Is Instant Replay Good for Baseball? - George

I can't remember where I first heard it, but there is an old philosophy joke about umpires that goes something like this:

Three umpires are discussing how they call balls and strikes.

The first umpire says, "Some are balls and some are strikes, and I call them as they are."

The second umpire says, "Some are balls and some are strikes, and I call them as I see 'em."

The third umpire says, "Some are balls and some are strikes, but they ain't nothin' 'til I call 'em."

One could argue that the calls of a game involve all three of these perspectives. The umpires are deemed good by how well their subjective calls (2nd umpire) match up to the objective strike and ball (1st umpire). But neither strike nor ball exists until the verdict is delivered in history by the umpire (3rd umpire). We experience this as we watch a close play and wait expectantly for the hands to go up with the signal. We see this play out comedically in The Naked Gun when Lt. Frank Drebin goes undercover as an umpire and the whole stadium waits for Frank to give his judgement on the first pitch of the game.

The rising interest in adding instant replay to the MLB experience comes, in part, because of a belief in an accessible objective truth. It is an effort to remove subjectivity from the game. It is tempting to critique the temptation toward a so-called-objectivity. And even though the quest to access and apply pure objective truth is an impossibility, practically speaking, that critique doesn't matter because what really is happening here is that people want the calls to match what they see. We want the ump's subjective call to match the subjective call of us, the technically assisted home viewers. They might frame it, erroneously, in terms of objectivity, but what everyone really wants is unanimity. And careful use of instant replay assures greater unanimity.

Famous umpire, Bill Klem, said, "The best umpired game is the game in which the fans cannot recall the umpires who worked it." This was in reference to the fact that a memorable umpire is almost always memorable for bad reasons. It is easy to go from a sentiment like this to a view that umpires are unimportant, that they are accidental to the game, that there should be a way to do this without them. I don't think MLB officials think this way, but I do see it from the wider public. Pretty soon there will be a call for sensors to be sewn into the fabric of the uniforms, into the baseball, the foul lines, the bags, and home plate. The whole environment will be digitally measurable and give instant reads and there will be no need for the human element. And this will be viewed as allowing for the purest of competition. And maybe it would. But I don't know if that would qualify as an improvement. 

MLB umpires are the best in the business. Observing and judging plays is what they do. The game is fast and sometimes umpires are blocked out from seeing the details. Tools like instant reply can be helpful to them. But instant replay or not, the call is the call, the umpire judges.  The players strive to make a play that will be judged in their favor.  There is no removing the judge. We might replace him with camera and computer version, but the judge is still there, and ultimately it is still subjective.  Yes we'd have greater unanimity, but what do will we lose when we dehumanize the judge? How does our game change when the players strive for a judgement from soul-less technology?  What kind of world are we heading toward?