Opinion

EDITORIAL: Initiate replay in baseball


Published: November 5, 2009

Major League Baseball this year was forced to confront a problem professional football and basketball were long ago obliged to solve: what to do when officials make bad calls. Football and basketball have opted to get the calls right at all costs — almost. Baseball had better head in that direction.

Human beings make mistakes. Even umpires and referees. For years, that was a well-kept secret, apparently. Only managers like the argumentative Leo "The Lip" Durocher knew it for sure in baseball.

But then televisions found their way into American homes, and even casual fans began to suspect umpires didn't get every call right. Their suspicions weren't confirmed until some pest invented videotape, and all of a sudden plays that ended with fishy-looking calls were replayed on TV screens for everyone to see that the ump had blown another one.

It was the same in football and basketball. Football was first to address the issue, and pretty soon we had plays being rerun from multiple angles, at multiple speeds, so everyone in America could see what the referee had missed. The replays were a cumbersome system, sometimes holding up games for minutes, but football knew that the first order of business was getting the call right. Soothing the embarrassment of the referee was secondary.

Basketball eventually saw the wisdom in using replay to uphold the integrity of the game. Baseball remains a holdout.

But the recently concluded set of post-season playoff games should have been the clincher. The umpires had the bad faculties and the bad luck to commit at least half a dozen widely replayed, widely discussed, very obvious blunders, all in a matter of days, to provoke renewed demands for instant replay in baseball.

The argument against it, subscribed to by such knowledgeable observers as television analyst Tim McCarver (a former catcher who probably saw firsthand as many erroneous calls as anybody), says replaying questionable but pivotal calls would take too much time. Look at football, which squanders long minutes while a referee ducks under a hood to watch the play over and over.

But that argument is specious. Instead of stopping the game while umpires go look at a TV monitor, an extra umpire could be stationed in the press box just for the purpose of watching questionable, important plays and have an answer in seconds — as quickly as the viewers. It would barely interrupt the game.

The benefit of instituting this practice is certainty that the game was correctly officiated and not won or lost on erroneous judgment. Additionally, fans will be discussing the game afterward, rather than the incompetence of the umpires.

The obvious answer is to give it a try — in spring training, say. If it has flaws, fix them or scrap the practice. But not to even consider it deserves ... well, a second look.