As some of you may agree, we may wish that we misunderstood the news that we’ve been hearing. The news comes as a shock and a disappointment to me, and a lot of you out there may feel the same way I do; flabbergasted. What has me so confused and leaves me looking for an explanation? Well apparently, the MLB is definitely going to implement an instant replay rule to our National Past time. They say that they will begin using it by the middle of August, but the good news is it will be used on a limited basis to dispute home run calls.

At least that’s what the people in charge of the decision are calling the good news. I personally think that no matter how limited they make it, instant replay is bad news for baseball. As our National past time, baseball has been around for over 100 years. To explain the importance and impact of baseball on America i think that James Earl Jones character, Terrance Mann, summed it up the best to Kevin Costners character Ray Kinsella in the baseball classic “Field of Dreams” when he said, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.” What he says is true of baseball, because it has survived the years and remained relatively pure in at least some sense of the word. There has been little changes to the game, excluding of course, the AL DH and a few minor adjustments to the field sizes and a few of the rules. These are just minor changes, but they all have done the same thing, and that is bring more fans to the stands. That’s mainly the reason why a few of the rules and minor intricacies of the game have been changed, to try and sell out games at stadiums.

That’s fine, because that’s business, and no one goes into business to take a loss. Of course owners and the specific unions that have a say will change rules if they think that making the fields smaller for more home runs or adding the dh to AL teams for the same reason will put more fans in the seats at the stadiums and in the seats at home watching on t.v. They are trying to make money, so these past changes to the game seem logical to me.

However, this new change to the game does not make sense to me. I don’t see how this is going to make more fans come to games, or make more fans watch at home. I don’t see the economical justification in adding the replay to the game. I don’t see how it can be good for baseball, but i do see a ton of ways that it can be bad for baseball. The adding of instant replay to make judgment on home run calls, just seems to me to be the most obvious mistake this league could make. Most of us know that talks about getting serious with instant replay began when about 2 months ago 3 home run calls were blown within two days. Apparently Selig had a fit about it and got up in arms about not letting umpires mess up the calls like that. Well I’m just wondering why we can’t just let the umpires mess up like that, and why we need a machine to make everything in our lives right. I know that we all hate it when it happens to us and ump. blows the call for our team so we might wish we had a way to get the call right. Trust me, I know. I’m a Yankees fan, and two of those three calls that got Selig in fit were at Yankee Stadium. So I know what it’s like to be pissed at the umps for blowing the call. But that’s one of the reasons i love this game.

Isn’t it part of baseball for people to maybe not hate, but always have it out for the ump. Umpires blow calls, it’s in their job descriptions. To be fair, when they blow the call for our team, we hate it. When the blown call is in our favor, we love it. So why take away the chance for the ump to make a mistake when we’ve been letting them do it for over 100 years. Now, obviously I’m not saying that on an obvious blown home run call we should let the ump off. The chances of that happening are slim anyway because of how the 4 umps talk over the decision. So even if one ump is so lost in the clouds that he blows and obvious one, his crew buddies pick him up with the right call. But for the small mistakes they make, when it’s one foot fair or foul, or it hits the top of the yellow and not the front; for those mistakes i say leave them up to human judgment. We are all human and we all make mistakes. When we start to let a video tape, or a machine tell us what’s right and wrong, i think we lose a sense of purity to the game. I think that leaving the home run up to human capabilities is one part of the game that makes it exciting.

Other than taking some purity and excitement away from the game, the replays are now going to slow down the game. Obviously, there isn’t going to be a home run replay on every hit and every inning, but the few times it is going to get used, i guarantee everyone at the stadium and at home are going to be asking what the heck is going on here. We are so used to the old way that no one is going to be used to this new way. It will be like a timeout in the middle of the game, and that’s foreign to us baseball fans.

Imagine if Jeter’s home run against the Orioles was overturned because of the obvious fan interference. It’s crazy to think of what this is going to do. I’ll tell you one thing, one of these day’s probably in the playoffs this year, someone is going to reach over a fence or interfere with a home run ball in the bottom of the ninth in a game 7 somehow and we are going to have ourselves another Steve Bartman. Basically, i just know that someone this season is going to have beer thrown on them because of umps call that gets checked on replay. It’s going to happen.

Now some people may say that it’s no big deal, and that it’s just a small thing that’s not really common that they are replaying, so there’s no reason to care that much. However, the real reason i guess I’m angry about this and the reason that I have written everything I’ve written so far about this, is because I know that there is no way that this is the end. This is now just the doorway for more new things to come to baseball. After this replay system works out and is successful, they will start to use it on home plate safe and out calls because that’s crucial to the outcome of the games. Some may say that I’m being pessimistic and that the people in charge say that the home run calls is as far as replays will ever go, but i know better. I know how money and politics work, and I know that we will soon be having umps review safe and out calls on steals to second base. It’s a snowball effect and it’s going to change the face of baseball. The reason i guess that all this bothers me, is that i like the game just the way it is now. I don’t think that it needs any changing at all, but I’m just a fan, so I guess it only matters what the people in charge think. I’m not being a martyr, just a realist, and i just hate to see the game change in this way. I just hope that it doesn’t ruin what a lot of people in the country love and have become accustomed to in their lives.