| 12 July 2010
Please welcome our first guest blogger of the week, Rob Iracane. Rob holds down the fort at the wonderful "Walkoff Walk", your source for alliterative post titles, the famous walkoff shrimp, and one of the best mixes of intelligent writing and wry observations you'll find around the baseball blogosphere. You can also find Rob on Twitter at @iracane. Thanks for contributing, Rob!
After watching the NHL playoffs and the Wimbledon championship in tennis recently, I was impressed with the way those sports use technology to review the judgment calls of their human umpires and referees. The organizations involved take care to make sure the right calls are made and little time is wasted. So I ask, why doesn't Major League Baseball, a leader in embracing technology and enabler of some questionable official decisions lately, have instant replay yet?
Simply put, rule changes in the national pastime, when they happen, are painstakingly slow to arrive. Most of the major changes, however, have gone against the established fabric of the game (no matter how soiled it is) and ignored precedent. Think of Jackie Robinson's debut for the Dodgers; it took bold moves by Jackie and Branch Rickey to tear down the color barrier in the big leagues. And the sport became more legitimate because of it.
So whenever a change must come, it need not have the same social importance as Jackie Robinson to be necessary. Bringing comprehensive instant replay to baseball won't legitimize the game in the same way that Jackie did, but it would still correct something that needs correcting.
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So, why are we only calling for instant replay now? Why was there no instant replay when the rules of baseball were first codified in the nineteenth century? You'd think the umpires, in their straw hats and smartly-hemmed pantaloons, could halt play for a moment to head off the field and consult the canvasses of the game painters to see if the striker had indeed tallied an ace before the scout plugged the runner. But oh, what an impossible task that would be. Winslow Homer can only paint so fast!
Instead, faith was put into the judgment of the umpires. Sometimes they'd botch a play in your favor and you'd breathe a sigh of relief; sometimes they'd botch it in the other guy's favor and you'd string him up. Because before the dawn of slo-mo instant replay on the forty-two-inch high-definition television sets in the living rooms of every Joe Fan in America, the human element was part of the game.
No longer. We have the technology. Joe Fan watches replays at home and in the ballpark; he can tell when a call has been botched. This is not a question of honor for the umpire whose calls can and will be reversed on a regular basis. The umpires understand. They are not being replaced, they are being aided by technology. And if Bud Selig takes my advice and adds a fifth umpire to every game who sits in a dark, windowless trailer with twelve different LCD screens showing every angle of every play, the umpires will get new job opportunities.
We as baseball fans in North America are not suddenly calling for instant replay because our favorite teams just started getting screwed over. Our favorite teams have been getting screwed over for decades! But only now, with the rapid, technological changes in the way the game gets shown in our homes and bars, do we notice it.
Think not of instant replay as a mere way to satisfy the bloodthirst of rabid fanatics. Think of it more as an improvement of the social contract between Major League Baseball and the American public. We give them broad power to come to our cities and devour our tax benefits and mark up beer prices. The least they can do, in return, is get the damn calls right.
It is perhaps a tired cliché to say "the world is not fair". There is nothing that should stand in the way of MLB using available technology to make its game more fair. Bud Selig has taken the first step by allowing home run calls to be reviewed and it's time for him to take it further. It's the right thing to do and the right time to do it.
