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Aug 26, 2008 9:45 pm US/Eastern
Baseball To Start Instant Replay Thursday
NEW YORK (WBZ) ―
Major League Baseball reversed its long-standing opposition to instant replay and will allow umpires to check video on home run calls in series that start Thursday.
The rule will also apply to determining whether a ball was fair or foul.
Three series are scheduled to start Thursday, with Philadelphia at the Chicago Cubs, Minnesota at Oakland and Texas at the Los Angeles Angels. For other games, replays will be available to umpires starting Friday.
The start date comes nearly 10 months after general managers voted 25-5 to use the technology, and following MLB agreements with the unions for umpires and for players.
Video will be collected at the office of Major League Baseball Advanced Media in New York. If the crew chief at a game decides replay needs to be checked, umpires will leave the field, technicians at MLBAM will show umpires the video and the crew chief will make the call.
For now, video will be used only on so-called "boundary calls," such as determining whether fly balls went over the fence or whether potential home runs were fair or foul.
Baseball had been the last holdout among the major professional sports in the United States. Replays were first used in the NFL in 1986.
Some Boston fans had mixed feelings about the new rule.
"(They) should keep it the way it is now," said Donald Torrey of Manchester.
His friend, Bob Dion, wondered, "We start bringing it in for this, what happens next? Ball and strikes? No, I don't like that."
Fisher Cats manager, Gary Cathcart, worries about that too. "There's just something about the human part of baseball that's always been intriguing to me, and that's how the game always was, and I hope it always stays that way."
But some fans, like Jolene Vips, feel it's time to let technology take out the possibility of human error.
"The game could be so close that someone could lose that shouldn't lose and someone could win that shouldn't win, so I agree with that," she said.
Former Red Sox player Lou Merloni once had a home run ruled a double, so he wouldn't mind seeing the instant replay, just not in the middle of a season.
"It's almost like playing under different rules a little bit and I just feel theres a lot of things that have to be ironed out," he said.
In the NHL, video review has been in place since the 1991-92 season to check whether the puck crossed the goal line completely, went in before time expired or the net was dislodged, and wasn't kicked or batted in intentionally.
In the NBA, replays have been viewed since the 2002-3 season to decide whether players got off shots before time expired and since last season to aid decisions following altercations and flagrant fouls. In grand slam tennis tournaments, a Hawk-Eye system has been used to decide close line calls since the 2006 U.S. Open.
International soccer has refused to embrace aiding referees, with FIFA's International Board voting last March to stop all experiments with technology that could determine whether balls cross goal lines.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
