MLB players don't usually plan to make history when they take the field. It just happens.

The same has to be true for MLB umpires. Or, at least, it was true for Frank Pulli on May 31, 1999. That's the day Pulli spontaneously pioneered the use of video replay to correct a call during a game between the Cardinals and Marlins in Miami. It was a highly unusual move for an MLB umpire at the time, nearly a decade before MLB officially allowed it. Naturally, Pulli's decision caused a wee bit of controversy.

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Here's how it played out: The Marlins' Cliff Floyd lined a ball off the top of the scoreboard in left field at Pro Player Stadium, with the ball bouncing back to the field. It was ruled a double, but the Marlins argued the ball had cleared the wall. So the umpires huddled, discussed and changed the call to home run. Of course, that caused the Cardinals to object, which led crew chief Pulli to go to the St. Louis dugout to watch a replay on a television camera. After watching the video, he determined the ball hadn't cleared the wall and reversed the call back to a double. Watch the whole thing unfold.

This definitely fell under the "things you didn't expect to see today" banner, especially because baseball had long prided itself on the purity of the ever-present "human element." So, of course, there was some fallout.

"Use of the video replay is not an acceptable practice," NL president Leonard Coleman said at the time, according to a Los Angeles Times column lamenting the idea. "Part of the beauty of baseball is that it is imperfect. ... Traditionally, baseball has relied on the eyes of the umpires as opposed to any artificial devices for its judgments. I fully support this policy. Occasionally, however, the umpires too will make mistakes; that is also part of the game."

In the same Times column, retired NL ump John Kibler also expressed some grumpy thoughts.

"To have instant replay in baseball would be the worst thing in the world," he said. "The games are too long now, what with all the bad pitching. How much longer will they be? How much will it actually change?"

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The call led acting Marlins manager Fredi Gonzalez to play the rest of the game under protest, but that didn't go anywhere. Despite Pulli's extreme bucking of the MLB system, his call was allowed to stand and the Cardinals' 5-2 win went in the books. As for being a replay pioneer, Pulli, who died in 2013, certainly didn't see himself that way.

“I sure don’t want to make a habit of it,” he said after the game, according to 2013 story by The Washington Post. “But at that moment, I thought it was the proper thing to do. ... I hope I don’t have to go to the replay again. I don’t want it to become like football.”

Of course, baseball did eventually become more like football. MLB first allowed replay to verify home run calls in 2008 and greatly expanded replay use in 2013. Today it has just become another part of the game, with most fans generally accepting of it despite occasional frustrations.

A handful of home run calls were reversed in the early years of replay review, but it eventually became much more commonplace. From 2014 through 2018, for example, 135 home runs were awarded or taken away because of replay review.

Official MLB replay history says the first such reversal happened on May 13, 2009, when Adam LaRoche of the Pirates had a dinger taken away on review and was awarded a double instead. But the real first occurrence, at least in the minds of baseball trivia buffs, came May 31, 1999: the day Frank Pulli became a spontaneous pioneer.