Adrian Gonzalez, the first baseman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, came lumbering towards home plate in the second inning of the fourth game of the National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Dodgers. Never once considered fleet of foot during his 13-year career, Gonzalez was banking on the fact that the Cubs outfielder, Jason Heyward, wouldn’t consider Gonzalez a threat as he rounded third base, attempting to score the first run of the game.
The ball seemed to travel through water, as it sailed from right field towards home plate—Gonzalez, to be fair, appeared to be moving through molasses. Finally the ball arrived in the mitt of Cubs catcher Wilson Contreras at the exact moment Gonzalez ascended into his sloppy dive towards the plate. With his arm extended, the Dodger lunged at the plate while Contreras turned to his left to make the tag. Gonzalez’s hand slapped the bag as Contreras’ glove whacked Gonzalez on the nose. The umpire pumped his fist once with vigor—Gonzalez was out.
Three years ago, this emphatic fist pump from the umpire would be the end of the play—and in this situation, the end of the inning. But in the age of instant replay in baseball, this call at the plate, one that supposedly changed the fate of the Dodgers season for the worse, is one that could be called into question.
And indeed it was. The call was challenged and instant replay reared its ugly head into one of the most crucial games of the season for the two competing championship starved teams. In the time it took to review the play about 900 babies were born and not a single shred of new information was revealed.
Instant replay continues to destroy, with the unwieldy force of a wrecking ball, the pace of a sport many already consider too slow.
The appeal of baseball, for me and for many others, is the methodical pace of the game. Each pitch begins with a few seconds of stillness and reflection, an instance to align oneself with the moment. Then the burst—the ball zips out of the pitchers hand and travels nearly 100 miles per hour, faster than most of us have ever traveled by car. The batter swings, adding ten to twenty miles per hour to the ball. The fielders explode from their crouch and lunge towards the speeding ball of leather. The ball is thrown towards first base. Tenths of a second later, the batter slams his foot against the bag. He is out, the play is over, and now we breathe. Smell the grass and the fall air around you, brush off the dirt, and pull the strings tight on your glove. Prepare. Relax. Focus. Breathe. The pitcher begins his motion and here comes the—wait…the manager is calling for instant replay. The immortal pace, the pace adored by fathers and their sons, mothers and daughters, the pace romanticized by poets, idolatrized in the movies, the pace is dead. All it takes is one offbeat.
Instant replay became a part of baseball at the beginning of the 2014 season. According to the Major League Baseball rulebook, instant replay is “designed to provide timely review of certain disputed calls in all Championship Season, All-Star, and Post-Season games played in the 30 Major League ballparks.” During a game, each team’s manager has access to one “challenge” if the game occurs in the regular season and two if it occurs in the post-season playoffs. Only certain plays can be challenged—for instance, tags at home plate. Balls and strikes are off limits, despite the fact that most television broadcasts’ super-impose a strike zone graphic that shows it’s viewers just how accurate the umpire’s call really is—as though fans need another reason to yell at their televisions.
How is it that we, the fans, and they, the players, coaches, and baseball executives, trust the umpires to judge the accuracy of a ball zipping towards them at an average of 95 miles per hour, but don’t trust them to judge the bang-bang play of a player tagging a runner. Calling balls and strikes is far more difficult than calling outs at the bases, and still umpires make the “right” call, ball or strike, around 85 percent of the time. Without technology their accuracy has been on a steady increase since 2008, according to fivethrityeight.com.
Since 2014, instant replay has expanded and become more embedded in the strategies manager’s and players employ while playing the game. When Gonzalez popped up from his headfirst slide into home and saw the call, he immediately turned towards his coach and wagged his finger saying, “no, no, no.” His manager, Dave Roberts, agreed and called for the challenge. Three years ago, Gonzalez might have run up to the umpire and belched a few harsh words into the face of the official. The umpire would bark back, fans would cheer, and Roberts would rush out of the dugout to come to his player’s defense. This is how calls were disputed in, you know, the good ole’ days. But now, a player’s instinct is to demand that the umpires make a phone call and force everyone else stare at a screen for five minutes, hoping to see something new.
Once a manager decides to challenge a call, the game gets put on hold. Two of the four umpires working the game walk towards the home team’s dugout and get handed two sets of headphones. A mysterious commission, located inside of Major League Baseball headquarters in New York City, reviews the play from multiple angles and communicates back to the umpires what they see. The members of the commission are completely anonymous and for good reason—I know a few people that would most likely engage these replay watchers in violence if given the chance. A challenged call can be confirmed, reversed, or it can stand, meaning there wasn’t enough evidence to overturn or confirm it. Whatever the commission says, goes.
“Instant replay destroys the humanity of the game,” says Neil J. Sullivan, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College who has written extensively on baseball and it’s history in American society. “It replaces the natural with the chemical.”
Baseball used to have games within the game. Fans watching from the stands or on TV were completely unaware of the little games played between players and umpires. Expanding strike zones, calls made out of spite, or calls made as reparations for a bungled call from the previous inning. Baseball, historically, is a moral game, exemplified by these calls of judgment. But computers have no morals and, in some cases, they even corrupt our own.
Before instant replay and the jumbo-tron, fans would turn to each other between innings to discuss the big moments they just witnessed. Instant replay cheapens these conversations. While the umpires talk to New York, the fans, both at the stadium and at home, watch the replay over and over again from different angles, each one less conclusive than the one before it. On television broadcasts, a split screen is shown— one shows the replay and the other bounces from the player’s reaction and discussion, to the umpires staring idle at the ground while they receive instructions. The broadcasters weigh in on what they think. “Oh yeah, he’s out,” one may say. “Hey, look at that, from that angle he looks like he’s safe,” may say the other. “Good challenge,” says one. “Oh wait, bad challenge.” People at home have an almost identical conversation.
At the stadium, the crowd cheers for their home team. As the jumbo-tron shows the replay, fans cheer if the call made favors the home team and boo if it doesn’t. People see what they want to see, even when what they are seeing is a 200-foot tall baseball player falling towards home plate and clearly getting smacked in the face by a glove with a ball in it. “He’s safe!” they yell. “Please god, no, make it stop, please, oh god no,” I think aloud. The most damning fact about instant replay is that in the end, only half of the challenged calls are overturned, according to Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com.
Baseball has been the slowest sport to utilize technology and move into the 21st century. The National Football League experimented with instant replay in 1978 but didn’t implement it fully until 1985. Instant replay came to the National Basketball Association in 2002. But beyond instant replay, technology became an integral part of football and basketball with the installation of the jumbo-tron. Before the mammoth television commanded only basketball and football fans to clap or cheer, or, most importantly, buy, buy, buy. In 2015, after a jumbo-sized episode of public outcry, Wrigley Field, the home to the Chicago Cubs, and the last vestige of hold-outs, adapted the jumbo-tron. All 30 MLB stadiums now have them and each one of them exists for the sole purpose of selling and distracting.
The jumbo-tron, like instant replay, distorts the pace of the sport. Innings are broken up by pointless games like “kiss cams”, and mascot races. Commercials are shown between pitches. The tension on the field goes unnoticed to those with their eyes on the massive screen. This is one of the biggest tragedies of technology in baseball.
Baseball has been a fixture in the fabric of this country since before the Civil War. As the world has changed, the game has changed too, but these recent changes in a quickly changing world go too far and in the wrong direction. Sullivan explains that sports fans go through a cycle. When they are young, they like sports in general, baseball being one of them. As they enter their teenage years and fill up with angst and rage, they gravitate towards the quicker and more violent sports like football, basketball, and hockey. But as they grow into their late twenties and their bodies begin to slow for the first time, they soon rediscover the comfort of baseball. The violence and stress of the work day pushes them towards something that will help them relax and uncoil. Something like baseball. But this only works if the pace of the game is the same as it was when you were a child, or when your father was a child, or his father. Alas, instant replay and the jumbo-tron say foo to you and your father’s game too. Oh, the good ole’ days, if only we could rewind and replay you.
