It's Time to Entirely Scrap MLB Replay

So MLB Replay and myself have found ourselves here once again. It was apparently not enough to have one egregious, potentially season-altering fuck-up at home plate of Truist Park this year, so we played the hits again last night.

Tuesday night's Braves-Yankees game went down in the record books as a 5-4 win for New York. But as you can clearly see if you're an honest person with working eyesight, the Braves scored a fifth run. Simply no doubt about it. I have already had a conversation with one intentionally obtuse Yankees fan this morning — shoutout to Macrodosing producer Avery — but even Hubbs admitted the Braves got screwed.

So here we are again. A great, hard-fought baseball game was potentially stolen from a team which is going to need every win it can get to win its division by the umpires. And my thoughts now are exactly the same as they were in April when this happened the first time: get rid of this shit completely.

Replay in every sport gets stuff wrong, but Major League Baseball makes it an art form. And I truly believe it comes from the self-congratulatory umpires who don't want to change calls in some sort of attempt to protect the "brotherhood" they think they've formed. So if that's the case, let's just get rid of it. If all we're doing is creating situations like this where I won't be able to sleep tonight because these assholes decided to fuck me over, then just nix the whole system.

I can live with mistakes made at full-speed. We all grew up with baseball where the call on the field was what it was and you just had to deal with it — and the game went on just fine. But when we have dozens of cameras and every angle imaginable only to still get game- and season-changing calls wrong, that's unacceptable. Either get the calls right or get rid of replay. This is not an isolated incident and these things will continue happening, so what's the point?

Advertisement

Just these two highway robberies of calls are the difference in two games which would have at least gone to extra innings and potentially the difference in a 4.5-game and a 6.5-game lead in the NL East for the Braves right now. Get the calls right or wrong on the field and people will learn to deal with mistakes. But when there's a reasonable argument to be made with mounting evidence that certain teams are being screwed in regards to replay, something has to change.