Replay reviews is the worst thing to happen to sports in the past ten years. Fans of replay never tire of saying you have to get the call right. Never mind that it makes a slow-moving sport slower, the truth must win out! My response to that remains that the game is losing its soul. A shortstop makes an error and so does an ump. And you know what? The umps usually get it right. It’s not as if they’re on the take. As for the close plays…who cares?! That’s life.
In the 8th inning of the deciding NLDS game five between the Cubs and Nationals – a one run game – Nationals catcher Jose Lobaton was ruled safe on a close pick off play. Let’s go to the video tape! The review folks in the New York bunker proceeded to spend five minutes reviewing the play frame by frame, Zapruder-style, to discover that for 1/100 of a second Lobaton’s foot was off the bag. He was ruled out.
Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post wrote, ‘For 100 years, Lobaton would have been safe, the original and seemingly obvious call, and everybody would have moved on to the next pitch, unbothered and riveted to the eighth inning of a one-run game. As Thursday night became Friday morning, a ballpark engaged in near-forensic video study, squinting to see if Lobaton’s leg had come off the base at a moment when Rizzo’s glove touched him.’
I’ve thought all along that replay is ruining sports and nothing has come along to change my opinion. Between replay reviews, innumerable trips to the mound, and double digit pitching changes leading to five hour (9 inning) post season games, we’re stuck with a sport that is fast becoming unwatchable.
Say what you want about the other three major sports, they aren’t interminable to watch. What’s the difference between a bunch of technocrats painstakingly making a call – that is still debatable – and an ump making a bang bang call in the moment? The difference is that one is anti-climatic (and still sometimes wrong) and the other is exciting.
The World According to Keitho 