MLB looks to expand instant replay with challenges

As I scanned some headlines today, I saw the Major League Baseball plans to expand the instant replay feature in 2014.  It's an effort to help with the number of blown calls by umpires.

Baseball owners will vote on the move in November, needing 75 percent approval, and the players' association and umpires would also need to approve any changes. The replay expansion would give managers one challenge over the first six innings of play, and then two from the seventh inning through the remainder of the game.

If a manager sees a call he thinks is incorrect, he can challenge the call with the home plate umpire or crew chief. A MLB crew headquartered in New York will replay the challenge and have the final say. If a play is non-reviewable, and therefore can't be challenged, managers can still argue the call. So, if you like seeing Twins manager Ron Gardenhire get red in the face and throw his hat around, you might still be in luck.

Don't slow it down
A concern throughout baseball, for some, is the pace of the game and how much slower it's gotten over the years. Doing anything to slow down baseball games probably wouldn't be a good idea. But these new replay changes will reportedly have a ruling back within 1 minute and 15 seconds. Current replays for home runs (which will be grandfathered into the new rules) take a little more than three minutes.

So that makes it seem alright. However, managers who win a challenge get to keep it (or lose it if you lose the challenge or don't use it at all). That creates a potential to have multiple challenges per game if both managers use them and win one or two. Then again, there really shouldn't be the need for that many challenges because there shouldn't be that many bad calls during one game.

If you're keeping track, MLB is the last of the four major sports to use a video replay system. It started back in August 2008.

Let's give it a try
I'd welcome the new instant replay rules for baseball. While I don't want to see the games slowed down, to me it's more important to have correct calls than whether a game can get done in under three hours. Being a sport without a clock, baseball games have lots of variables where they can range from two hours to four hours. That's just the way it goes.

This actually made me think of a project in my journalism ethics class from nearly five years ago when we had to present an Ethics Issue of the Day. I, of course, chose something sports related: Instant replay. I still even had my notes on my computer, because I can be an electronic pack rat.

Ethics Issue of the Day
I talked about what sports have instant replay or challenges: The National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, MLB and United States Tennis Association, but mostly I focused on baseball.

Every sport is different, but I really like the replays in tennis, which started in 2006. All a player has to do is indicate if he or she wants to challenge the last call, and then there's an immediate graphic on the video board, displaying where the ball landed. Sometimes it's just a hair on the line, but it still counts as in. The replay takes just a few seconds and then play resumes.

I also went over the defensible and indefensible ethical issues with instant replay. Things like video replay not fitting with the "spirit" of the sport and even with video review there may not be enough evidence to reverse the call.

Video replay can be a slippery slope because you can always expand it. Then it becomes a question of, where do we stop? I think it's reasonable right now for baseball to try the challenge and review process to try and eliminate some of those bad calls out there.