. It’s “the human element,” they say.
Every time I hear that I just want to scream.
And I want to scream about this too: The biggest drawback they say to using replay beyond the home-run calls is that instant replay will slow the game down. News flash. Baseball’s already slow. It’s not a video game. It’s baseball, and it was intended to have a more unhurried pace.
Seriously, how much slower would baseball be with additional use of instant replay?
Without replay on a play at the plate or a wrong call on a player trapping the ball, one bad call can create a dispute that turns a game into The Neverending Story.
You know the drill: Controversial call provokes angry snit by player who throws his cap, stomps the ground, cusses up a storm (elapsed time: 45 seconds).
The player is then joined by the first-base coach, who steps in between the player and ump, huffs and puffs, cusses and fusses, kicks up dirt, shoves the player away again (elapsed time: 1 minute 45 seconds) …
The umpire returns fire, cussing and pointing, waving his hands hysterically while ducking the spittle and insults coming from the manager, who has now joined the little dust up (elapsed time: 2:10) …
And boy is the manager putting on a show.
In a fit of irrational showmanship, our feisty field general is building a dirt castle over home plate. He follows that with a tantrum as he flings the base toward the outfield while vulgarly spewing all sorts of questions about the umpire’s vision, birthplace and family lineage (elapsed time: 2:30).
And now both the player and manager have been tossed out of the game, and the manager returns to the dugout where he starts lobbing batting helmets, gloves, bats and water buckets onto the field …
In a fraction of the three-plus minutes that traditional little circus would take, the umps could have reviewed the play 15 times on a replay screen and been done with it.
If you ask me, I’d rather have the technological element than the human one if the machine can see it better than the man.
MLB
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