Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
August 28, 2008
Nerve Center

Via FishStripes, Ronald Blum provides details of the Network Operations Center for instant replays:

Baseball spent $2.5 million and two months installing fiberlink lines, monitors and dedicated telephones to link every ballpark with the NOC. Major League Baseball Advanced Media will now collect both teams' video feeds from each game and send them here.

For the 20 to 30 games each year with no telecast, MLBAM already is sending its own production truck, with six-to-eight cameras. And just in case there's a power failure at the NOC, the control room has emergency battery power just behind the wall and a generator on the roof with at least 12 hours of fuel.

The transformation is dramatic for a site where Oreos, Mallomars and Animal Crackers used to be cooked up--and the change is about as radical for MLB.

Baseball was the last replay holdout among the major U.S. professional leagues, one so conservative that National League president Len Coleman chastised umpire Frank Pulli for consulting a monitor in May 1999 before awarding Florida's Cliff Floyd a double rather than a home run in a game against St. Louis.

"You can slow a picture down so much that you can see the grains of sand and the clay around the bag. You can see whether or not a person has shaved that day," Solomon said. "The commissioner has come around and he's embraced it, because the technology is undeniable. I'm sure there was a time when all of us watched baseball on black and white TVs. Now I bet you everybody in the room has a high-def TV."

Solomon goes on to say that replay will never be expanded beyond the boundary calls. My guess is that as soon as there is a blown call that costs a team a World Series (see 1985), replay will be used for everything.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:04 AM | Umpires | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Well, that would make 22 series and counting since 1985. By that logic we might have to wait a long time for an expansion of replay.

In fact, I think replay will eventually be expanded - no reason to confine it only to HR calls - but subject to a stringent challenge system. A team would only get one or at most two challenges per game.

Posted by: Casey Abell at August 28, 2008 11:33 AM

Oops, forgot about 1994. Make that 21 series and counting since 1985.

Posted by: Casey Abell at August 28, 2008 11:35 AM

20-30 games that aren't telecast? It sounds like your saying that 20-30 games aren't aired on TV... that can't be true can it? Or am I just a buffoon and didn't read it right?

Posted by: Mike at August 28, 2008 11:49 AM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?