If baseball in America were to be described in two words, it would be "old school." Baseball doesn't have the glitz and glamour that football or basketball do. Players don't use smack talk to intimidate each other, nor do they have the colorful players that everyone likes to rave and talk about. No, in today's world of baseball, everything from the stadium to the players is old school. Some like the simplicity of the sport and its old school nature.
Unfortunately for baseball, though, being old school can have its setbacks that brings the sport down.
Last week, New York Mets first basemen Carlos Delgado smacked a fly ball to far left field against the New York Yankees. The ball hit the bottom black part of the yellow foul pole and the umpires initially ruled it fair for a home run. After a couple minutes of talking it over, however, the umpires changed the call to foul. This happened when a national audience watched the umpires make a blatant mistake by calling the first ruled home run a foul ball.
Later on in the week, it happened again as Yankees third basemen Alex Rodriguez hit a home run that barely cleared the wall. However, since the umpires saw the hit distance away, it looked like the ball bounced off the wall, so it was ruled a double.
This then started a frenzy of angry fans crying out for replay. On television and radio sets across the country, sports talk shows argued and discussed the need for replay in baseball. Many argue that baseball needs to install replay so that calls like home runs are correct. That is true and the main reason for replay is to get the calls correct so that a team doesn't get screwed over. However, another reason why baseball needs to install replay is to start to shy away from its old school image.
Replay is in almost every sport. It's used in football, basketball, and hockey, and even though all three sports do it differently, it's still efficient. In sports today, technology is being used to its fullest by the invention of replays. MLB needs to get their act together and enter the 21st century with the rest of the major sports. With the use of instant replay, no longer are the days where teams get slighted over a bad call.
However, teams sometimes do get slighted for wrong calls, which upsets the fans. Baseball has the technology to make the calls right and make the game fair. For easy-to-see home runs on television, it only takes 10 seconds to realize that it's either a home run or not. It's not rocket science in most cases. All it takes is one look and a decision is easily made.
The use of replay doesn't even slow the game down. In fact, it speeds it up. Instead of watching a manager spit at an umpire for two minutes, technology would make that two minutes into 20 seconds and then further continue the game, and any way to speed up the game would make fans more willing to watch it. The normal fan doesn't want to sit for four hours watching a game. Sure, the fan wants to watch a good amount of baseball to feed their appetite. But they don't want to sit there forever to watch the conclusion of the game. It's something that has turned off so many fans in the past. If MLB can speed the game, that can only been seen as a positive.
Reports are that MLB will experiment with the use of replay in spring training next year. There are also reports that the use of replay may not be implemented into baseball until 2010.
Why can't they install it now? Why can't they figure out a solution in the matter of days? Why do they have to wait for 2010 to put it in?
This is what is frustrating sports fans across the country. The lack of doing the most simplest tasks right now is driving fans away from baseball.
Here's a solution to the problem. Do what the NFL does and have one umpire as the replay official up in the booth. Any Joe Schmo could've come up with that. In fact, many analysts have come up with that idea as that has been the majority idea/plan by many baseball experts. It's these little snippets of decision making by the head officials in baseball that is making it more unpopular today.
I'm not saying that replay would fix all that is wrong with baseball. I'm also not saying that it won't erase the old school image in baseball. What I am saying is that if the MLB keeps ignoring this issue and doesn't address it appropriately, it will continue to re-enforce the idea that baseball is still behind other major sports.
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