Headline: Instant Replay in Baseball

I only have a couple of comments to add to the raging debut, but I nevertheless want to provide an announcement that instant replay officially comes to baseball starting tomorrow. (There's supposedly some sort of test drive in today's Pirates-Cubs game, but I don't know what that actually means.) I believe that it will be limited to fair versus foul calls on homeruns at first, but we can obviously (despite what official baseball people state) expect its use to be expanded in the upcoming years. I think only a few of this weekend's series will include it. Whether or not baseball should have instant replay has been debated on-and-off over the years, but discussions really heated up this year and now it's reality.

My main hope, by the way, is that this doesn't reduce the fantastically amusing arguments between managers and umpires. The people against instant replay often talk about "the human element" of the game (which is a euphemism for making more mistakes), but the thing I would actually miss the most are things like Lloyd McClendon stealing first base. For what it's worth, the argument against instant replay that I do buy is the concern over game length if it's used too often. I think umpires and managers will still go jaw-to-jaw quite a bit even when instant replay is fully established, but I'm just saying that that's what I'd miss if it went away.