Beyond time for baseball to use instant replay
Posted: Thursday, May 22, 2008 2:35 PM
I used to be one of those traditionalists who said baseball should not enter the 20th century, much less the 21st, by embracing instant replay.
I was stupid, and I was wrong.
Seeing three home runs in one week disallowed by umpires whose eyes weren’t good enough to decipher what they were looking at has convinced me it’s time to use technology to make the game better. There’s no need at the moment to use it for judgment calls on plays at first or tags at the plate or anywhere else. But it is absurdly quick and easy to rewind the tape and see whether a ball hit fair or foul, over the wall or off it. There is no reason not to do it.
That same string of bad calls apparently did the trick with the only person standing in the way of limited instant replay -- commissioner Bud Selig. One day after Alex Rodriguez lost a homer, Major League Baseball suddenly decided it wanted to experiment with instant replay in the Arizona Fall League this year and perhaps next spring in the World Baseball Classic.
Even I have to agree it’s about time.
Baseball owners GMs voted 25-5 last November in favor of using instant replay to settle disputes over home runs, fair or foul balls and fan interference. Selig didn't act on that vote, saying it goes against tradition, an argument that has been used in baseball from the day the game began.
That’s right, folks. Back in 1871, when the National Association of Professional Baseball Players established the professional game, the founders thought long and hard about using instant video replay but rejected it. No records exist of the debate that led to the decision, but circumstantial evidence suggests it was because they felt that waiting 125 years for the technology to be invented and perfected would slow the games down excessively.
In any event, if the founders wouldn’t embrace instant replay, Selig didn’t want to. This is what in baseball is considered to be wisdom.
Of course, tradition is a flexible concept. The founders also turned down the idea of night games because it was hard to illuminate a field using gas lights, kerosene lanterns and bonfires. But their descendants, who for many years fought the concept of night baseball, finally embraced it when they realized that they could sell more tickets and make more money playing at night – once science found a way to chase away the darkness.
Tradition was used as an excuse to keep blacks out of baseball until 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers introduced Jackie Robinson to the world and opened the game up to some of the greatest players the sport would ever see.
It was also used for years as an excuse to ignore pitchers who cut, scraped and lubricated baseballs in defiance of the rules of the game. Pitchers had always cheated, the thinking went, which made it a tradition that couldn’t be broken. But baseball got over that one, too, and today the instant a ball hits the dirt, it’s thrown out of play.
Tradition once let teams build pitching mounds up to Alpine altitudes, but when it got to the point where nobody could hit the ball anymore, that went out, too.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Tradition sometimes is a great thing because it connects yesterday to today to tomorrow. But it’s a lousy excuse to avoid doing the right thing. Singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” is a tradition that adds to the experience of the game. Having umpires blow home run calls is a tradition that subtracts from the experience.
So put it in, and don’t wait for the fall league. It’s real easy. Just have someone watch the game on a monitor, check the replay and signal the umpires if a ball they called foul was really fair or vice versa and if a ball did or didn’t leave the park.
Selig has the power to make it happen. He doesn’t need a test run to see if it works. We already know it does. So just do it.
Now.
