The Death of Baseball

First appeared on September 24th, 2008
in The Lebanon Reporter

History was made at Tropicana Field Friday night when instant replay was used to overturn an umpire’s call. Initially a ball hit by Ray’s first baseman Carlos Pena was ruled a ground rule double. Upon further review however it was decided the ball was actually a homerun. Though the play eventually proved meaningless to the outcome of the game, it did mark the first time technology was used to overrule an umpire.
What isn’t meaningless is the change commissioner Bud Selig is bringing to America’s favorite pastime. On August 28th the czar of baseball gave the go ahead for the use of instant replay on home run calls. Claiming the move was “in the sports best interest” Selig has unwittingly pulled the plug on a sport that had previously been recovering nicely from a steroid-era induced coma.
This is not the first time we have seen Selig in his laboratory tinkering away like a mad scientist. For trying to link the outcome of the Major League All Star game with the playoffs, none here will argue Selig’s epitaph should read “This Time it Counts” when his time comes. Allowing instant replay is just another in a long line of cackhanded Selig decisions and we are of the opinion that what is actually “in the sports best interest” is to let baseball be baseball.
For well over 100 years now baseball has been the one constant in American culture that has stood unchanged. As so many fashions and fads came and went there was baseball. As silent films gave way to those with sound and war flicks heeded to westerns, there was baseball. Through the ugliness of war, national tragedy and presidential scandal baseball has always marched on with its head held high.
Baseball was the last bastion of tradition in American culture. The game is still played today as it was a hundred years ago. It is a unique world where a Saturday spent in Wrigley in the 1940’s was absolutely no different than a Saturday spent there last weekend. Now all of that seems destined to change.
We contend human error is a critical aspect of sport. Be it player or umpire, one of the intriguing elements of any game is its unpredictability. Instant replay changes all of that. And yet perhaps instant replay is merely a microcosm of modern society, a symbol of the way the youth of America are taught to view life today. Don’t worry about getting things right the first time, we’ll give you another chance. Of course it goes without saying that pondering such concepts is FAR too deep for us.
More to the point, the umpire was always the guy you could curse when things didn’t go your way, a convenient excuse for a team that just wasn’t good enough. Now, between instant replay and ESPN’s K-Zone (a computer that accurately targets balls and strikes), why do we need these guys at all?
Perhaps baseball in 2080 will feature some faceless voice from the press box bellowing out every call as if the umpire were God himself (of course Cubs fans know if this were actually the case, we would never lose). The one sport that had weathered the temptation of fashionable rule changes has now unfortunately succumbed to the incessant pressures of the information age.
Umpires are a real part of the game. Someone needs to tell Bud Selig that there are things in life that were never meant to be changed, like the Twinkie or Michael Jackson’s nose. While the rule change is technically temporary, we are still of the belief that Selig is erasing the human element from the game and, in doing so, carelessly gashing the sport we love through the heart.