Friday, August 16, 2013

Instant replay in baseball

This morning, it happened.

I nearly fell off the shitter when I read that the MLB is instituting instant replay starting in 2014. I was relieving myself of a night's worth of solids reading the news on my phone and I almost fell off. Swear to God.


I'm going to get a lot of crap for this but I'm going to say it: I hate football. I understand it's this grand game wherein one player is the main thrower, there's a kicker, and people score touchdowns and shit but do you know what happens for 90% of that game? No? I'll tell you what. Referees staring at goddamn instant replay screens trying to decide what the perfect call is.

Baseball is already a slow game. Why slow it down with getting every call just perfect?

If you're a sports fan you remember two types of moments in sports: the time your team won the big game and the time the big game was stolen from you. That's a beautiful thing. When a game comes down to one call, one out, one safe... you start to appreciate the human element to competitive sports.

Have we become so intolerant of mistakes that we must review every possible mistake to ensure the perfect game was called? Have we become so dependent on machines to interpret data that we can't trust our own fucking eyes? Sure, there'll be bad calls and there'll be good calls and there'll be calls that are so damn close that there's no way to truly know. That's the beauty of it. There's uncertainty. Let the umps call the games - they're an integral part of it. I'd rather have a human being make a bad call than an umpire staring at an endless video loop of a nano second of a disputed call to get it perfect.

Perfection is overrated.

I, for one, enjoy saying things like, "Is that umpire blind? What the Hell? Get your eyes checked, fatty!" when I'm watching a baseball game.