Baseball’s Replay Redux

Baseball made a big splash yesterday, announcing that an expanded video replay system has been approved by major league baseball and will start immediately. They are trumpeting this achievement from the highest mountaintops as well, apparently convinced that they have now cured all that is wrong with their sport.

Once again, they don’t have a friggin CLUE!

Ironically lost in this incredible “triumph” to bring replay to the game on a much less limited basis, is that by doing so, it will most likely make baseball’s biggest problem even WORSE!

Everyone who watches the game of baseball nowadays knows exactly what that “real” problem is of course. It is simply the tiume it takes to play a regular nine inning game. The guys who run the sport don’t have one iota of of comprehension about this.

Back in the 1960’s and 70’s, when baseball was king, and nearly the perfect game, a regular nine inning game took just under two and a half hours to play. It was the perfect amount of time to pay your money to come and watch. If it was a quick game, you still felt you got your full, nine innings worth. If it went into extra innings, you felt you got some “bonus baseball” and still got back to your car around three hours or so after you went in. Currently, the average nine inning baseball game takes around three hours and 15 or 20 minutes to play, with extra inning games routinely coming in over four hours. In some Yankees-Red Sox games in fact, you can watch the season change over from spring to summer or summer to fall while it is being played.

Now each manager will get a replay “challenge each game. If they win that, they will get a 2nd. That makes for four replay challenges per game possibly, and that’s just from the managers. You know once this is tweaked, any umpire will be able to call for one whenever they want in an effort to “get the call right”.

Now don’t get me wrong–this is all good. baseball should want to get as many calls right as they can, so that the proper winner of the game can be determined without the umps involvement. When it comes to solving the game’s biggest problems though, it pales in comparison to the length of games on the priority list. In fact, with all these ecxtra challenges, it will make the problem far worse.

Lets say there are four replay challenges a game. Major league Baseball says its replay system will be able to get each call decided in under two minutes. So, let’s say two minutes for the sake of argument, because these things always take longer than anticipated. Just ask football. That means the average game will take EIGHT MINUTES LONGER THAN BEFORE!!! Now you are getting closer to three and a half hours for an average game!!!

It is getting ridiculous, and the guys who run the sport need to realize this, and not be so oblivious. If they don’t realize it soon and start doing something about it, the sport hay never have a chance of coming back to even a percentage of it’s former levels of populatrity.

Now of course, it’s time to shift gears and talk football! It’s NFL Chamionship Sunday in a couple of ays and many of you can’t wait. Neither can I.