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Bud Selig Talks Replay Again, Still Sounds Tone-Deaf

MLB commissioner Bud Selig is the object of ever-increasing derision over his stance on instant replay in baseball. The people don’t really care about it, he says, despite poll results like this (in fairness, that’s from 2010), and despite the fact that baseball actually does plan to expand the use of replay (only when it “ha[s] the technology,” of course) to include fair/foul calls and traps-vs.-catches in the outfield. But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. So when Selig visited ESPN Radio’s Waddle & Silvy on Friday and the replay question came up again, he had this to say:

“[B]aseball is a game of pace and I’m not going to comment on other sports and that but I know our sport and I know it well. I have a 14-man committee and it’s been a great committee [...] I must tell you that not only that committee unanimously, 14, but many other have said ‘Commissioner that’s enough now’ and I agree with them [...] When I said there is no appetite for further replay I wasn’t kidding. There’s none. There’s some people that think I maybe have done more than they hoped I would do.”

Selig seems to use this “game of pace” argument a lot – never mind that baseball is an already-slow-moving game with tons of breaks in the action as is and that at least some of the changes don’t sound like they’d delay the game much at all. And the anecdotal “Commissioner that’s enough now” stuff isn’t cutting it as far as actual valid reasons not to expand replay are concerned. He went on:

We do a lot of polling, I talk to a lot of fans, I get a lot of mail everyday and I answer every piece of mail here. Guess what guys, I get almost no letters, calls or thoughts on Instant Replay. By the way and I say this and I don’t want it to sound, we’re setting attendance records. We’re having a year that’s unbelievable [...] That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to look at this. By the way we will continue to review all of this [...] I will say this, Instant Replay doesn’t always solve problems by the way. Sometimes it creates more. You can’t keep stopping games.

So you could, say, institute a challenge system the way the NFL has done that guarantees only a limited number of potential stoppages, which limit the chance for that to be a problem. As for polling, we already linked to one poll that showed fans overwhelmingly support more replay. Here’s another. Want something more recent? Vote in the poll at the bottom of this story and check the results when you do. Additionally, Hardball Talk already mentioned why the “I get almost no letters” comment is problematic.

The crazy part of Selig downplaying the desire for replay is, MLB under his direction really is taking steps to expand replay. It’s already used on home runs. Selig himself says it’s coming for the fair/foul and catch/trap calls. What, is he just expanding replay to try to shut a vocal minority (to hear him say it, anyway) up? If Selig didn’t keep saying stuff like he said to Waddle and Silvy, people might actually be applauding him for at least doing something. Instead we’re left to wonder how he could keep sounding so out of touch… and remind everyone that as replay rules currently stand, this was a catch.

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