Sporting News

Forget one ump's miss; MLB's slow play on replay is the blown call

Joe Girardi didn’t exactly say it, but baseball needs a Martian. That revelation hit him Sunday after an umpire blew a call against his Yankees.

Time to apply the Martian Test. It reveals that when people get so conditioned to something preposterous they don’t realize how preposterous it is.

A Martian isn’t blinded by inexplicable earthly traditions. It would never text while driving or watch one of those “Real Housewives” shows. And if one landed Sunday at Yankee Stadium, it would have left scratching its antennae.

Not over New York paying Alex Rodriguez, Curtis Granderson and Robinson Cano $53 million to get one hit a week. The little red man would be flummoxed by the call in the eighth inning of Game 2 of the AL Championship Series.

Cano tagged out Tigers baserunner Omar Infante, who was trying to scramble back to second base. Everybody in the televised world saw Cano’s glove hit Infante’s chest about five minutes before Infante’s hand hit the bag.

Why not correct something that’s so correctable?

Photo gallery: Famous blown calls in postseason history

Umpire Jeff Nelson admitted he was wrong when he saw the replay—after the game. You could see how it happened. Nelson was in good position, but he couldn’t see underneath Infante’s body.

A variety of TV cameras did. How hard would it have been to call time out, check with a replay official in a booth and get it right?

Not hard at all, but that doesn’t matter. If the Martian had been sitting next to a baseball “traditionalist,” it would have been explained why. By now, we’re all familiar with the reasons.

Replays would break the rhythm and slow the game. It would place baseball on a slippery slope toward total automation. Abner Doubleday didn’t have cable.

Basically, replays would endanger the sport and threaten civilization as we know it.

“It’s frustrating,” Girardi said.

He got tossed for arguing the call. He should have taken an iPad out to second base, dialed up TBS and thrust it in Nelson’s face. Then he could have lifted it toward the Commissioner’s box, stretched his arms and yelled, “Why?”

The first baseball game was played in 1846. It took only 162 years for the sport to acknowledge the benefit of instant replay. But only to help get home run calls right.

Next year it will start allowing umpires to use replay to determine if line drives are caught or trapped, whether balls land fair or foul and if fans interfere with a fielder’s chance of making a play.

“People in our sport don’t want any more,” Bud Selig said when the replay expansion was announced. “Given our attendance and everything we’re doing, we’re in the right place with instant replay.”

Yeah, so was Nelson, and a lot of good that did. Baseball needs to wake up and smell the technology.

GPS can track a tree frog in the Amazon. Radar imaging has eliminated controversial line calls in tennis. Baseball could easily do the same with foul or fair balls.

It could put sensors in bags and gloves to see if runners are safe at first base. Graphics already show if a pitch is a ball or a strike. The sport could go completely geek, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about controversial baserunning plays. They wouldn’t take 10 minutes to review, but what if they did? Wouldn’t that be time well spent, especially when the call could decide a playoff game?

If pace of play were really such a worry, baseball could stop allowing batters to turn games into exhibitions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

They step in and step out, unstrap and restrap the Velcro on their batting gloves, take three practice swings, kick dirt on the chalk lines.

ALCS 2012

Derek Jeter may need surgery

Yankees glad to be leaving New York

Joe Girardi attends father's funeral

Complete TV schedule

The Jets go three-and-out in less time than it takes A-Rod to strike out. If Peyton Manning took as long to throw as Josh Beckett does, he’d be living in a wheelchair.

Commissioner Selig says attendance is great, but how many of those fans are asleep? The worry that replay will disrupt the game’s flow is as silly as the defense that blown calls are part of baseball’s magic.

That’s essentially saying that incompetence and injustice are all right because they’ve always been part of the game.

So were spitballs, day games only and train rides. Nobody is proposing umpires being replaced by drones. Nobody is saying replay would be a cure-all to every bad call.

But what’s so bad about a cure, something that would help avoid embarrassments like the one Sunday?

If you know the answer, please forward it to Mars. There are some very perplexed creatures there right now.

Around the Web