Baseball: Re-play it again, Bud

Baseball: Re-play it again, Bud

MLB has announced major changes to instant replay and reviews for the coming season.

Best of all, they say there will be more replays shown on the video boards at the ballparks. That was one of my biggest knocks on Target Field, especially the first couple years. The routine pop-up would be shown again, but any play with even a hint of controversy was even’t acknowledged, videographically speaking.

For the most part, there aren’t that many plays in baseball that need to be reviewed. But because it is such a sequential game – every minor action changes the situation for the next play – it is important to get the calls correct so the game can proceed as it should.

The downside of replay is that it deflates the dramatic moment. In the NFL, if there’s a crucial play that’s close, it doesn’t pay to get excited about it, because you know it will be reviewed and you won’t know for three minutes yet if the result is what you want it to be.

Baseball will now have the same challenge. But baseball is already a slow enough pace that pausing to get a call correct might not be nearly as noticeable an interruption as in football.

We’ll see . . . and then we’ll see it again.