As in all things baseball, Commissioner Bud rules over all.

During last night's game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays, Bud Selig declared that Major League Baseball will not see expanded use of instant replay during the 2010 playoffs.

"I brought the subject up, as I always do with everybody," Selig told the AP. "I don't get the feeling that there's a lot of support for it, at least their conversations with me."

What a surprise. The accidental commissioner who has long been the butt of baseball jokes doesn't get that his sport is at a crossroads when it comes to instituting new technology. At the moment, replay is restricted to questionable fair-or-foul calls on home runs, and it doesn't appear that's slated to change soon.

"Our committee" – that would his hand-picked Special Committee for On-Field Matters – "said we need to study it more, maybe have a few more months of study," Selig said. "But from the numbers that I heard, of the controversial tough plays, they got something like 98 percent right.”

Sounds pretty good, right? Except even with Selig's crude cocktail-napkin math, that would equate to at least one blown call in every single game. That means a blown call in every September game that has playoff qualification implications. That means a blown call in every potentially historic perfect game that might be thrown. That means a blown call in every World Series game. Sure, that doesn't sound so significant, but just you wait until the Chicago Cubs are on the cusp of ending their historic championship drought and the blown calls goes against the North Siders.

It's not like this in other sports. Hockey referees can go to a dedicated official – and even a central nerve center in Toronto – to get the call. Basketball referees have the use of nearby courtside monitors to judge whether a player got the game-winning shot off in time before the clock expired. And, of course, the NFL, which has opened this 2010 season to record-high ratings, has wholeheartedly embraced all kinds of instant replay-worthy scenarios after years of waffling on the issue.

Selig, by way of his stodgy thinking, has chosen to align baseball, at least in the mind of public perception, with sports like soccer, which is fighting the use of goal-line technology even in the face of global criticism during this summer's World Cup in South Africa. (Granted, with the rarity of goals in any soccer game, getting it right on the pitch is more critical than any baseball counterpart, but when baseball fans are investing at least three hours of spectating for any given game, seeing the outcome turned on a missed call can be an utterly deflating experience.)

Instead of bracing baseball's 150-year tradition of evolution and forward-thinking – the 1960s alone saw the introduction of artificial turf (boo!) and the lowering of the pitching mound (woo!) – Selig knowingly chooses to eschew advancements that, when applied to the game with minimal intrusion, could actually draw more people in. Has limited instant replay, introduced in mid-2008, harmed the integrity of the game? Not a chance.

Besides, baseball has enough intrinsic human element infused into its DNA. Every ball thrown from the pitcher's hand is a moment in subjectivity. In basketball, the ball goes in the hoop or it doesn't. In hockey, the puck crosses the goal line or it doesn't. In the NFL, the ball goes through the uprights for a field goal or – wait for it – it doesn't. Why not have a larger safety net to cover those parts of baseball that are more susceptible to human error?

It's important to note that 55 percent of players surveyed oppose expanding replay usage, but that doesn't mean it can't be instituted in such a way that doesn't trample on decades of history. (Not to mention that if we let players' preferences dictate the governance of baseball, steroids would still be running wild through clubhouses and the shadow of doubt hanging over the game's most esteemed records would still be casting a dark gloom.)

No one is seriously advocating instant replay usage for things like balls and strikes, but why not for whether a player tagged a runner at first base on a close play, or whether a scorching line drive down the line was actually was fair? Obviously, these cases would be limited strictly to plays where the runner was deemed safe and advanced, since (in the majority of cases) you couldn't overturn a play called foul and arbitrarily award bases to someone.

Seventy-five percent of MLB managers, many of whom have been in baseball for decades more than their players, favor expanding replay, according to an ESPN survey. These are the sport's true lifers, more entrenched in baseball tradition than any of us could hope to be. And yet, they still can grasp the true potential of expanded replay far more than any committee can.

As Orioles manager Buck Showalter put it to ESPN, "I guarantee you that once we put this in there, people will be going, 'Why in the world didn't we put it in before?'"

Sadly, no one will until Bud says it first.

Photo: Flickr/RodBegbie, CC

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