The Debate on Instant Replay Drew Kort/ MoWeFri 9am J.A. Adande and Bill Plaschke* engage in an Op/Ed duel that brings to light the key points of the issue to all those involved and interested. djpostl.wordpress.com * note: I am taking on the personalities and bylines of actual authors for the purposes of the Final Writing Project, but all opinons expressed in this paper are mine alone Foul By: Bill Plaschke Unlike most husbands, I actually enjoy the cooking of my wife, and when 2 o’ clock Dodger’s games go three hours plus I have a better chance of getting mauled at the zoo then enjoying a home cooked meal. Baseball is a game that most people greatly enjoy even though it is admittedly long, littered with stoppages, and relatively boring. Now, what would the expansion of instant replay do for the sport? Make a long game even longer and increase the profits at my local McDonalds. Yea yea, maybe instant replay has proven effective in most other major sports, and this piece of information alone seems to be enough to deem it necessary for the MLB, but it’s a different situation when it comes to baseball. The tension and excitement created from close calls and even blown calls is something that fans expect and prefer to see when they go to the ballpark. Am I the only one that enjoys yelling at the umps and telling them that they should get off their knees because they are, in fact, blowing the game? If an ump can simply walk over to a monitor and re-watch the play in slow-mo, the entire thrill is eliminated. A homerun, a double, a triple, and a skirmish between a manager and an ump all bring the crowd to their feet, not watching an ump fast-forward and rewind a videotape of the previous play while everyone waits for the next pitch. Flow? No, the game doesn’t have much flow to begin with, so there is no flow to interrupt. It’s more about overall length. The average game is close to three hours as it is, and most of that time is spent watching a batter adjust his gloves or a pitcher toss the Rosen bag before throwing to first instead of home. Kuensters got it right when he says that no more time should be dedicated to anything else other than the actual playing of the game considering how little time it takes up as it is. Should this addition of time be a sacrifice in order to get all of these calls correct? Oh that’s a tough one. Still no. The baseball season is a 162 game marathon (if you will), and blown calls are bound to happen to every team, and every team’s opponent as well. If you’re reading this then you’re probably an avid baseball watcher, and you know this better than anyone. These calls are likely to somewhat balance out when everything is finished, leaving no team at an unfair advantage. People can go on complaining about blown calls when it’s against their team, and claim that because of it a game or two or maybe even ten were lost when they shouldn’t have been. But how many times throughout the season did that specific team get lucky when a blown call worked in their favor? Who knows. Those calls go unmentioned, and even unnoticed. Don’t sit there and act like you haven’t been watching a game when your team catches a huge break because of a blown call, and you shrugged it off like it was no big deal, or you maybe even convinced yourself that it was the right call. The point is, it happens to everyone, everyone gets screwed and everyone gets lucky. Shwarz and Szczerban bring another fact to light: how often do you really see blown calls, let alone blown calls that actually affect the outcome of the game? The majority of incorrect calls are often calls that do not actually end up resulting in runs scored, or preventing runs from scoring that should have. Usually it is difficult to tell how one call would have affected a game. In the overall scheme of things, there are much larger issues that should be addressed. The salary cap that is absent in the sport allows big markets teams to be able to purchase talent rather than develop it, but only big market teams are capable of this. This is really what we should be debating, I mean, can a fan from Milwaukee ever really get excited about their team? No, because the Yankees will just buy C.C. Sabathia from you for 161 mil, and all of your hopes and dreams will be effectively gone. Now that’s not fair. Each team having an equal opportunity to succeed in the league seems like a larger issue than that of some sporadic missed calls that only questionably affect the game. There’s always the “human element” as well. Ever since day one, baseball has been officiated using little to no assistance. Dating all the way back to the 19th century baseball has been played with no technological assistance, and has become “America’s Pastime.” Why would something that has been proven to be so enjoyable to so many ever want to be altered in any way? Like the saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If people enjoy it as it is, there is risk involved when deciding to change the game. Fair By: J.A. Adande What’s the date? Oh yea that’s right, its 2011. The self-driven car is being developed; I think I read about a dog that was successfully cloned over in Europe, and there is rumor that they are thinking of implementing full use of instant replay in the MLB. Now, which one doesn’t belong in that sentence? The fact that the MLB has not yet expanded instant replay to almost all facets of the game seems a bit ridiculous, and here’s why. Let’s remind ourselves of the most basic goal of the MLB itself (if your mind immediately goes to “making money” then I guess there are two main points, but this is not the one I am speaking of). Each and every season teams have month long spring trainings before the regular season, play 162 games in approximately 180 days getting practically no rest whatsoever, and practice before each of those games, and for what? It’s pretty simple: to earn a large profit so they can get that new section of club level put in over the off season, yes, but what we would like to believe is that they do these things to try to win the most games possible, win the World Series, and become the superior team in the league. When a blown call affects the outcome of a game unfairly, and a team that would have otherwise won ends up losing, the goal of the entire league is corrupted. A player cannot practice for a missed call, and this is the entire issue. Phil Taylor put it beast saying, these mistakes, this “human element, ” it does nothing but “take the results out of the hands of the competitors.” It’s not such a big deal if there is an umpire error in little league or even college baseball, but it’s a different story in the pros. Fans expect pro leagues, the largest and most important leagues of their favorites sports, to get calls correct almost all of the time. If any league should be enforcing rules and correct calls as much as possible, it should be the pro leagues. “In pro sports or big-business college sports, there’s so much money involved, you have to correct what could cost somebody mightily,” says NFL coach Steve Mariucci regarding blown calls in elite sports. Farber questions: doesn’t it seem that the MLB should want to incorporate this technology into the game? When there is a call that was blown, and everyone watching the game can clearly see the mistake (because they are allowed to see the replay), but nothing can be done about it, it embarrasses not only the umps, but the league as well. Why not lift the pressure off of themselves? Instead of continually being embarrassed, only be during the time that it takes the umpire to look at a monitor and reverse the call. Think about the Jim Joyce incident regarding Armando Galleraga. Based on how much scrutiny that Joyce went through because of the missed call, and how much he suffered afterwards, the MLB should consider the expansion just based off of this specific incident. This would at least take a little bit of pressure off of the umpires that are undoubtedly going to make mistakes. “The game of baseball has not changed, but the scrutiny has intensified,” Joyce said himself after the episode. He received death threats for months after, why put anyone else through this? There are some things that concern me about the potential expansion, though. Baseball games are often long and slow, and there really doesn’t need to be another reason to stop the game; with this I agree. But I have some ideas. Maybe the league should start enforcing a rule that is already in place regarding how long pitchers can take between pitches (the rule is no longer than 25 seconds). Pitchers take on average around 25 seconds between pitches, and reducing this time will slowly but surely make up for time lost looking at replays (and this could very well not happen at all some games).