By Michael Moraitis--Featured Columnist (@Michael Moraitis)
In an effort to get more calls correct during any given Major League Baseball game, the league is set to expand its instant replay for the 2014 season, which is a huge mistake.
According to
Bob Nightengale of
USA Today Sports, MLB will hold a vote with the ownership of all 30 teams in November to finalize the proposal, but commissioner Bud Selig has already said the new version of instant replay has already been "widely accepted."
If passed, the managers of each team will be allowed three challenges per game, one of which will be allowed to be used in the first six innings, while the other two can be used in the seventh inning and beyond of the contest.
The only type of play that can't be looked at further will be balls and strikes. That will continue to be at the sole discretion of the umpires.
Should a manager successfully challenge a call on the field and win the review, he will not lose a challenge. If a manager uses all three of his challenges and there is a disputable call on the field, it will be up to the umpires to make the call whether to review or not, but that will only be allowed with home-run calls.
People with umpire experience will be making the final call on the manager-ordered reviews from the MLBAM offices in New York and not the crew chief.
It's nice to see MLB finally catching up with the times and going to expanded instant replay much like the other three major sports have, but MLB has a very specific problem that those other sports don't have: the games are nauseatingly long as it is.
Expanded instant replay will only serve to make these games longer and that has a fed-up baseball fan like myself expecting the worst to come out of this.
Granted, blown calls are a problem in the league and that does need to be changed, but the worst problem the league has is the length of its games. I would argue that a longer game would drive fans away faster than a blown call or two.
The league is essentially giving managers an unlimited amount of reviews per game. Think about it: if a manager successfully overturns a call on the field, he will be returned his challenge and therefore can use it again.
That means if the umpires are having a particularly bad night, managers can challenge plays to their heart's content as long as they keep winning until we all pass out from the exhaustion of watching a ridiculously long game.
Let's just say all six reviews are used in a game and each of those reviews take five minutes. That's another half hour tacked on to the length of the game and maybe more should multiple reviews be won. If it takes ten minutes for a play that's particularly tricky to review, the replay process could add an hour or more to the game.
The only hope MLB has in all this is that the replay process won't take that long and/or managers just won't use their challenges all that often.
Both of those scenarios are highly unlikely at best considering managers will always fight to get the calls right for their respective teams even if they aren't totally sure, and the people in charge of watching the actual replay footage will take their time in order to get the call right.
In those two cases, it's the human condition to behave in those manners and it's the human condition that got us to instant replay in the first place. Humans are prone to making mistakes or not doing things in the best way, so why are we to believe the expanded instant replay won't fall victim to the exact same thing?
At the very least, MLB could have given fewer reviews to each team per game or even allowed a one-and-done for each manager's review. Instead of replenishing after a successful review, the manager's challenge should still be taken away in order to avoid countless replays on countless bad calls.
I have always been a proponent of having an umpire or someone qualified as such to be watching the game from a booth in each stadium housing a game per day. That person could help correct bad calls umpires make on the fly instead of having to go through the formal challenge process as it is being set up now.
This would take far less time if these reviewers are paying attention to the game as their job entails and thus, the game won't be slowed down a lick or minimally at worst. In the event that the umpire upstairs catches a mistake, he should have direct communication with the crew chief on the field to quickly overturn the botched call.
Even though the process of calling balls and strikes is also a disaster in the sport, that can be left alone for now until the technology is there to have a computer call the balls and strikes based on the game's actual strike zone and not the opinion of the home plate ump.
There are several imperfections in baseball much like every other sport, but baseball's situation still stands as unique.
The sport may be cleaning up the mistakes its umpires make with expanded replay, but the cost of doing so may turn more fans away from the sport because we as fans don't have all day to watch games that may run four hours or more.
