Baseball finally steps into the 1990s

So Major League Baseball has finally decided to allow instant replay to help decide home run and fair/foul calls. And I say, it's about time. I've covered a lot of this ground before, but to recap briefly, there's been a lot of talk about replay "removing the human element." That's absolute rubbish. I can accept the fact that players make mistakes; heck, that's an essential part of the game. But errors by the umpires can mean that a particular game wasn't decided by the players.

ESPN's Tim Kurkjian explains how replay will work, and colleague Rob Neyer put together a very interesting list of big games that might have gone differently had the umpires had access to replay. It includes Game 1 of the 1948 World Series, which our Indians lost 1-0 to the Braves. That one run was scored by Phil Masi off Bob Feller, after Feller may or may not have picked Masi off second base. The second-base umpire said Masi was safe, but Feller insists to this day he was out. That being 60 years ago, there's no replay that definitively solves the mystery one way or the other, so that call was made using all the tools available to the umpires at the time, which one has to accept. And anyway, the Indians would go on to win that World Series in six games, so all's well that ends well, though the great Bob Feller never did win a postseason game. It should be noted, obviously, that the newly implemented replay system would not have corrected that call, since it was not a home run or a fair/foul call, but just as replay has evolved in football, it will evolve in baseball.

John Kruk said a bunch of incredibly stupid things on the subject of replay last night on "Baseball Tonight." I like John Kruk; I find him entertaining, and he seems like a generally nice guy. But I also think he's kind of an idiot. He was railing about how it's wrong to put "a rule change" in place in the middle of the season, because it's not fair to teams who were affected by bad calls earlier in the year. The reasons why this argument is ridiculous are obvious to me, but I will put them forth nonetheless. First of all, there is no rule change here. It's simply giving the umpires a new tool to enforce the rules that are already in place. Second of all, teams that were hurt by bad calls earlier in the year will not be helped by bad calls later in the year, unless those calls should happen to go in their favor. But those teams are just as likely to be hurt again by bad calls, and I really don't see what good that would do.

As it is currently constituted, replay will not pop up very much. MLB has said it would have been used on about a dozen plays up to this point in the season, so that's about once every 10-12 days or so. I look forward to seeing the first bad call an instant replay turns into a good call.