Joe Posnanski, the best sportswriter in the country, doesn’t like instant replay. See this recent column: http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/replay-lose-nuance-of-game/. He knows that people think he is crazy to have that opinion but he lays out his case with humor and aplomb. Joe doesn’t think we need to get every call right and I agree. His solution is one that I think is spot on, one that I’ve been telling my children about for years.
The two most fundamental problems with instant replay are the time expended and the creation of phantom errors. The phantom errors are those that, but for the excellence of technology, would not exist. A couple of simple examples are provided in Joe’s column. Whether a player loses contact with a base for a ten of a second or less should not be reversible. People do not regularly operate at that minute level of separation. Similarly in football, re-spotting a ball because a player’s knee came did or did not touch down for a micro-second is too minute a level of distinction to justify reversing the call of a seasoned sports official.
A simple change to the way the various leagues operate their replay protocol would solve both of these issues: wasting time and creating phantom errors. The simple change would be to have a replay official review the various angles available one time at real speed. That official should only be able to reverse the call if it was clearly wrong. There is no reason to stop a game for five minutes or more to allow officials to look at every segment of stop action that is available. There is also no need to scrutinize every call made by an official at the microscopic (whether in time or space) level.
Professional officials, whether baseball, football, or any other sport, generally do a fine job. Of course, some are better than others, just as players are. And of course, they make mistakes. But every single mistake should not be reversible or there will come a day, because of advances in technology, when every single play will be reviewed. Instead, we should ensure that the calls that are obviously wrong get reversed and learn to live with minor or barely discernible mistakes.