Thursday, Aug 28, 2008 is a day that will be remembered as the day that Major League Baseball initiated the instant replay feature for home run calls.

In my opinion, this has been a long time coming.  This season, especially, has seen the umpires get some crucial home run calls wrong.  Of course, it’s not their fault.  They’re only human,  and all humans make mistakes.

Although mistakes may not be the right word.  After all, up until yesterday, they had to rely on what they saw from the field position they happened to be in at the time.  And we all know that sometimes,  it’s just not possible to get a clear view.

There are a lot of baseball fans who don’t like the fact that baseball is using this modern technology.  They actually don’t like it because it removes the “human error” from the officiating.  HUH??  They are actually saying that they don’t mind players being robbed of home runs because the umpire made an “error”?  Yep.

I don’t really understand the complaints.  After all this is not even a rule change.  Essentially, what’s happening is that MLB is adding an additional umpire to the crew.  The fact that the umpire is not on the field really doesn’t matter.   It will make the game more fair, and reduce the likelihood that a bad call by an umpire will cause a team to lose a critical game.  It’s totally beyond me why some people see this as a bad thing.

Actually, I would go further to help the game become more fair.  It’s entirely possible and feasible that modern technology could be used to call balls and strikes.   In fact, MLB is already doing that, in a manner of speaking.

The Questec pitch monitoring system is installed in some Major League ballparks, and is used to grade umpires on the accuracy of their pitch calls.  And every baseball fan has seen ESPN’s “K-Zone”,  and similar systems used by other TV networks, that superimposes a rectangular box over the strike zone to make it easy to see the location of each pitch relative to the strike zone.

If MLB automated this portion of the game, it would eliminate the gigantic discrepancies in the strike zones as called by different major league umpires.  It would also stop umpires from making spite calls that are intended to stop players from “showing up” the umpire (in other words, showing displeasure when an umpire makes a questionable call about a pitch’s location.)

The rules of baseball are clear – the strike zone is clearly described, and there is no concession in the rules that says that umpires can use their own estimation of what the strike zone should be.  The rules call for pitches to be scored appropriately, not at the whim of some umpire that has a grudge against a particular batter or pitcher.

It would also reduce the obvious advantage that some pitchers have when an unpire has a “wide strike zone”.

The rules are already there.  All that needs to be done is to enforce them.

Tags: Balls And Strikes, Baseball Fan, Baseball Fans, Critical Game, Espn, Espn Zone, Field Position, Home Runs, Human Error, Instant Replay, K Zone, Major League Ballparks, Major League Baseball, Mlb, Modern Technology, Monitoring System, Similar Systems, Strike Zone, Tv Networks, Umpire, Umpires

This entry was posted by Nick Bulka on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 3:46 pm You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.