All’s Well Without Replay

In a game nearly as crucial as a game can be in May, beleaguered Mets first baseman Carlos Delgado came to the plate against Yankees ace Chien-Ming Wang on Sunday night and tore the ball down the left field line, breaking the game open with what was, as millions of people saw, a three-run home run. And it didn’t count, because three of the four umpires calling the game were convinced it was foul.Only in baseball could such a thing happen, because, alone among major American sports, baseball refuses to be sullied by the horrors of instant replay. Some, such as the 25 general managers who expressed limited support for a replay policy last November when the matter was put to a vote, might say that this shows the sport at its worst: willfully perverse, deliberately anachronistic, and contrarian. Those who oppose replay, as commissioner Bud Selig does, might say their opposition shows a tolerance for the inherent limitations and frailties of human knowledge that suits a game that, by design, celebrates failure. Both sides are wrong, which is why neither has ever convinced the other. This is why the sport doesn’t have replay, and why, with any luck, it never will.The arguments usually made by those who oppose replay — Selig once actually claimed that “human error is part of our sport” — are pretty unconvincing. Mostly they come down to the idea that replay in baseball is bad because baseball doesn’t have replay. I’m sympathetic to this aesthetically; change in baseball is generally for the worse, and if you made me commissioner for a day, there would be no more night baseball. But the mere fact that baseball hasn’t come around to an idea adopted by every other sport doesn’t, by itself, prove anything. Tradition is a good thing, but the history of baseball is an attempt to mitigate human error as much as possible — if this weren’t so, players would still call the games, as they did in the 19th century.On the other hand, replay supporters also offer some puzzling arguments. Other sports may use replay, but “everyone is doing it” isn’t a much better reason for a sports league to do something than it is for an 8-year-old. There may be an issue of basic fairness at play — who would want a pennant decided by a botched home run call? — but if that’s so, the energies of replay advocates would be put to much better use in an effort to convince central baseball to toss the home plate umpire in favor of a computer that would call balls and strikes. After all, while mistakes like Sunday’s are rare, mistakes like the refusal of umpires to call any pitch above the belt a strike, despite the explicit definition of the strike zone to be found in the rule book, are common.Nor have replay aficionados ever made a decent case for how challenges would be made. Managers certainly can’t be involved; no one wants to see some scheming fraud running up an appeal just to buy some more time for a reliever to get warm in the bullpen. It wouldn’t be fair to leave all decisions up to the very umpires whose calls would be under dispute, though, and leaving them up to purportedly neutral third parties would open baseball up to truly ugly situations worthy of the NBA, home of gambling referees and worse. In theory, replay might seem a fair idea, but it’s difficult to think of how it could be implemented in practice without either making already interminably long games even longer or removing control of the game from the umpires.Faced with all this, baseball has done exactly the right thing by doing nothing at all. It has done nothing for the more than 50 years during which replay technology has been available, and it is a good bet that it will continue to do nothing for some time to come. Last November’s vote was the quintessential baseball statement on the matter — the 25 GMs voted not to recommend replay, but to recommend that Selig look into the matter. This carries about as much technical weight as my suggestion that he not do so, or your suggestion that he give his $14.5 million salary away to worthy charities. And if Selig ever does truly look into the matter, and if he does decide it would be a good idea, he would then have to get the approval of both the umpire and player unions, all of which would involve many steering committees and much taking under advisement.All of this bureaucratic inertia may seem a bit much, but think of it this way: Anyone who saw Delgado robbed of his home run and was moved to righteous anger over the sport’s refusal to use simple, readily available technology to prevent injustice can rest assured that baseball is taking the matter seriously — gravely pondering it, even. And anyone who saw the robbery and was sure they saw something beautiful, an idiosyncratic bit of nonsense they couldn’t see in the other, lesser sports, can rest assured the baseball isn’t taking the idea of replay too seriously at all. Everyone can be happy with this status quo — why should baseball change it at all?tmarchman@nysun.com

All’s Well Without Replay

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