It’s about damn time baseball got with the program.

And I HOPE it’s a slippery slope. I hope it gets broadened to plays at the plate and trap plays in the outfield. Both are often calls where the ump has a bad angle.

It’s called technology and progress. Use it. Or go back to the cave.

I prolly woulda rather just thrown an additional two umpires in the outfield, but this was probably inevitable.

This is my first post here at BCB. I thought there were some good points raised thus far, so of course, I just had to add my two cents.

I forget who exactly it was now, but someone on one of Bob Costas’ more recent round table shows was able to sum up my feelings on replay fairly well. Baseball is not like other sports. Quit trying to make that so, and allow it it’s quirks.

I’m not going to argue that a game should not change, but I do feel it should be a more organic change, a slow evolution, if you will. Perhaps I am biased with the myriad changes in the Selig era (DH, interleague, “This time an exhibition game counts!”), but this just seems like yet another knee jerk reaction by MLB, implemented by a man who seems to have a flair for reducing this game to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Why should Bud risk pissing off the ump’s union by suggesting they be more accountable, when he can just introduce a more tech friendly, marketable tool that can homogenize the sport further, yet having the very real possibility of not being much more accurate that the system before it? As has been mentioned previously, replay is hardly infallible in other sports.

I guess, at the end of the day, I’ll learn to deal with it, but I do dearly hope that this does not turn into yet another tool that broadcasters try to use to distract me from the game itself. Get ready for the Fujifilm MLB Instant Replay, brought to you by Budweiser!

Ooops, see, I dislike Selig so much, I even attribute the DH to him.

I guess I did get off on a bit of a Selig rant there, but my basic point is that there have been a lot of changes in baseball over the past couple of decades, and a lot of them seem to have been made not with the best interests of the game in mind, but rather, the best interests of the business. Maybe, because of that, I’m a little jaded. I’m sure that they could find a replay system that was expedient, accurate, and that didn’t distract from the game (by the way, anyone who does not believe that replay could be a distraction, really pay attention the next time you watch a ballgame on Fox), but does anyone have any confidence that they will?

Or, to rephrase, what was the last fundamental change in the game that you truly enjoyed, with which you had no problems, either conceptually or in the way that it was implemented?