Video replays should be banned from baseball
Baseball is an imperfect game, played and managed by imperfect people, all of whom live in an imperfect world. Let football pursue the illusion of perfection. It’s not for baseball.
Despite recent pronouncements by new baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to the contrary, the fact is baseball’s turn to video replays last season was profoundly misguided: hidden cameras and men deciding safe and out calls from sterile, bloodless cubicles in the dark heart of Manhattan have no place in the game.
Video replays mess with an essential of the game. How so? The average fan loves to feel superior to the boob umpire. Paradoxically, he loves to feel betrayed by the umpire as well. “How can he do that to my team? Whose side is the ump on, anyway?”
The use of video means no more catcalls or second guessing from the stands, no more heart-felt beratings of the men in blue. The fun is gone.
As for players and managers, a certain antagonism is expected toward umpires. That’s why it was distressing to see time after time throughout last season the easy, knowing smiles exchanged between managers and umpires as a result of video reviews.
At one point, I witnessed in disbelief as an umpire draped his arm around a manager’s shoulder. For the love of Earl Weaver.
Sometimes cliches are true: baseball is a game of inches. For this reason, video replays fail on the most fundamental level: they do not provide definitive answers to really close plays. Without my actually keeping score, it was obvious that most video decisions are judgment calls, only fractionally better than those made at the ballpark by umpires inches from the play.
For sure, video reverses some bad calls. But baseball has lived — and prospered — through calls bad and good for better than one hundred years.
But I’m human, I contradict myself. If baseball must have video, put it where it is really needed and where it will really work: calling balls and strikes.
It’s exasperating to watch baseball on TV and see the number of times the plate umpire calls a ball a strike and a strike a ball.
I don’t necessarily blame umpires for this miserable record. A baseball thrown from 60 feet, six inches by a major league pitcher travels 85, 90, 95 miles an hour. It dips, it sinks, it moves sideways and up and down. The strike zone is invisible, even imaginary. Real-time decision-making is tough.
So, why not have balls and strikes called electronically, employing the same technology used by TV to show fans at home the strike zone and the placement of pitches?
It would be quick — instantaneously, actually — and efficient. It might even speed up the game, which would be a real reform.
A man in blue would still be needed behind the plate or hovering close by. For foul balls, for plays at the plate and so forth. And maybe, if the technology blinks out, for an occasional ball or strike call.
At the very least, can’t we agree that TV monitors should be banned from the dugout and clubhouse to prevent managers from knowing almost to a certainty whether the onfield call was correct or not. Introduce the element of uncertainty in the manager’s mind.
Otherwise, stop with video replays already. You hear it said even by veteran baseball men that “the important thing is to get the call right.” Nothing matters more than “getting it right.”
The “right” thing to do in this instance is to give video replays the old heave-ho.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books of local history – “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.