Should there be instant reply in baseball?
| No, never, ever, ever! |  42 (37.50%) |
| Probably not, but it's inevitable | 8 (7.14%) |
| Only in the post-season | 5 (4.46%) |
| Yes, in some form of the NFL's "coach's challenge" | 14 (12.50%) |
| Yes, but not for balls and strikes | 15 (13.39%) |
| Yes, but ONLY for fair/foul calls | 13 (11.61%) |
| Yes, all the way around | 10 (8.93%) |
| Other (please specify) | 5 (4.46%) |
Simple, and solves a couple of problems at once without costing the league a ton of cash.
I really want to avoid the complete and utter embarrassment to the game that this whole thing caused last night.
As for fair/foul calls, I think that there should be some kind of laser on the foul line detecting the ball crossing to the other side. Anyone remember the 4 game Jays vs RedSox series and Catalanotto's almost home run in the 1st off Wakefield? That ball disappeared right into that bright sun and no umpire could possibly be expected to make that call right most of the time. All you can do is see where it disappears and estimate the arc...some type of aid for that would be much welcomed.
The time has come to place denkinger in the OED as a verb.
The lying and coverup job aside, mind you.
In cricket there's rumblings of using 'Hawkeye' for disputed Leg-Before-Wicket calls. That's a much more difficult problem: would the ball have hit the wicket if the batsman was not in the way. The maker of Hawkeye claims that they can predict the path of the ball within 6mm. Figuring out if a ball went thru the strike zone is easy in comparison.
Admittedly, this means that Cowboy Joe, among others, can't call a lousy game anymore...
In which case, you don't have seven umpires, you have one umpire, with six minions to handle extra stuff for him.
That is very, very dangerous. One all-powerful umpire (and remember, these will necessarily be less skilled umpires, since they will need special training and won't therefore be drawn from the general pool) provides a single point of failure for a baseball game. Not to mention a single chokepoint for corrupt influences to exploit a ballgame.
One umpire in a booth somewhere can't conference with his field umpires, and is largely at the mercy of the TV producers anyway in terms of what he sees. I see this system as full of holes and prone to whims and selective overrules. One of the great things about umpiring mechanics at the major league level is that every umpire is given ultimate responsibility for "his" calls, and there is no abdication of responsibility. This system introduces maximal abdication of responsibility - ultimately, the video ump is responsible for everything.
I am not above supporting a system where umpires are expected to go to the video (on their own decision, not the whim of anyone else) to get help, on ANY non balls/strikes decision, just as umpires can conference as a crew nowadays for any reason. I can see a setup similar to the NFL's, but where four (or six) umpires instead of one come to an area near the camera bay to review the play together, possibly with both managers alongside them. And no "challenge" crap, which is just dumb. Coaches should not play referee.
The thing is, I just find it unnecessary. I mean, in most circumstances where a call is ambiguous, video isn't going to give much help anyway - look at the Pierzynski/Paul/Eddings "strike three" fiasco - video replay can't help at all there. I've had a couple dozen e-mails about my article on the topic, and read a few dozen more points of view in other places, and everybody has a different opinion on what they saw in the video.
And if you think the outcome of the "continuous action" play was bad in Game 2, where some of the Angels reacted to the "out" call, wait until some video umpire calls down to the field and tells them "yeah, the ball was trapped, take the double play off the scoreboard, bring the runners out of the dugout, and put them on 2nd and 3rd".
The maker of Hawkeye claims that they can predict the path of the ball within 6mm.
I don't believe they can, Excalabur, not even close. Maybe under ideal conditions, where the ball pitches on a length or short of a length. But where you have a turning pitch and a spinner up, and the ball is over a length, I don't think Excalabur or any other system that we now have, has the precision to estimate a trajectory on limited information.
This might be another push to introduce video replay or there might be talk of a conspiracy against the Angels.
However, I think that the use of replay on television has made us think that umpires in baseball and referees in football are idiots. I don't like the use of it in football and I couldn't stand it in baseball. It's a game filled with human errors, how come the umps and refs are supposed to be perfect?
When you look at the pickoff play against Podsednik, he looked out on the replays, barely. We see that replay where from a position where we can easily see the glove, ball, base and hand of Pdsednik. To us it is obvious he is out. To the umpire, Podsednik's body is blocking the glove, the ball, and the where the tag was laid. We saw the replay a bunch of times in super slow motion and we had to were shown it multiple times. The ump saw it once in realtime and made a call. He called him safe, Podsednik later scored.
On the issue of Finley hitting the catcher's mitt and getting doubled up at first, if he had been running full speed out of the box, he had a real chance at making it safely. If the ump saw him hitting the glove, he would have called it immeadiately. He wouldn't look at Finley and think 'Finley is pointing and aying he hit the glove so he must have.' He had already made up his mind.
The Angels lost by 6 runs, there are more people to blame than the umpires in this game.