Replay coming to baseball?

An AP story today reports that replay may be coming to Major League Baseball as soon as August.

According to the story, the rush to implement replay comes from a "rash of blown calls" lately, but the only two that are mentioned are home runs by the Mets' Carlos Delgado and the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez that were ruled incorrectly (supposedly - I never saw the plays myself).

I wonder if there would be such a rush to get replay going if the missed home runs were by players on the Pirates or Royals. New York whines about something and all of a sudden, it's an emergency. boo hoo.

Replay is already in use in most major sports in at least some fashion, but I have never been a big fan of using it in baseball. In general, the umps do a good job of getting calls right, and using replay could slow the game down tremendously.

Just recently, MLB instructed the teams and umpires to try to speed up games by doing things like shortening mound conferences and batters' pre-pitch preparation ceremonies. There are some guys who step out after every pitch and adjust their batting gloves, helmet, cup, shin guards, elbow pads, pine tar, makeup and 401Ks before getting back into the box. I understand the need for a routine, but that's ridiculous. .

There really aren't a whole lot of practical uses for replay in baseball, however determining whether something is a home run or not is one of them. Especially in the situation where the ball is over the fence, but bending around the fair pole, because the ball is dead whether it's fair or foul. Since those situations are relatively rare, the delays would be minimal.

The situation where the ball hits a wall near a yellow line that divides home runs from in-play doesn't work as well. If baseball decides that these plays are reviewable also, then umpires will be inclined, if not forced, to rule that anything close is still in play so that reversing the call is easy. You see something similar in football. Refs are now reluctant stop a play where there is any chance that a fumble occurred because once they stop the play, it can't be reversed.

In this situation, if the ump lets things play out, and then if the replay shows that it was a home run, it's no big deal. If the ump calls it a home run first, but replay reverses it, there's no way to remedy the situation. I suppose they could simply treat it like a ground rule double, but nobody knows what might have happened if the correct call had been made to begin with. More than likely though, the call would not be considered reversible, which defeats the purpose of replay.

The same problem occurs with fair/foul rulings on the lines, or any other play where the ball is either alive or dead, depending on the call.

Replay would also be very impractical on the bases and for balls and strikes. If those calls were reversible, baseball would turn into cricket, where games sometimes go on for several days.

So, until the Cubs lose a World Series because some ump blows a home run call, I'd like to see things stay as they are.