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Should baseball begin using instant replay?
Pro: Using it for disputed home run calls makes sense
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Jeff Lewis / AP Tigers manager Jim Leyland, left, and third baseman Carlos Guillen, right, argue with umpire Tim Tschida during a game last week in Anaheim. After several recent disputed home run calls, there is talk baseball could adopt an instant-replay system.
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If baseball is to start using instant replay to help umpires get calls right, it needs to be careful about it.
We all want to see the right calls being made — especially when replay clearly show an umpire was wrong — but we also don't want 4-hour ballgames and that's what could happen if Major League Baseball isn't judicious in the way it decides to use replay.
Baseball gets enough bad press as it is for the creeping pace of games and commissioner Bud Selig seems to talk about speeding the game up nearly as often as he's had to talk about performance-enhancing drugs. We all know that when it comes to using video as a means to make sure calls by officials are correct, there's nothing "instant" about it.
Football is the worst offender and that's because it uses replay to determine so many things: out of bounds, if a ball carrier is down, if he went over the goal line ... yada, yada, yada. Examining numerous replays can take forever. Then on top of that, they're very often inconclusive and the whole thing is a waste of time.
Other sports are very narrow in what they use replay for. In basketball, it's only to see if a shot was made before the buzzer sounded. In hockey, it's to see if the puck went over the goal line. In tennis, it's to see if the ball is in or out. In these sports, replay isn't a burden for the fans and they are correct virtually 100 percent of the time.
The talk in baseball is to use it only for disputed home runs and as long as that's all it's used for, then that's probably OK. The fear is — by Selig and others — is that once replay is implemented for that, there will be pressure to use it for other things and that would slow things down to a crawl and it's really unnecessary.
Replay, if it's to be used at all, needs to be used very little.
— Jim Carlisle is a staff writer for The Star. E-mail address: jcarlisle@VenturaCountyStar.com.
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