Lemme get this straight: A clearly missed call decided the outcome of a game with direct impact on the National League pennant race. Baseball has a sport-wide replay system, right? And no one bothered to use it?
Wow.
Even those of us who complain weekly about the NFL's replay review were left shaking our heads Thursday night after the St. Louis Cardinals' 4-3 walk-off victory over the Cincinnati Reds.
The NFL system has its faults, and it draws the endless ire of fans who disagree with its "clear and obvious" standard for overturning calls. But it does have safety nets to prevent what happened in St. Louis. First, all touchdowns are automatically reviewed. Second, the replay official takes over in the final two minutes of either half -- freeing coaches of the responsibility to challenge to have a play reviewed.
MLB replay allows umpires or managers to initiate a review, but on the final play of a game, its rules require a manager to challenge "immediately" or not at all. As we saw in St. Louis, Reds manager Bryan Price did not realize that Yadier Molina's game-winning hit should have been ruled a ground-rule double until after the umpires had left the field. It was too late to initiate a challenge, and the Reds had no recourse.
And so MLB finds itself in a similar quandary as the NFL during its various incarnations of replay review. Should it tweak and/or evolve its system in response to a specific flaw? Or is simply fixing some calls good enough, even while leaving others unaddressed?
The simplest answer is to require umpires to remain available longer than "immediately" after a game-winning play. That's what happens when NFL games end with an automatically reviewed play. The referee remains on the field, as do coaches and players, until there is word from the replay official.
Should baseball automatically review every run or every hit off the wall? That would seem especially onerous for a sport that values its pacing even more than football. But at the very least, it seems reasonable to give the manager more than an instant to decide whether to challenge a game-winning run.
Amateur and professional sports are dealing with the advance of broadcast technology in their own ways. The NFL has added electronic communication equipment so that its referees can speak directly to supervisors in New York City. The Canadian Football League has added a centralized video review official to correct unreviewable calls in real time. It also reviews subjective judgment calls such as defensive pass interference.
Baseball, it seems, is caught between nostalgia and innovation. No one wants stoppages all night long to back-check every call. But when a game is decided on the final play, there should be enough time to decide whether all the objective calls were made correctly. Even the NFL has figured that one out.