Is Instant Replay Good for Baseball? -Matt

Imagine for a moment you were a lucky kid. Lucky enough that you happen to be in Kansas City for a baseball game and one of the world’s greatest athletes, Bo Jackson, came up to bat and drilled a one-hop liner to the Third Baseman, who fielded the ball right over the bag.  He turned and fired to first and in what looked like a close play, Bo was ruled safe by the First Base Umpire.

When you break it down you can see that the close play at first was really, really close.  Running down the first base line, Bo would have traveled 28.12 feet per second.  His last stretch to the bag would cover more than 7’ and take less than .25 seconds.  The throw from 3^rd would have traveled 117’ feet per second and traveled 30’ (or 24% of the distance from 3^rd to 1^st) in the same .25 seconds.  The umpire would be unable to watch the ball and the runner’s foot at the same time, so instead he would listen for the sound of the ball hitting the 1^st baseman’s mit and watch the runner’s foot touch the base.  The difference between calling the play ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ would be determined in a millisecond, if that.

Most of the time Umpires get this and other calls right.  In fact 99.5% of the time they are correct .   We could say, in Baseball parlance, umpires put up ‘hall of fame numbers’ day in and day out.

However, 0.5% of the time the umpires are wrong.  Ask any baseball fan and he can tell you the exact moment this rang true for his team.

For some this error rate is unacceptable.  In fact all of the MLB’s team recently voted to expand instant replay to catch these missed calls.  There is far too much money on the line for seasons to be cut short due to a missed call.

For others the human error factor only adds to the magic of baseball.  I am in this category.  Baseball is a game of legends and lore.  Seasons played 50 years ago are just as remembered as a season played last year.  Human error is as much of the story as human triumph.  In baseball milieu Roger Maris is as famous as Bill Buckner.

There is little doubt that we could achieve near perfection in the calling of a game if we employ many technical advances.  We could even remove the umpires altogether and replace them will well positioned cameras.  But is this a worthwhile goal?  Perhaps in looking for perfection we’ll lose what makes baseball great: the humanity.

Regardless of my feelings, the trend in baseball is moving towards the goal of removing umpire error.  Starting this season there will be a number of plays that are eligible for review by instant replay.  A good number of the reviewable plays deal with stadium design.  Homeruns, ground rule doubles, foul balls, fan interference are all issues related to stadium design.  All of these are ‘fixable’.  For example we can change the rule so that any ball that leaves the field of play in the air, within the foul poles, is a home run.  This would remove the arbitrary painted line in many stadiums demarking what is or is not a homerun and return it to the true intent of the rule.  There would be no question as to what a home run is.  

We could solve a good portion of the problems if we just take a more simplistic approach to the solution.

After all, “Baseball is a simple game.  You throw the ball.  You hit the ball.  You catch the ball.”