Baseball instant replay is good call

All this talk about bringing instant replay to baseball neglects one piece of, as the football techs like to say, indisputable visual evidence.

Baseball already uses instant replay.

When a plate umpire checks with a first base umpire on a check swing, isn’t that instant replay?

When a third base umpire gathers his crew to decide whether a ball that sailed over the fence was fair or foul, isn’t that instant replay?

Any time one umpire asks another for help -- and it happens every game -- those unimpeachable arbiters are admitting what the rest of us have long since known.

They can’t do it alone.

So when baseball’s general managers voted 25-5 on Tuesday to recommend the use of instant replay on disputed home run calls -- fair or foul, over the fence or not, fan interference -- I have but one question.

What is Bud Selig waiting for?

The backing of baseball’s brightest young minds should give Selig all the juice he needs to push the innovation past the owners and union, getting it on the field in time for testing this spring, setting it up for full use by 2009.

The umpires might not like it. The players might be wary of it.

But baseball’s sagging credibility demands it, and no less of an authority than Bruce Froemming endorses it.

“They might be on to something here,” said Froemming, a 37-year veteran who retired this season after umpiring 5,159 games. “The way the parks are built today, sometimes there are impossible home run calls. The fences are too big. Fans are too close. Why not bring in the TV camera for help?”

Froemming knows all about baseball’s human instant-replay process, because he used it during the American League division series.

In the first inning of the opener between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians, the Yankees’ Johnny Damon hit a ball down the right-field line and into the stands.

Jim Wolf, the right-field umpire, called it foul. Froemming, watching from the plate, overruled him and called it fair.

“Believe it or not, the closer you get to the fence, the harder it is to see the ball,” Froemming said in a telephone interview from his winter home in Florida. “The bottom line is, you have to get the play right.”

That’s what replay does for this country’s four other major sports.

Pro football, college football, pro basketball and college basketball all successfully use it in certain situations.

It rarely intrudes into the action. It doesn’t notably change the human element. And it’s always right.

“But it would slow down our games, and I’m against anything that would slow down our games,” said Doug Harvey, a 31-year major league umpire who retired in 1992.

Harvey’s opposition to replay echoes the view of many baseball officials, including Selig. This is the one argument that could kill the movement. This is also the lamest argument.

Baseball worried about delaying its games is like football worried about violence or basketball worried about showboating.

C’mon, Bud. Keep batters in the batter’s box. Keep managers off the field. Then worry about slowing down the game.

“I can’t imagine replay would slow down many games,” Froemming said. “How many disputed home runs occur during a game? Maybe one?”

Harvey, who is retired and living in central California, also worried that replay will take the game further from the fans.

“The thing about disputed calls is that everyone can have an opinion on them,” he said. “The next day, one guy says, ‘Great call’ and his buddy says, ‘Horrible call!’ and that becomes one of those great debates that makes our game so special.”

Fans in other sports have those same kinds of special arguments. Only, those arguments are about players and coaches, wins and losses, good and great.

Baseball is the only sport where fans argue about mistakes, and how sad is that?

There was much talk this fall about the missed calls in the National League wild-card playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and San Diego Padres. None of it felt special. All of it felt damaging.

No, replay could not have fixed the blown call at the plate to end the game, the Rockies’ Matt Holliday being ruled safe.

But replay could have made the play moot by earlier awarding the Rockies’ Garrett Atkins a home run on a ball that landed over the fence and bounced back onto the field.

Seemingly everyone watching the game knew it was a home run. Everyone except for the only six guys who needed to know. Atkins stopped at second base with a double, and the mistake nearly cost the Rockies their dream finish.

If replay had existed, an official in the press box would have noticed the blown call before the next pitch and notified plate umpire Tim McClelland, who would have checked a monitor and changed second base umpire Tim Tschida’s ruling.

It would have been just like what happened two days later, when Froemming changed Wolf’s call.

Only faster.

Baseball needs to quit kidding itself and realize that instant replay already exists in the world of outmanned umpires navigating obstacle-filled ballparks.

Why not just make it official?

--

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.