Major League Baseball is on the verge of instituting instant replay to judge boundary calls on home runs. Crew chiefs at each ballgame will determine whether video review is needed to properly call a play, at which point video will be fed from the Major League offices in New York to the ballpark for umpires to review. The crew chief will then make the final call.
A few of the writers here at Bill James Online tackle the issue:
Scott Ham: I am fully in favor of Major League Baseball utilizing instant replay and home run calls are a good place to start. People have been calling for instant replay on almost every type of play except balls and strikes for a number of years. While I think it would be a bit reckless to employ instant replay across the board, disputed home run calls are a rare enough situation that the medium can slowly be worked into the game without causing major disruptions. There will be kinks to iron out and people will complain, but the game will benefit from proper officiating and less controversy.
Times have changed and the game has changed. Equipment technology has evolved, sports medicine has progressed, but officiating has remained basically the same. The NFL and NBA have both shown reasonable success with instant replay, and while some may say that it wastes time in the NFL, in the end, no one feels that their team has been cheated.
Finally, to those who say that it removes some of the human element from the game, I disagree. The human element that should decide the game is the players, not the umpires. An umpire’s mistake is just that, a mistake. A player and a team deserve to benefit from their performance, not lose out to human elements that never touched the ball.
Roel Torres: In my experience, the expression “keep the human element in the game” is synonymous with “we like blown calls.” I have no sympathy for this position. I don’t believe it to be defensible.
I am not only in favor of instant replay, I would go so far as to support a movement to have balls and strikes called by a robot or a machine further down the line. I mean, QuesTec is already in place in many parks. Why not take advantage? (Clearly, this is a tangent and diverges from the issue at hand of Instant Replay. But it illustrates my general philosophical position: Use technology to get the calls right.)
Skeptics are saying, “This will open the door. People are going to want to use replay for trapped-ball catches, and safe/out calls.” Yes. So? Why do we have a problem with that?
Okay, let’s start with homers and boundary calls. Cool. But one day, replays and technology will be used for everything. Everything. And I, for one, will be extremely thankful for that.
Matt DiFilippo: If Major League Baseball adopts instant replay on a regular basis, it absolutely must get everything settled beforehand. In the early days of NFL instant replay, Jerry Rice scored a touchdown when the message from the replay booth was misinterpreted. In the 2006 Oklahoma-Oregon game, the replay showed Oregon illegally touched an onside kick, and Oklahoma recovered the ball anyway. The officials looked at the replay and gave the ball to Oregon, which went on to win. Those kinds of mishaps must be considered and eliminated before they happen.
Moreover, if we extend instant replay to cover things like trapped catches and safe/out calls on the bases, we have to figure out a solution should these plays be reversed. In the NFL, nothing is more maddening than the replay showing a fumble, but it doesn't matter because the whistle was blown. What about the runner going from second to home who pulled up because the umpire signaled a catch? What about the time element? We need clear solutions, or we're just creating different problems, not solving them.
As for nobody in the NFL feeling like their team is cheated, talk to any Raiders fan about the Tuck Rule game. That's a potential problem in instant replay. In the end, the call was technically correct by the dumb rule in the book, but a great many fans feel the call was wrong.
The biggest problem with instant replay is that fans will expect every controversial call to now be ruled correctly. There's nowhere to hide if the call is still wrong with replay. I don't think there can be a "halfway and let's see how it works out." Major League Baseball must ensure that the system is as good as it can possibly be before instant replay is implemented, or we're heading straight for a huge controversy.
Scott Ham: I generally agree with what you guys are saying, although I only want machines calling balls and strikes if there are actual robots modeled after Enrico Pallazzo on the field calling pitches. Otherwise, I just don’t want to see a board light up “ball” or “strike” after the pitch.
Seriously, I think umpiring still needs to be conducted by humans. While eliminating them would probably curb some of the prima donna antics we get out of some players, how famous would Lou Pinella be today if he didn’t have an ump to kick dirt on? It’s not the prettiest side of the game, but it is color, and I dare you to conjure any image in your head of Earl Weaver or Billy Martin that doesn’t have them jawing with an umpire.
The rollout of instant replay has to be gradual for just the reasons Matt highlighted. There will be kinks, there will be mishaps. Personally, I think the idea of the video being fed from the Baseball headquarters in New York to the ballpark is a pretty stupid idea. The TV viewer at home, ten seconds after the play, can see angle after angle courtesy of your local sports network conglomerate, but the umpires need someone at a console twenty-five hundred miles away feeding them video? How are they sending it? Internet? Satellite? For that cost, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a fifth umpire upstairs every game, seeing the broadcast feed that will be running these replays anyway?
Work out the kinks, make communication clear, and prepare for people to demand more.
Roel Torres: I'm really not interested in preserving the color of the game at the expense of its integrity. The NBA experienced a crisis of the soul when they found out a human referee named Tim Donaghy was not calling games with impartiality. And for as long as I live, I will never forget Eric Gregg making one atrocious call after another in Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS, single-handedly determining the fate of the World Series participant from the NL. Lou Piniella, Earl Weaver, and Billy Martin would have plenty to do without jawing at umpires. As Bill James mentions in his piece on the 2008 Beijing Olympics: Nothing drains the joy out of a sporting event more than blatantly horrible judging.
Um... this was about instant replay. We just happened to hit a raw nerve of mine. Sorry.
Bring on replay. Bring on technology. You can't bring it on fast enough, and implement it thoroughly enough for my liking. Every step we take that brings us closer to making umpires obsolete is a good step.
Matt DiFilippo: I think I would stop being a baseball fan if we went to reviewing every ball-strike call. If we do it in a booth, is there going to be a delay after every pitch? If we have a robotic umpire, I think that would look unbelievably silly (Although I would relish the comedic possibilities at someone like Lou Pinella coming out and delivering a kick to the robot's midsection.). The more things instant replay is used on, the more we remove the excitement and disturb the flow.
I don't think we need sweeping changes to the system we have. If we can eliminate the most obvious mistakes, that's fine with me. Even that may be out of reach. I don't know how many times I've seen a call from three different angles, and still can't tell for sure what the call should be.
In closing, a completely out of the box thought: Let's take a lousy call like Don Denkinger's in the 1985 World Series. If we don't have that, what is the most memorable moment of that series if you're not a die-hard Royals fan? I can't think of one either. It's possible that the debate stirred up by a few (and I stress a few) controversial calls is good for baseball, because it gets discussion going and keeps people talking about the game.