Hey Hey, Let’s (re)Play, Too

Watching the White Sox dismantling of the Angels was not only the best experience of my life as a baseball fan to this point, it also taught me several things:

1) The White Sox starting rotation isn’t good. Even calling it great doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s better than I thought it would be during my most optimistic moments before the season, or even after that rotation had proven critical in building a 15 game lead in the AL Central. If they do anything remotely similar to this in the World Series, there’s going to be a debate as to where they fit among the all-time great pitching staffs. Consider:

- 4 complete games in a row. In the playoffs, against a good offensive team. They had 9 complete games all year, and that’s a high number for a major league pitching staff. Well, now they have 13. In those four games they allowed 4 walks, 20 hits, and 8 runs. Also, in the game before that, their lone loss in the series, Contreras went 8 1/3 and gave of three runs – hardly a poor effort, unless compared to the four games that followed.

- That was actually my only point, but it was significant enough that it warranted switching to bullet points. Sorry if I confused anyone.

2) Vladimir Guerrero is just about ready to take his place alongside A-Rod and Gary Sheffield in the “great regular season hitters who can’t hit good pitching and thus aren’t really scary in the playoffs” hall of fame. Interesting to note that the Yankees, who were bounced in the first round, have two of these guys, while Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Jorge Contreras, and Orlando Hernandez were all on LCS rosters. Hmm….there's definitely a lesson here, I just can’t quite put my finger on it…

3) AJ Pierzynski in Anaheim (NOT Los Angeles) has now secured his place among the top five Current Athletes Who are Hated by Everyone in a Particular City, along with Roger Clemens in Boston (who just beats out Roger Clemens in Toronto and Roger Clemens in New York), Joey Harrington and Ron Artest in Detroit, Terrell Owens in Dallas, and (somewhat inexplicably) Antonio Davis in Indiana.

4) Which brings me to the last point – baseball needs instant replay. What convinced me was not all of the calls that went against the Angels. For the record, the game two ‘trapped ball’ call would have had about a 15% chance of being overturned using the NFL’s “indisputable visual evidence” standards for replay. I’m sorry, but it’s true. The Angels did get hosed on multiple calls in game 3, but since it was a 6 run game it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. To their credit, the umpires did overturn two calls in game 5 which could have easily been screwed up (the Escobar missed tag and the fan interference ground rule double, although I’m personally of the opinion that if a fan messes up a play for the home team, that’s the breaks – especially after it was called that way against the Cubs). I don’t think any realistic case can be made that those calls determined the outcome of the series. However, what has convinced me that instant replay needs to be added next year was all the whining about the calls that went against the Angels (although it was mostly coming from announcers and analysts who were still stewing over the Sox making it that far; the Angels were impressively classy throughout the whole series).

Think about it. There are bad calls in the NFL all of the time. How often do you see the sports media supporting/encouraging fans to complain about them or blame their team’s failures on the officials? Almost never. Just in the last couple of years, the Seahawks (against the Cowboys), Bears (against the Lions), Lions (a couple of weeks ago on the Marcus Pollard slide), and the Saints (just last week) have lost games or had ties broken against them (which is all that happened to the Angels) due to debatable or blatantly erroneous calls, and other than the fans of those teams, pretty much nobody remembers. This is because having a replay process creates legitimacy. Even when bad calls are not corrected, the capacity to second-guess them is limited, because the play either could have been or was reviewed.

One of the arguments I hear frequently against replay is that it slows down the game. Before you accept this, consider what happens whenever there is a questionable call in an important baseball game. First, the manager of the team who the call went against runs out and argues with the umpire for two or three minutes. Then all of the umpires huddle together for another two or three minutes. Depending on what the other umps saw, sometimes the play is overturned, then the other manager runs out and argues for another two or three minutes. There’s no way that a couple of replays per game would slow down the game more than this. Here’s what I’d suggest for baseball – copy the NFL. Two challenges per team, per game, calls only overturned with indisputable visual evidence. Heck, provided that there’s a limited number of challenges, I wouldn’t even mind allowing them for balls and strikes, although I don’t love the idea. I don’t know if it’s going to happen soon, even after all the harping on the umps this post-season, but it will happen eventually, and when it does, it will be a good thing.