The Final Word on Instant Replay

Recently I wrote a lengthy article for an online magazine regarding the future of instant replay in baseball.  I have long been a proponent of replay, and I attempt to once and for all explain why it's an important and necessary part of baseball--although I am quite certain I did not succeed, as some people will never agree with that statement.

Here's one paragraph from my article:

Even more ridiculous is the notion that it is tradition for umpires to make incorrect calls, accidentally of course, and thus that they must be able to do so.  Do these people think that if, when baseball was first played in the mid-nineteenth century, players and coaches had had the option of using a replay system they would have balked at it?  As Vecsey points out, umpires in that era often asked passing spectators for help with calls.  At one point, that was tradition too, but baseball got rid of it because it correctly decided that it was not the best way to officiate games.  The only reason that, for 150 years, people have said you can’t remove the human element—again, the human element being equivalent to incorrect calls—from baseball is that for the first 140 years you couldn’t.  And we still can’t entirely eliminate it, but thanks to advanced video technology we can significantly limit its affect on the game.

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