Instant Replay in Baseball: Some Scuttlebutt

Baseball, more than any other sport, is governed by fussy traditionalists who vehemently resist change. (For a good example of this problem and how to fight it, check out the amazing work at the now-defunct Fire Joe Morgan -- Michael Schur's Cousin Mose's baseball blog, for you Office fans.) I understand and agree that the simple, pastoral, un-technologified nature of baseball is part of its appeal, but at the same time, the game could stand to modernize a bit. It's time to take some of the subjectivity out of baseball and implement some sort of replay review beyond what we currently have to help baseball keep up with the other sports.

Replay review on home runs has already been put into place and all the old farts who claimed it would become a big part of the game and slow it to a sloth's pace have been wrong. (Just don't tell Brian Bruney.) A replay review is only needed for the closest home run calls -- teams will go weeks without seeing one -- and the replays haven't taken significantly longer than the average seventh-inning stretch. The logical next step is to allow replay for other calls, preferably as ordered by the manager who believes he got the short end of the proverbial stick.

This is where the baseball fundamentalists mount their high horse and talk about how replay will ruin the game. And they're partly right: replay COULD ruin the game. If replays become too frequent and take too much time, baseball will head down the same road already traveled by football. Modern football games -- especially NFL games -- are dominated by challenges and replay reviews. It seems to me that video reviews in football have almost become bigger than the game. Every close play is now carefully and meticulously scrutinized, and in a commendable effort to "get the call right," the league has now erred on the side of reviewing too much. Most people don't seem to notice, because, as ESPN drills into your head every single day, "the NFL is king," but I think that the NFL would be better off with a slightly scaled-down version of what it has now, where replays aid the officials, but don't take their places. NFL games are slowly creeping into the 3.5 to 4 hour range, and the number of media timeouts due to challenges help neither the fans watching at home, nor the fans packed into the stadium.

So, how do we avoid a similar fate with baseball? Simple, I think. Here's the plan: In addition to automatic reviews of close home runs, each team gets one replay review per game. Win or lose that one "challenge," that is IT. This will allow umpires to get the game's most important calls right but still keep replay review to an absolute minimum. How do we ensure that replay won't become too intrusive or frequent? Easy. Since each team only gets one replay no matter what, managers aren't going to be quick on the trigger finger. You don't want to challenge a meaningless infield single in the fourth inning -- no matter how awful the call was -- because you don't want to be caught with your pants down when the umpire blows the call at home on your game-winning RBI in the ninth! Thus, most games will probably end with one or both managers not even using a challenge, since they won't want to waste them early and there may not be a need to use them late.

There's a lot to like here. Managers, players, umpires and fans will get to see the game's most important calls made correctly more often. As long as the replays can be as efficient and quick as they have been for the home run calls, a maximum of two of them per game will not significantly impact the length of games. Fans -- especially DH haters -- will enjoy the addition of an extra layer of strategy to the game. (Should they challenge here? Is it worth trading an out to keep the review? What if they need it later?)

Finally, like it or not (and I do not), baseball will benefit from the added "water cooler talk" -- i.e., scuttlebutt. After replay is introduced, the day after a big game, everyone will be able to talk about the big call from last night: did the umps get it right or wrong, was it the right time to challenge, etc. I still think that adding challenges was one of the smartest things the NFL ever did for that very reason. The way America's Pastime has been struggling, its administration might be wise to try to copy some of the things the NFL is doing right.

This is far from a perfect system, especially as I worded it here. The fine print of my proposal is available in this post from THE MANUAL BUZZER, but I felt the need to put this out there again on this blog, because it's something I'm passionate about, and because it's a reasonable, modest proposal that I think most baseball fans -- traditionalist or not -- could agree on. What do you think? Go ahead and shoot down my idea, or leave your own in the comments. An idea like this will NEVER take without some discussion and discourse from baseball fans; the Commissioner needs to know that his fans would appreciate instant replay!