Good news for people who hate bad calls:
Major League Baseball is leaning toward expanding replay for the 2012 season to include trapped balls and fair-or-foul rulings down the lines, a person familiar with the talks tells The Associated Press. Major League Baseball is leaning toward expanding replay for the 2012 season to include trapped balls and fair-or-foul rulings down the lines, a person familiar with the talks tells The Associated Press.
The expanded replay will not cover out/safe calls, but we’ll take what we can get at this point. And really, if they’re moving beyond straight boundary calls (i.e. they’re reviewing trapped balls) it’s only a matter of time before they go out/safe too. I mean, ball-in-the-glove is ball-in-the-glove, right?
The article has the usual assortment of pro and con player quotes. This one from Chone Figgins is the most significant, I think:
“To have those guys go back and look at replay for everything, it would be just too long unless they had a signal from upstairs and hit a button.”
That’s the key, I believe, for replay to work well as it expands in use. The eye-in-the-sky — I say a fifth umpire in a booth — who can almost instantly review calls without on-field arguing and challenges and without the regular umpires having to leave the field. We already allow one ump to overrule another if he saw a play better. This would simply be an extension of that. Indeed, practically speaking all it would require is an ear piece worn by the crew chief. If the sky-ump sees the play was called wrong on the field, it can be resolved in a matter of seconds.
Good going baseball. Now go all the way with it.
