Save Your Sport, Commissioner; Expand Replay Now

Let's hold hands and pray. Someday soon, when Bud Selig finally is removed from the commissioner's chair like a rotting tree, we can only hope his successor realizes October is waning. Pro and college football continue to tickle the American consciousness on every demographic level -- male and female, old and young, reality and fantasy -- and reduce our national past-its-time to secondary programming. And when we do see gripping story lines develop, from a possible Yankees-vs.-Joe Torre matchup in the World Series to the Angels and the inspiration they draw from the late Nick Adenhart, what gets in the way?

Wretched umpiring.

A day barely passes without another missed call influencing a playoff series and renewing widespread pleas for expanded instant replay. Just when we were recovering from the Phil Cuzzi gaffe in New York, where a ball that was fair by several inches was called foul and led to a national referendum on why six umps can't get a play right, we now have an even lamer sequence that had direct impact in determining a series winner. Late Sunday night in Denver, in weather more conducive to the Iditarod, Philadelphia's Chase Utley checked his swing in the ninth inning and fouled a ball off his right knee in the batter's box. Except the plate ump, Jerry Meals, didn't see the ball hit Utley and let the play resume. Unlike the preponderance of umpiring mistakes in recent days, this situation wasn't confined to one screw-up. As Utley advanced down the line, he was thrown out by Rockies closer Huston Street -- a replay confirms that first baseman Todd Helton dragged his leg across the bag for the out -- but first-base ump Ron Kulpa called Utley safe. You know the rest: Utley scored the winning run in a 6-5 victory, and when the Rockies blew a two-run lead in the ninth Monday evening and lost their National League divisional scrum to the Phillies, some might say this series was lost the previous game by two clueless umps.



"Yeah, the ball came up and grazed off his leg and continued rolling up the line," Meals told the Associated Press after viewing a replay. "No. 1, it wasn't seen by myself or anybody. If you look at it, you'll be able to see it. Off the front leg, got him up in the knee-thigh area. It just grazed him and the ball continued to roll the way it was rolling. I just saw a ball hit and rolling out there and that's it. Utley took off like it was nothing. He gave no indication to us that it hit him. Whatever percent of the time, you're going to get a guy that's going to stop if it hits him."

Uh, not when you're a clever gamer like Utley and trying to win a playoff series. How dare this umpire try to blame Utley for his own oversight. "The ball might have caught me," said the Phillies second baseman, playing coy a day later. "Nobody said anything, so I ran hard. I check swung. The ball checked up in front of me. It might have hit my leg. But nobody made a call."

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"Chase probably felt it but he said, 'Hey, I'm going to take off, nobody is saying anything,' " said Shane Victorino, Utley's teammate. "And it turned into a pivotal play in the game."

If not the entire 2009 postseason, which finds the Phillies trying to make history as the first NL team to repeat as World Series champions since the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds.

So when history is being altered by human error, isn't it the ultimate no-brainer to expand replay? At the moment, videos are reviewed only on potential home-run calls, but as long as MLB is adopting technology for its slow and backward sport, Selig and the old farts should immediately extend replay -- preferably before the two League Championship Series, but more realistically for next season -- to include fair/foul calls and even tag plays. It's not healthy for the sport's future when playoff drama is haunted by perpetual anxiety over the next umpiring blunder. If baseball wants high credibility, not the current crudibility, Selig and his men will act swiftly for a change and recognize their crisis at hand. Even Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, a purist who fought the concept of replay when it was implemented last year, now thinks it needs to involve more than debatable home run calls.

"I mean, they've been missing calls ever since baseball has been 100-something-years-old or whatever. They've been missing them that long," Manuel said. "But at the same time, if they want to get them right, then getting it right is getting them right."

Thank you, Yogi Berra. No matter how he voices his concerns, he's correct. So is Torre, the Dodgers manager, who is more eloquent in his pro-replay argument. "The fair-foul thing I think could be expanded. For plays where maybe umpires are blocked out, they're human," he said. "Am I saying they're making more wrong calls now than they did years and years ago? I think we have more ways to scrutinize and look at it now than we did then, so I can't say that. In terms of where [an umpire] may be blocked by the call, something like that it may be the future."

Replay works in the NFL in a wide assortment of ways. Replay works in the NBA, which expanded it recently to include shot-clock situations and, in the final two minutes of regulation and overtime, which player touches the ball before it goes out of bounds. Replay works in the NHL. It works in tennis. And it would work in expanded form in baseball, a sport that has clung too long to a traditional refrain that human beings make mistakes. "I think the first thing I ever said was that the absence of replays would not bother me. I've been around too long," said Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, whose team wasn't burned by anything but its own ineptness in being swept by the Dodgers. "Part of the game is umpires making their best calls. I mean, you watch us play, you watch me manage, nobody's perfect."

Look, it's 2009, gentlemen. Getting plays right in the computer age is much more sensible, progressive and responsible. Very simply, you position another umpire/league observer in the press box with a high-definition, big-screen TV in front of him -- hopefully, someone fairly young with sharp vision -- and have him buzz down to the crew chief when it's obvious on replay that Cuzzi misses a play. Or Meals and Kulpa miss their plays. It needn't be a long, time-consuming ordeal. As quickly as a viewer sees a mistake on a replay, the man in the booth can inspect the same video and react instantly. Agree to place TVs in both dugouts so managers can view the same plays and don't feel the need to spend five minutes arguing. The last thing I want to do, as one bothered by the dreadful length of games and post-midnight finishes, is turn replay into an agonizing exercise. Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, who was victimized by Cuzzi's call but also benefited in the divisional tiebreaker game when umpires didn't see when Detroit's Brandon Inge was grazed by a pitch, wants to wave a red flag. That won't work.

"I didn't see the [Cuzzi] play, so I would have had to have coaches up in the booth calling into my ear on my headset," Gardenhire said. "Give me a headset and give me a red flag and we can fix this stuff, but I would have to have somebody calling me saying, 'Throw your flag, let's question this call. If you use it and you're wrong, you don't get to use it the rest of the game. If you use it and you're right, you get your red flag back, and that would save a lot of money [for ejections]."

In total disagreement is Yankees manager Joe Girardi, whose team might be good enough this postseason to overcome any umpiring mess. "That might be dangerous with that red flag. I just think it really breaks the rhythm of the game," he said. "You know, during the course of the year, everything is going to balance out. In the playoffs, it's different, and how many red flags would you be allowed to throw? The rhythm is important to your pitchers, and I just think it would really hurt that."

A day barely passes without another missed call influencing a playoff series and renewing widespread pleas for expanded instant replay.
I propose a compromise: One man in the booth, one minute to make a complete judgment, one minute for the crew chief to make a correction. Now how hard is that, people?

The Cuzzi scenario revealed a problem with umpires down the left- and right-field lines, the fifth and sixth men in an expanded postseason rotation that started in 1947. "We're not used to playing that far down the line," Cuzzi told the Newark Star-Ledger, his hometown paper in a state across the Hudson River from Yankee Stadium. "The instant the ball is hit, we usually start running. I think I may have been looking too closely at it. I never had a feel for where the left fielder was on the play. There is no excuse. I missed the play. It's a terrible feeling. As badly as many people on that field may have felt [Friday], I don't think any of them had a worse night's sleep than I did."

Funny how we never heard umps complaining about monitoring the postseason foul lines in the '90s, '80s, '70s and '60s. "The challenges in working the foul line: No. 1 is we don't do it a lot. It's a tough one to practice," said Tim Tschida, chief of the crew on the night Cuzzi erred. "Your first movement is always to get out of the way because we're not accustomed to having fielders come from the side."

Fellas, that's why you make the medium-sized bucks. Deal with it, have seminars, do simulated situations, whatever it takes to get the calls right. Or get out of the business. Too much is at stake.

When asked about expanding replay by FOXSports.com's Ken Rosenthal, Selig offered up one of his pseudo-intellectual, no-action responses. "Baseball is not the kind of game that can have interminable delays," he said. As usual, Bud Light is dismissing something out of hand instead of looking into it, just like steroids in the mid-'90s. I hope the owners urge him to join the 21st century, with the rest of us, and rectify the latest problem ravaging his slowly dying game.

It's October. We're supposed to be having fun.

We're not.