And
now the MLB wants to extend the powers of instant replay. Hopefully, someday, baseball will be
just like football and we can halt the game and focus in on every little detail
of every play to determine how to best call it. Please, cut this out and let us just play baseball the way
it was meant to be played- with bad calls.
I guess you can call me a purist-
if my sense of baseball purity is based on the rules when I was born. The game is constantly changing, that
is a fact. Whether it is the
rules, the style, the gear, the drugs, etc, the game has changed greatly since its
conception. But at some point,
mustn’t a line be drawn?
When instant replay first entered
the game in 2008 I was not pleased.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this is. It’s not that I don’t want the game to be more fair-
although, it doesn’t really become fairer with instant replay, everyone plays
with the same umpires- but that’s not it.
No, I just want baseball to maintain its traditional spirit.
Baseball operates outside the
confines that control all other sports.
If you look at every other (popular) professional sport, there is a
projectile that makes its way up and down a rectangular plane with some method
of scoring at either end (with the exception of cricket (which I have no
understanding of) and golf, which is a great game, but not a sport. Nascar is neither.). Baseball embodies America in a way
these games cannot: there is no time constraint- a game can go on infinitely, a
homerun literally leaves the game, the concept of “stealing” is present…there
is true freedom in baseball.
The rigid rules in other sports rob
the game of freedom- there is a set of laws that cannot be evaded. In baseball, you can get lucky or
unlucky with a bad call. It is the
nature of the game. This aspect of
the game gives it life, after all, that is life. We all must deal with the chaotic power of luck and if we
all love baseball because of its relationship to our lives, then why would we
want to destroy that aspect? Even
if you disagree with this philosophy, you can still see how far instant replay
could go; maybe one day we can replay every single pitch of every at bat. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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ReplyDeleteAlright I totally see your point and I respect it, but let me lay down on the table a couple scenarios. What about Armando Galarraga's near perfect game and Jim Joyce not so perfect call? While that was an accident on the umpire, that's a HUGE accident to have occur. I have had some doubt over the past few years about the umpire's ability to call games and while I believe that it is tradition, if you think a line should be drawn against the IR where does the MLB draw the line on bad calls? I don't think there will be a perfect medium of umpire instinct coexisting perfectly with instant replay, but first of all what if that happened to you, as a player about to make history, or what if that was your team you root for and that same scenario happened? You would probably be pissed off knowing your guy threw a perfect game legitimately, but it isn't going into the books as a perfect game. According to MLB.com umpires (both the Minors and Majors) make on the low end $84K a year and all the way up to $300K a year depending upon the umpire's skill as well as experience. That is a lot of money for a yearly salary to be blowing calls that significant and while that is an extreme case what about the small cases that still decide games outcomes, games which decide the record for that season and that season ending successful or not? A few missed calls here and there isn't going to send people into a wild panic, but if fans are seeing umpires mess up that bad then maybe a lot of those fans will rule in favor of IR regardless if they feel that pastime tradition of baseball. Like I said I do understand your point, but I do think eventually there won't be as big of a need for umpires, unless they step up their game and stop blowing bad calls. Going off of how a business/employees operate in America, if you aren't doing your job to what your pay rate entails then you get canned whether it be by a new person or a company finds a machine to do it. Either way the game will go on and I believe it is up to the umpires to save their own tails or they will be replaced by IR in the long run.
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