Blown calls in postseason outline need for expanded use of replay

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Joe Mauer's sinking liner in Game 3 appeared to tick Melky Cabrera's glove before landing about a foot inside the line. It was ruled foul. AP

First off, I don't like replay in football. I don't like it because of the way it interrupts the flow and pace of the game. And, no, I'm not talking about the time it takes to make a call. I don't care about the time it takes. For me, the thing with replay around is that everything in football feels theoretical. A receiver for your team makes an impossible touchdown catch in the final seconds ... Do you cheer? Do you go crazy? Do you throw your popcorn and drop your beer and kiss the person next to you and go berserk?

No. You put your cheers into the waiting chamber. You wait for the referee to go behind the curtain -- like he's going to take a black-and-white photograph of Old Hoss Radbourn* -- and then you wait for him to run back out on the field, and you wait for him to turn on his microphone, and you listen carefully to his first few words to see if you can figure out what he's about to say. It's like going on a first date ... you study his body language, the tone of his voice -- will he overturn? Won't he overturn?

*If you are not, you should follow OldHossRadbourn on Twitter. Not sure how Old Hoss has Twitter access considering he died in 1897, but the reach of the Internet is astounding. A typical Tweet: "So T. Hunter flipped his bat. Do that to me and I wouldn't just bean you: I'd take the bat, kill you, and poison your pet cat."

And suddenly your moment -- the moment when the receiver caught the game-winning touchdown -- has turned into the end of an episode of Judge Judy. If he does overturn the touchdown, then the moment never happened, it was all a mirage. And if he says the ruling on the field stands, then suddenly you are not cheering the breath-taking moment but instead you are cheering a middle-aged man wearing black and white stripes and a wireless microphone.

Of course, that sounds preposterously fogeyish and anyway I'm not OPPOSED to football replay. I do want the calls to be right, and if replay is the price we pay then that is the price we play. I only begin here because I'm about to talk about the inevitability of replay in baseball, and it would be wrong to say I come from a pro-replay background. I see replay in football as necessary but tiresome. It has given us the right calls more often, which makes it worthwhile. But I do think there is a cost. I think it has taken some of the joy out of the game.

My feeling about umpiring in baseball is that it's a lot easier than being a football official. The rules of baseball are much more concrete -- a ball is fair or foul, safe or out, tagged or not tagged. Balls and strikes can be tricky, but the umpire is stationary and in the best position make the call. Plus the game moves at a slower pace. I'm not saying it's easy to be an umpire. But I think it's easier than being a football official. It's much more black-and-white.

And because of that, I never really thought much about baseball replay. Every so often, there's a passing thought. But before replay EVERY football game had three or four or five very questionable calls. Baseball isn't like that. Umpires miss calls, sure, but it never seemed like an epidemic to me. It always seemed like they would get the vast majority of them right. I'm estimating, of course, but I would bet that for every time I have seen umpire make a bad call, I have seen four or five really good calls, the kind of calls that make me think, "Wow, he got that right. That's really good."

So, replay ... maybe two or three times a year I would have a fleeting thought about whether replay belonged in baseball and I quickly then moved on to something else, like how many players since World War II have had 20 or more triples but fewer than 20 stolen bases*. I just never thought about it much.

*Three. Stan Musial in 1946 (20 triples, 7 SBs), Dale Mitchell in 1949 (23 triples, 10 stolen bases) and George Brett in 1979 (20 triples, 17 stolen bases).

But, of course, baseball replay is inescapable now because these playoffs have been an umpiring disaster. I don't know if it's a trend -- it probably isn't a trend. It's probably just a bad run of high-profile missed calls. But it has felt like an epidemic, and it was topped off by the almost-impossible-to-believe missed call on Joe Mauer's sure-double against the Yankees on Friday night -- that ball was fair by a foot. Trend or not, this is the sort of thing that gets people talking, and the talk now is replay.