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Argument: Tradition of umpire calls in baseball should be left alone

Issue Report: Instant replay in baseball

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Tim McCarver, the veteran catcher who will call his 20th World Series on TV and his 12th for Fox, acknowledged that 2009 was a “dreadful” postseason for umpires but does not believe replay should be used to review out or safe calls. “Outside of (boundary calls), I think the game should be left alone.”[1]

Ross Douthat. “Against Instant Replay” New York Times. June 3, 2010: “But baseball is also a game where history matters, and where continuity — those mystic chords of memory, connecting the Tiger fans who watched Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline and Mickey Lolich to the Tiger fans watching Armando Galarraga last night — matters even more. True, often it’s just the illusion of continuity (part of the fury over the steroid scandal reflects the rage of a fan base having part of that illusion stripped away), and starry-eyed sportswriters can go overboard heaping metaphysical significance on what is, in the end, an athletic contest and a multi-billion dollar business, and not necessarily in that order. But still, baseball’s past is real, those mystic chords are real, and a hundred years and counting of bad calls are part of the sport’s history, part of the legacy of glories and grievances that one generation hands down to the next.”