Interesting read, reflecting much of what has been commented on here. I’d love to hear more about the “war-room” and the thinking behind it versus the video being available to the umpires involved.

I also think it’s interesting that we can tolerate the imperfections in our star players. Derek Jeter can bobble a ball. Albert Pujols might go 0-4 on a given night. Brandon Webb might walk 6 batters and lose the game. But we all just think, “Oh, it’s okay. Everyone has a rough night.” But we have a different standard for our umpires, who are just as human and just as likely to make a mistake.

So much of the joy of baseball is in the human element. First we have instant replay. What’s next? Are we going to install machines to take the home plate umpire’s job and call a consistent strike zone in all 162 games of the season. That would suck! I love it that every game, every umpire has a slightly different strike zone and that players have to adjust. And what would come after a robotic umpire? Robotic players? Is it perfection we want, or is it baseball? The two are quite different.

Unlike Dan, I love baseball. I think it is one of the truly greatest products of human creativity of all time. I think it is one of the most perfect sports because of its infallibility. Because of its human element. Because it is sometimes messy. I love that in baseball I’m almost always seeing things I’ve never seen before.

It’s also interesting that we’re discussing instant replay, which would slow games down, at the same time that Bud Selig is trying to enforce timing rules on players and umpires to make games shorter. Don’t get me started on that one.

I advocate using instant replay in playoffs and World Series games only. It’s a shame when games of that magnitude can be lost because of an extremely bad call by an umpire i.e. Don Denkinger in the 1987 World Series. I still have nightmares about that one.

I’m sure that over time someone will figure out an economical way to properly place cameras so that balls and strikes can be called consistently by a computer. But it seems to me that part of the game within the game, for pitchers and batters, is figuring out how a particular umpire is calling pitches. Those smart enough to figure it out the soonest during a game will have earned an advantage, as they should.

I don’t even really like baseball that much, and anything that slows play down further, such as replay, has to be a bad thing.