Yesterday, it was reported that Major League Baseball was leaning towards expanding the use of instant replay in the 2012 season. My reaction was that of unbridled euphoria, as well it should have been, but for some reason this news was not received with the same glee by all, especially a number of current players.
Are these guys crazy? Dumb? High on pine tar fumes? How can so many people be so very wrong-minded?
Enough of this obstruction of obvious progress. These fallacious arguments against replay must be put to rest.
The first mind-boggling argument comes to us from Aubrey Huff of the San Francisco Giants:
“You’re messing with the history of the game when you start messing with too much.”
Ah yes, the old tradition argument, which is the reason that old-timers like to hide behind because it sounds so much better than just screaming, “Meh! I fear change! Change is bad!” On the surface, Huff is right, history lacked instant replay. I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure that had a lot to do with the fact that baseball was invented before TV cameras were. Come on, people. Do you really think that if a new professional sport were invented tomorrow that the rules wouldn’t include some sort of provision for usage of instant replay? Please. The one salient point Huff does make is the “messing with too much” statement. MLB definitely doesn’t want to overdo it with replay, but enabling it to be used on fair-foul calls and trap-catch calls hardly seems like “too much,” in fact, some could make the argument that it still isn’t enough.
Which leads us to our next quote, and this might be my favorite, brought to us by Seattle’s Chone Figgins:
“I think it might be too much if you do that. Then you have to do it for everything, strikes, I think it’s just a tough call.”
Actually, Chone, no you don’t need to use it for everything but thank you for that little trip down the slippery slope. Major League Baseball has been exceedingly cautious over the years about what types of calls they are willing to use instant replay for, which is why it is only used for home run calls now, and even that is a fairly new development. Not once have we heard MLB talk seriously about using instant replay on balls and strikes (even though there is technology readily available to handle that) or anything that can be even remotely considered a judgement call. Homers, the foul line and catches, these are all cut-and-dry events that involve no guesswork or interpretation and Bud Selig’s regime has clearly drawn the replay line to only even consider such events.
If there is one valid argument against additional replay, it is the time consuming nature of it, as expressed by Ron Gardenhire:
“The one thing you don’t want is to have the game last longer and longer because of all these replays and go deep into the night.”
On the surface, that argument has some real legs. Almost everyone agrees that games are already too long, but instead of using that as an excuse to inhibit the growth of instant replay, we should really be thinking about how to use replay as an excuse to address the problem of increasingly long games. There are a number of things baseball could do to cut a few minutes off game times to accomodate the occasional video review. Ryan Franklin of the Cardinals suggested shaving ten seconds off each break between half innings, which certainly wouldn’t hurt. That doesn’t sound like a big difference maker, but it is big enough to cancel out the time taken up by replays, which, by the way, still won’t be all that frequent. And that doesn’t even begin to cover all the other alternatives for speeding up games. It isn’t as if there are questionable foul or trap calls every inning either, so there isn’t much time that needs to be recouped. One would have to think that assuming an average of one replay per game is probably a pretty generous assumption, so don’t try and act like more replay is suddenly going to add half an hour to every contest.
What Major League Baseball does need to address before signing off on this big change is just how these replays will be conducted. As of right now, questionable home run calls are reviewed somewhere in the league offices in New York via phone call. That works for now because those sort of situations are so infrequent, but that won’t fly with these new types of reviews. The simple solution would be to copy the model the NFL uses during the final two minutes of a game where a replay official sitting in some video room of the stadium buzzes the on-field ref whenever he believes a video review is necessary. Baseball moves slow enough that the video umpire should have more than enough time to assess the need for a replay before the next play or pitch. Once the game is stopped, the video umpire can then conduct a proper review and radio it in to the on-field crew. It is just that easy and it spares us the indignity of watching the umpires duck under the peep show hood like the NFL refs do. No way this process slows the game down by more than two or three minutes and no way does it somehow tear asunder the moral fabric of baseball, much less defecate on over a century of history.
So there you have it, we make the grand sacrifice of three minutes per game (at worst) in order to make sure that very important calls are actually made correctly. Yes, let’s not forget that last little bit there that seems to be getting glossed over in all these counter-arguments. We all love correct calls. They are what keeps the game’s “grand tradition” intact, whereas dubious umpiring leave unsightly blemishes behind. But, hey, if you still want to adhere to a “purist” point of view, that’s your decision. It is just the wrong decision and I don’t even need instant replay to prove it.
