It seems that I am slowly trying to change Major League Baseball into the NFL. Several weeks ago, I made the case that baseball should become the fourth and final major sport to adopt a salary cap and, this week, I'm suggesting that it needs to implement instant replay in order to regain some of the credibility that it has frittered away over the course of this year's playoffs.
We all know the scenarios by now. In the top of the 11th inning of Game 2 of the ALDS, the Minnesota Twins' Joe Mauer hit what most of the world clearly saw as a ground-rule double. The only problem was that Phil Cuzzi, the left-field umpire who was closer to the play than anyone else, inexplicably ruled it foul. The Twins lost the game, lost their spirit and lost the series to the New York Yankees.
In Game 4 of the ALCS, third-base umpire Tim McClelland watched a bizarre play unfold directly in front of him in which both the Yankees' Jorge Posada and Robinson Cano avoided third base like the plague while Angels catcher Mike Napoli tagged both of them out in quick succession. For reasons unbeknownst to everyone but himself, McClelland ruled Posada out but decided that Cano should have the base.
Of course, there were other calls that made even a neutral observer want to throw his shoe at the television. And the Yankees were not the sole beneficiary. The Angels themselves received some generous umpiring in the ALDS that raised the ire of the Red Sox bandwagon, and there were a number of head-scratchers in the NLDS between the Phillies and Rockies.
This, however, is not an aberration. Although the calls made by Cuzzi and McClelland were egregiously lousy, the MLB regular season is always littered with similar rulings that either go unexplained by the league's front office or are brushed away with the standard line, "It's part of the human element of the game."
In a rare departure from his otherwise fiercely stubborn approach to his job, Commissioner Bud Selig agreed last year to implement instant replay for disputed home run calls. As an Orioles fan, my first reaction was, "Twelve years too late, Bud;" but as a general baseball fan, I wondered why he singled out the resolution of those types of controversies as the most crucial to the outcome of the game. Over a year later, I'm still wondering the same thing.
Disputed plays on the base-paths strike me as far more common and far more important to get right, and there are a whole host of other things — like whether or not an outfielder trapped a ball or got his glove underneath it — that merit a second look.
The argument most often heard against instant replay for baseball, aside from the "human element" nonsense, is "it impedes the flow of the game." Now, I'm not sure about the rest of the world's baseball fans, but I would gladly exchange five minutes of my time for the knowledge that it was only my team's ineptitude, not anyone else's, that lost a game. If baseball really wanted to speed things up, it would extend the strike zone back to what it's supposed to be instead of insisting on the heart-shaped box that it's become.
No, the calls made by Cuzzi and McClelland did not singlehandedly lose the game for the Twins and Angels. But they could have, and that's what matters.
I'm not suggesting that everything be open to replay — balls and strikes, for example, should still be unreviewable — and I'm not suggesting that teams should be able to call for limitless reviews. A reasonable and fair replay system, like the one in the NFL, would go a long way toward ensuring that everyone goes home confident that skill and execution carried the day. In the end, isn't that what baseball's integrity is all about?
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Rory Parks is a senior majoring in international relations and Spanish. He can be reached at Rory.Parks@tufts.edu
