Upon further review...
Baseball has a replay—and a strike zone—problem. And half-measures like we have in place now aren't an acceptable solution.
Hello. Dumb man here, man who can smell middle-age approaching with all the subtlety of giraffes on acid. A whole lot has changed about baseball, the endearingly stupid sport I fell in love with nearly 30 years ago. Some of it has been good. Some of it has been confusing. It’s featured a lot more Tony LaRussa than I once expected. But as ceaseless as the tide it has been, the herald of spring and the last rites of fall commingling to tell a tale 162 games long nearly every season.
The game from 30 years ago seemed simple, and maybe that’s because childhood reduces things to simplicity and nothing can remain as such. But perhaps, 30 years hence, the game we see before us now and the game that has evolved will look more complex and nuanced. Baseball is fungible; all sports evolve, trends take over or are cast aside and market inefficiencies change from era to era.
But if baseball doesn’t solve this replay nonsense, nobody is going to care.
Baseball, the game, is special. I love basketball like I’d love a child (not mine, somebody else’s) because I want it to be nurtured and cared for and to be the best it can be. But I love baseball like democracy, because it should be institutional and lasting and designed to weather any nonsense time or evolution or Rob Manfred can throw at it. Baseball, the business that fancies itself a novelty, needs to readjust its thinking about a great many things on this front, because it’s third and falling from an interest standpoint in this nation, and you, dear reader, may not like to hear that but the truth doesn’t give a damn if you want to hear about it or not, it just sort of is.
No potential perspective change is more dire than how the sport chooses to use replay.
If the sport is ever able to figure out a way to simply look at the replay, determine the correct call and then have that call be the prevailing theme on the field, baseball will be in good shape. Unfortunately, baseball’s bureaucracy has a way of getting in the way of things like common sense.
Baseball’s pursuit of perfection leads it to sensible micro-moments like ruling Whit Merrifield overslid the bag by a quarter of an eighth of an inch and determining him out, which happened earlier this season against the White Sox. This can be both accurate to the rule and entirely unnecessary to the game, because in “The Before” Whit would’ve been safe and that would’ve been that. Before a manager could call up the tunnel to whoever was watching replay to determine if he came off the bag, he wouldn’t have protested because there was nothing to protest. A baseball play occurred and a man paid to make blink-of-an-eye judgment calls made it. Sometimes it was right and sometimes it was wrong and in the end, you kind of hoped it would all even out fairly. That’s not a great system, but until replay became an option it was the one we had. I remember thinking in the moment that 10 years ago, nothing would have happened beyond the announcers lamenting how close a play that was and the inning continuing. It’s possible—probable—that the manager wouldn’t have even bothered leaving the dugout to talk to the umpires about it.
Somehow, replay has become a system that slows an already leisurely game to a halt for minutes at a time in order to give the umpires a frame-by-frame review of a play with a faceless voice in New York, leaving practically every reviewable call subject to the sort of tiresome litigation that will definitely win new fans and force baseball back into its rightful place in American lore—nothing, and I mean nothing, gives people greater satisfaction on those endless summer nights than watching two middle-aged men put on headsets and stare blankly into the middle-distance.
Contrast the relatively mundane—Whit sliding a fraction of a hair off the bag, ending an inning rather than putting a runner in scoring position early in a scoreless game—with something game-altering in a high leverage moment, like Salvador Perez corralling a one-hopper wild pitch right off Jared Walsh’s ball sac bouncer and back-picking David Fletcher at third to end the game. At that moment, it is very, very, VERY important to get the call right, and they did. It’s the system working as it is designed to work, to be sure the quality of the game isn’t obfuscated because a call was wrong, not in an infinitesimal sense invisible to the naked eye but in big, bright “Jim Joyce costing Armando Galarraga a perfect game”-style. Nobody minds taking five minutes to get that right.
A week ago Sunday night, they used all the technology in the Braves-Phillies game and got everything wrong anyway. Monday, plate umpire Roberto Ortiz’s command of the strike zone was really more theoretical than anything else. This, obviously, is the system not working as it was designed to work, either because humans are stupid or because the system contains flaws incapable of being worked out by silly things like rules, made and enforced by the same stupid humans.
If a man didn’t touch the plate— and Alec Bohm didn’t touch the plate—RIP to the mentions of @MLBReplays, and there’s video evidence of that, then he’s out. If we have a system in place to show whether or not pitches are strikes and…
…I think…
…we do…
…then going to that technology in the name of getting things right should supersede any “But it says in my book of baseball laws” arguments. Otherwise, the entire enterprise is stupid.
So if we’re only going to get this right some of the time, even though the technology is there to make sure we get it right all of the time, what exactly is replay’s point? It is here, nearly 1,000 words into this screed, that I unveil Spicy Take Time:
It’s time to either turn this over to the robots full-time or take the cameras out of the game and accept that sometimes the umpires are going to screw up.
Either have everything—every pitch, every play, every ruling—put into the hands of the machines and have the game slow down slightly for the sake of accuracy or accept that sometimes human beings aren’t perfect and allow that to be part of the charm of the game. There are no wrong answers; the people who want the accuracy will sacrifice the pace, and people who want to speed things along will accept the human element as the cost of keeping baseball, baseball.
In fact, replay will only be untenable as long as nothing is done to address its problems and flaws. This middle-of-the-road take, that we want to get it right but won’t allow getting things right to supersede the stumbling bureaucracy, is the only thing that works for no one at all.