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.” 

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?