As of right now, Major League Baseball only uses replay to determine whether or not a home run is a home run. That is reportedly changing ... kind of.
According to Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, MLB is going to roll out some trial runs of "advanced" replay systems over the next week, positioning cameras and radar equipment and other fancy things in both New York stadiums, to see how replay works.
Per Passan, MLB "will analyze a radar-based system and a camera-based system, both similar to the one used in tennis for down-the-line-fair-or-foul calls."
When the players association and owners agreed on a new CBA, terms of said agreement called for the expansion of replay into areas like foul and fair balls and trapped balls as well. This would be the first foray into such replay, and, frankly, it makes a lot of sense.
Holding some "dubious" (per Passan) people back is the fact that a) it's expensive to implement, b) they don't think it will work and c) GET OFF OUR LAWN, KIDS.
Or something like that: baseball hasn't taken full advantage of the technology available to them to ensure that umpires don't consistently miss calls they shouldn't. And they do consistently miss calls they shouldn't, because that's the nature of being human and having human beings judge sports that can suddenly be slowed down in high definition and instantly re-watched to prove whether or not something actually happened the way umpires believe it did.
At home, everyone will know within minutes -- if not sooner -- whether a mistake was made. And it's foolish of baseball not to give its fans the best possible product.
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Now the radar and cameras will have a chance to prove exactly why they should become our new robot overlords. If they perform the way they should (i.e. they work) in New York, it's quite possible that we'll see an expansive use of replay in the baseball's future.
