Published on October 24, 2011 at CSNBayArea.com

Baseball’s refusal to take instant replay seriously has evolved from a minor nuisance to a full-blown disaster over the past several years, and it reared its ugly head again in Game 3 of the World Series. Well, actually, it sent a little warning shot in Game 2, as well.

The Game 2 play I’m referring to was the ball hit by Adrian Beltre in the ninth inning that looked from every replay angle like it changed direction after hitting his foot, before caroming out to shortstop. The ball was ruled a fair ball, and Beltre was an easy out at first base. Fox’s new  “TSA Scan-Cam,” as I like to call it, showed a small white dot on Beltre’s toe, in case the physical reality of a ball hit down and to the left that suddenly went to the shortstop wasn’t enough evidence of the ball’s foul-ness. Readers of a certain age will recall the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination as using similar logic to that of the umpires on Thursday night.

That play was fairly quickly forgotten, because, after all, the best Beltre could have gotten out of the situation was another pitch to hit from the Cardinals’ flame-throwing closer, so you can’t make a concrete case that the call changed the outcome of the game.
Besides, on Saturday night the umpiring crew, allegedly selected on merit these days, presented proponents of instant replay with some real honest-to-goodness ammunition. They blew a call that prolonged an inning that produced four St. Louis runs, an excellent head start in a game the Cards wound up winning 16-7.  Many baseball experts have attempted to make the point that the call didn’t cost the Rangers the game, but I don’t see how you can definitively say that. Get that call right, and there are two outs with nobody on, which the percentages tell you is a big difference from one on, one out.

Rangers pitcher Matt Harrison, who had been pretty effective so far, got the next batter to top a ball toward first. With two out, that’s an easy play to second or first, but Mike Napoli tried to get the runner at home and threw it away, allowing two runs to score. Harrison, who should have been on the bench watching his team hit, then allowed a single and a ground-ball out (the fourth out of the inning, by my count, but only the second official one), and was removed by Ron Washington.

So not only did the Cardinals get four gift runs from the blown call, but they got the Rangers’ starter out of the game, and there’s no way to know how that impacted the outcome. This was not just any game, it was Texas’ first home game, and the game after the Rangers had wrestled home-field advantage away from St. Louis. They had it, if not taken away from them, made a much more difficult task than it would have been had MLB had any kind of decent instant replay system.

We know these things have happened in baseball for years, and one of the most ironic things about Game 3 was that the beneficiary was the St. Louis Cardinals, the team that got the worst hose job of all time in 1985. They were in the process of putting away the Kansas City Royals in Game 6 when Don Denkinger went to sleep on a play at first base, opening the door for a Royals rally that not only won that game but carried right through Game 7.

Back in 1985, however, instant replay was still considered a technological marvel, and we all had kind of a Star Trek “don’t change the course of history” attitude toward it. There was the “human error has always been part of the game” argument, which is one of the dumbest things anyone has ever said. The NFL was still years away from getting its act together, and I don’t remember anyone suggesting that baseball should start using replays to get calls right.

But time marches on, and the NFL, college football, the NHL and the NBA have incorporated some form of instant replay. The best MLB has been able to do is to look at replays to determine whether home runs were actually home runs, which comes into play a handful of times per year. Other fair/foul calls and outs on the bases have been distinctly excluded from review, leaving the umpires to just “do their best,” which has never really been good enough.

The folly that is MLB’s stance on replay was made clear just about two hours after the blown World Series call. Wisconsin and Michigan State had played 59 minutes and 56 seconds of inspired football with tons at stake for both schools. Wisconsin was playing to remain undefeated and a candidate for a BCS championship game berth, and Michigan State was playing to stay in the hunt for the Big 10 Championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl.

With :04 on the clock and the score tied, Michigan State launched a Hail Mary pass that wound up in the hands of one of their receivers on the 2 yard line. He immediately put his head down and tried to get in the end zone, but was thrown back by two defenders. The referees called him down on the 1, and the game was going to overtime. Except that every play in every college game is reviewed by a replay official, and after a very short period of time the announcement came that the call had been overturned and it was indeed a touchdown.

In real time, it looked like the refs had gotten it right, but the first look at a goal-line replay showed that the ball had broken the plane of the goal line ever so briefly. If the Badgers had gone on to win in OT it would have been a faulty verdict, and should they have played for the BCS championship the whole season would have been a sham. Because of instant replay, that won’t happen.

There’s no way that college football can do this and Major League Baseball can’t. I could go on and on about the reasons they’ve given in the past, but the debate is over.  Human error on the part of the players we can’t fix, but we can help those human umpires, and we need to.