If you own a Sharp Aquos television, listen up.
That’s the brand of HD monitor exclusively used by major league umpires to review disputed home-run calls, and a fine brand it is. This week, however, the Sharp company may not be so quick to advertise the connection since everything to do with the game’s limited instant-replay system is under suspicion.
Could there, for instance, have been a problem with the vertical hold Wednesday night when the boys in blue failed to see what everybody else easily saw on replay, which was a ball hit by Oakland’s Adam Rosales clanging off a metal railing beyond the outfield wall and bouncing back onto the field?
Or was it a matter of the cable being out in the umpire’s video cave and crew chief Angel Hernandez of Loxahatchee getting so tired of being on hold with customer service that he just stomped back out onto the field and stayed with his original and incorrect call of ground-rule double?
Failing some sort of technical explanation along these lines, we are left to conclude that no form of instant replay is capable of ensuring correct calls 100 percent of the time as the human element is involved.
This is trouble for all who insist that baseball would be greatly improved by making “Replay ball!” as common as “Play ball!”
Last season I stood transfixed in the visitor’s clubhouse at Marlins Park as Bobby Valentine, then the manager of the Red Sox, went on a 10-minute rant charging that balls and strikes should be identified and called automatically by one of those FoxTrax graphics boxes that pop up on the screen during broadcasts.
“In the 21st century there ought to be some way to get this done,” Bobby said, going on to suggest that Little League pitchers and batters should enjoy the same computerized courtesy lest young players become soured on the basic injustices of the game and turn to another sport.
Let’s set aside, for the moment, the fact that this argument comes from a man who has spent a lifetime hating and baiting umpires. If baseball turns more and more of its debatable calls over to TV review, there still must be a human authority to make the final judgment, and that’s always going to be a fatal flaw in the system.
You can either leave it with the umpires, which is asking a strong-willed authority figure to overrule himself, or hand the task to an independent party up in the booth, as if NFL replay officials don’t occasionally confound us with a different conclusion on the video evidence than the rest of America gets.
It remains a judgment call, one that baseball thus far has limited to home runs (fair or foul, fan interference or not, over the wall or not). Take it further, extending replay reviews to close plays at first base and the like, and you get multiple interruptions in a game that already moves at snail’s pace most nights.
Give me a good old-fashioned rhubarb any time, with the manager chin-to-chin with an umpire that everybody knows isn’t going to change his decision. Right or wrong, baseball needs all the human fireworks and spontaneity it can get, and less waiting around for something important to happen.
Football officials could throw a holding flag on every play but they don’t. It would ruin the flow of the game.
Basketball officials could blow the whistle for travelling on dozens of plays but they don’t. It would cut down on scoring and on spectacular moves, both of which are vital to maintaining the interest of fans.
Besides, every sport wrestles with which plays are reviewable and which are not. Even in tennis, where a kooky instant cartoon image takes the place of actual video replays, players are limited to the number of challenges they can make. The result is that a certain number of potential human mistakes remain an acceptable part of the system.
Which is it? Get everything right or get as much as possible right? The second of those is the only certain goal and major league umpires have been doing the best they can to hit it for more than a century.
Admittedly, your friendly neighborhood columnist can be a pigheaded purist when it comes to such things. After 40 years I’m still worked up over having the DH in one league but not the other.
I’ll be sticking with my old TV, too, and not the amazing Aquos. Mine may not be HD, but it works just fine.
