Exactly Wrong

Major League Baseball has heard the noise emanating from all the commentators calling for instant replay. It will expand the use of instant replay in 2014, in an effort to "just get it right."

On the surface, this call to "just get it right" is unobjectionable. Generally speaking, umpires ought to call plays accurately. No intrinsic good comes from missed calls. Also, fields ought to be perfect, weather ought not interfere with play, and schedules ought to be absolutely balanced. These things don't happen, of course, and there is rarely any whining about how grossly unfair it all is. (I say "rarely" because I have heard complaints about all of these things before.) To say that missed calls are lamentable is too obvious.

It's the tone of the complaining I can't take, as if these things were intolerable injustices. Not only that, sometimes I see the same replays the booth guys see, and I can't understand what they are complaining about. Missed calls are not really unjust, most of the time. They are "could have gone either way" kind of deals, and everybody should move on.

But MLB got the fix wrong. By allowing managers to appeal calls, they encourage benches to be planning for umpires to make mistakes, and to schedule their complaints. That's not productive. First, giving everyone three appeals is ridiculous -- I have never seen a game in which there are three calls worthy of appeal. Second, the time wasted in these things will be silly, because the rule has a "use it or lose it" approach that means teams will complain just out of desire not to waste a resource. Third, the dugout is absolutely the worst place to judge just about any call, because you can't see jacksquat from there. Finally, the appeal has to be made to a person sitting in a booth in New York. Why?

What the league should do is hire a fifth ump to sit in the booth and decide when a call is egregious enough to overturn. He would have the experience to judge well, and could check all the ones that need checking without wasting time on silliness.