Seeing as the subject of instant replay in baseball just won't go away, I figured why not throw my 2 cents out there. But first there is one thing you must know about me and my baseball addiction.
I'm a baseball purist. I hate pitch counts, ties in the All-Star Game, and interleague play. There isn't much about the game that I would change. I think it's pretty much perfect the way it is.
That being said, it's time for baseball to introduce expanded instant replay. I don't want the game taken over by robots, I just want calls to be made correctly. I realize that human error is a part of the game, that's fine. I don't want to see balls and strikes be a part of instant replay. But safe/out and fair/foul are both easily reviewable and potentially game changing.
Don't give me any garbage about how instant replay would make the games even longer. How hard would it be to add one more umpire to each crew, and his job was to sit in the press box or some other dedicated area and have the game on TV? For that matter, he doesn't even have to be in the stadium. With the amount of cameras trained on each game, there could be a crew of 6-10 guys in a room somewhere and their sole job was to wait for a page to come in and then look at the replay. Actually, this could probably be accomplished with 2 or 3 trained umpires. As for the time it would take, I sure would be willing to sacrifice 3-5 minutes (and it wouldn't take that long in probably 99% of the cases) in order to get the call correct. In most cases, it would take maybe 1-2 minutes.
As for how it would be decided when instant replay would be used, I suggest giving each manager 3 "challenges" to an umpire's call. Not only would this apply instant replay, but it would also significantly cut down on long drawn out, and utterly pointless arguments and in turn ejections. So the manager comes out, he tells the umpire he wants to challenge the ruling on the field, the crew chief radios the replay umpire, he reviews the call, radios back his decision, and the game resumes. I know it's much easier said than done, but I just don't see how a system like this would be difficult to implement.
Here is my biggest gripe when it comes to umpires. They aren't required to acknowledge their mistakes. Most, if not all umpires review the game after it has been played. Very few umpires who have blatantly blown calls have ever addressed it. That's what made Jim Joyce's apology when he totally tanked what would've been the final out of Armando Galarraga's perfect game that wasn't, such a big deal. He owned it. This is such a rarity in baseball, and it's embarrassing. We all make mistakes, it happens. But for these umpires to never have to answer or address anything that happens during the game is just ridiculous.
Some people think instituting replay for safe/out and fair/foul calls will just make umpires lazy. While this is an understandable notion, I don't agree. Would you call any of the NFL or NHL refs lazy? I sure wouldn't. Those guys have a reputation to uphold, and if their job is to get every call correct, wouldn't they want to prove themselves right? Now I'm sure umpires are also hesitant to back instant replay because they don't want to eventually be replaced by technology. That's a perfectly logical thought, I just don't see that ever happening.
If we learned anything from last season from watching the Braves and the Red Sox, we learned that every game truly matters. If either of those teams had won just one more game, they would've made the playoffs. For the Sox, who knows what that could've meant. For the Braves, it would have kept the Cardinals out of the playoffs and therefore out of the World Series. So when one blown call leads to a run in a game that ends up being a one-run ballgame, it's a pretty big deal. It's time for baseball to step into modern times and adopt an expanded instant replay system.
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