Yesterday at the Mets game the home plate umpire ruled a pitch by Pelfrey to have been a caught foul tip and an out. Scott Rolen argued that it hit him (even if he didn’t know where), and Dusty Baker, the Reds Manager, came out an argued as well. The umpires then conferred and subsequently overruled the call.
Is this really any different than an NFL coach throwing a challenge flag? It does have a lot of similiarities, butthe game last night lacked one big part of what the NFL does: They didn’t go look at video replays. Some of the very valid arguments against instant replay, and ones I agree with, are with delay of game issues and freezing action on the game to correct the call. There are a lot of things that would need to be worked out to get any sort of instant replay to be effective and accepted.
All of those problems were still evident last night, but without the benefit of technology to verify that the call was correct. We got all of the drawbacks without any of the benefit. Umpires either need to stand by the calls as they are made, with the possible exception of a different umpire being 100% certain that the call was wrong because the original umpire that made the call was blocked or didn’t see it, or use instant replay to get it correct. Standing around and discussing it and guessing at what happened is not benefiting anyone.
