Please, no more instant replay

Did you see that story in our paper on Wednesday (page 4C) about the possibility of adding instant replay to baseball? If you didn’t, just go to our Web site and do a search for, “How to ruin a great game.”

Good grief. Baseball does not need replay, instant or otherwise. No sport does.

The reason we watch sports is that it’s unscripted competition between athletes or teams. You don’t know what will happen. The game might be good or bad or somewhere in between. You watch because you like the sport and the suspense.

Bad calls by umpires are part of the game. This is not a “problem” that needs to be “fixed” by a bunch of suits in Orlando, Fla., trying to kill time until spring training starts.

If a bad call happens, you shrug it off and keep playing. If you do that, sooner or later a call will go your way.

In fact, most replays show that umps almost always make the right call, even though the play is happening at full speed and they might not have the best angle.

Even more annoying is the doubletalk coming from the people trying to push this nonsense:

“I don’t think there’s a significant impetus toward destroying what has been 150 years of the human aspects of baseball,” said Bob DuPuy, baseball’s chief operating officer.

Gosh, Bob, I owe you an apology. I guess I thought that using sophisticated TV cameras with slo-mo and freeze-frame capabilities to review an umpire’s call would undermine “the human aspect of baseball.”

Baseball is enjoying a resurgence: Steroid use has dropped. The Montreal Expos have been put out of their misery and the game has returned to the nation’s capital. (Though the franchise should have been renamed the Washington Senators.) Teams that aren’t named the New York Yankees are winning the World Series.

If the owners were smart, and they’re not, they would leave well enough alone. If they want to fiddle with something, go after the monstrosity called "the designated hitter" in the American League.