Kids today seem to have less interest in baseball. In addition, viewership for the World Series has been down in recent years. In order to address these disturbing trends I have decided to schedule a World Series game on October 31. I'm sure everybody, especially those kiddos, will be sitting at home watching the game because there is nothing else going on that night.

The commissoner of Baseball is a joke. I read somewhere where teams in the playoffs had more off days than they played games. Baseball isnt meant to be played like that. Thats why some of the games are sloppily played. It is a routine driven sport and when you continue to break the routine its going to be sloppy. An his opinion on re-play is also a joke. As bad as the umpiring is and you say we dont want to explore more replay??? And "human error" has always been part of the game!!! Yeah!! And people used to ride horses now we have cars. If you have the technology to get it right you do it. Human error is for the players!!

Baseball needs to update and get into the 21st century along with the rest of us.

Hey, here's an idea for entering the 21st Century. In addition to umpiring by instant replay and computer lets take full advantage of technology and play the games on Wii. You could pitch C.C. Sabathia, I'll find some 14-year-old geek.

Won't that be exciting? And just think. Weather will never be a factor either.

Dumb post.

How so? Come on, this is the 21st Century.

We not only have the technology to have human-free, errorless officiating, we have the technology to play the entire World Series in one day.

Not dumb at all. Sad, but not dumb. It's sad because this is the direction sports have been headed in. cowhide may have taken it to extremes, but when you need a big, bright line across the screen to denote the line of scrimmage, you know things are going downhill quickly...

And don't you just love the banks of TVs they have in the seating areas of Arrowhead, so that you can watch on TV the game that you are watching in person?

I guess I am in outer space also. How are you doing Paula.
Larry

By the way Cowhide, I 've got a old friend down here in AZ .He's a old gold prospector. We call him CowPoke. He wears his clothes in old western style with spures on his shoes and asix shooter on his side.

And I used to think sitting in the stands and listening to the game on the radio was odd...

I am not sure what the big deal is by expanding instant replay. Some people argue that it will interrupt the flow of the game. What flow? The batter steps out of the box after every pitch to adjust everything. Then the pither steps off the rubber to collect himself. Some say it takes away the human element. The human element is the reason the talk of instant replay has come up in the first place. We see the plays happen, and we see the mistakes happen from the umpires. I just want them to get the call right, even if it means the yankees benefit from it. Had they had instant replay in the 1996 postseason. the homerun by the Yankees against Baltimore would have been changed due to fan inteference.

Look, I'm not anti-technology. It certainly has its place.

But the more human work we turn over to technology, the less human the product becomes. I don't want baseball to become less human.

I think fair/foul and fan interference are about the only things that should be reviewable...Of coarse, in the heat of the moment, I've been known to want a robot calling balls & strikes...That doesn't make it right though.Yeah, I'm sick of the umpires not getting it right.Maybe the bigger problem is, the way that mlb "scores" them and the fact that some are still calling games at the major league level.Possibly the result of "the good 'ol boy" effect.I sure don't want the game to turn into "blurmsball" though...

Taking this combined with cowhide's post above this one, let me ask you this: where does it end?

In other words, where do you draw the line? I think the NFL has finally gotten it about as right as they can while still retaining instant replay, but baseball is far trickier. If you want calls right that have the biggest determining factor when it comes to outcomes, then you have to look behind the plate, don't you?

Look at it this way, those two calls the other night, one in the 7th and one in the 8th, kind of balanced things out because they were both wrong but benefited the opposite team in each case. But would either of those calls made as much of a difference than the multitude of "blown" calls behind the plate? Not in my opinion. So what do you do in that case? Have an electronic K zone called by a computer program?

I'm with cow on this one. I have said many times, it's a game played by humans and officiated by humans. The more you take the human element away from the game, the more irrelevant the game becomes.

The NFL has been steadily sliding down that slippery slope. I'd hate to see MLB follow suit.

Man, remember "back in the day" when you watched a football game and the only thing on the screen were the players and the field?! Now we have every kind of digital overlay that the networks care to cook up. I'm waiting for the vertical "pocket" lines to come next. I mean, if you can't discern the line of scrimmage with your own two eyes, is there really a point to watching the game?

I struggled for years with the little digital clock in the upper corner of the screen. I never thought I'd yearn for those days...

Would you want to see a digital overlay of the K zone while watching baseball?

HA!!

Cross-posted with you, but we're also on the same page.

BTW, it's "course". ;)

I'm not saying add instant replay for balls & strikes. However I would like to see the strike zone be follwed alot better than it is by the umpires. I can't stand the fact that they get to pick & choose their own strike zones.

Fair/foul calls should be reviewable, home run, and plays at the bases should also be reviewable.

But not he balls & strikes, or rather a player checked his swing in time. Also fielding plays should also still be left up to the umpire, as well as whether the ball hit the batter or not.

of course it is...I'm not the most stellEr spellAr...My punctuation can use work too... ;)

Don't sweat it, brother. I'm still working at making English my first language. And it's the only one I know...:(

durmonkee, OK I don't think we really disagree that much. If at all, really.

Here's why foul fair won't work.say you have a man on 1st and the guy hits it down the line most ump's make the call before the runner makes it to 1st ,so the umpp calls it foul but the replay shows fair were do you put the runners a hit down the line would score a fast runner from 1st or at least he makes it to 3rd and the guy who hits it gets a double.but the guy in the outfield might have a canon for an arm and the runners wouldn't run against him so now the ump has to decide were the runners should be and thats when it hurts the flow of the game because one of the mangers is not going to like what they come up with,it works on home runs because the hit is played out before they look at the replay.