The Tech Nihilist: I hate instant replay

Posted by Seth in GENERAL, TELEVISION on 06-10-10    No Comments


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Allow me to introduce myself: I am Seth. And I am a sports tech nihilist.

And after listening to Jonathan’s take on instant replay in baseball in this week’s The Sports Circuit podcast, I can stay silent no longer.

First of all, just to clear this up, every team has a regional sports network — even my beloved, woe-begotten Pirates. They don’t all have networks that are owned by the teams, like the Yankees with YES, but every game is televised. Jonathan is correct that from team to team — or from regional sports network to regional sports network — the assets may be different. Frankly, I don’t notice that much difference from broadcast to broadcast as I watch games from across the country on MLB Extra Innings. But not everyone has a slow-mo cam for each base, etc. So I agree that if baseball is to implement instant replay, there must be a standard system that is in use by every network that televises games.

However — and this diverges from the idea of solutions — I hate instant replay. I want to like it. I like it in theory: Get the calls right. Great idea. But the irony here is that advances in technology have made me hate it.

If you’ve been watching the NBA Finals (and if you’re not, you should be — it’s Celtics vs. Lakers) you know that in both Game 2 and Game 3 there were out-of-bounds calls that were reviewed to see who the ball last touched. Both times, in my opinion, the refs got it wrong after looking at these super slow-mo, high-definition, frame-by-frame replays. And do you know why? Because when you slow something down that much and look at it one frame at a time, you can see whatever you want to see.

Tuesday night Kevin Garnett clearly had the ball slapped out of his hands and out of bounds by Kobe Bryant. Should have been Boston ball. But then they went and looked at it one frame at a time and managed to find a frame that shows Garnett with the tips of his fingers still touching the ball as it left his grasp. You’re talking about a fraction of a second here. And that’s ridiculous. He lost the ball because Kobe knocked it out of bounds. Boston ball. End of story. But the ref gave it to the Lakers.

These high-tech replays are at odds with the way a play unfolded in real time.

This has become rampant in football on plays involving fumbles, where they slow it down frame by frame and look to see when a guy’s knee hit the ground and whether the ball was coming loose at that point or not. How can you tell if the ball is loose when you’re looking at one frame? You can interpret one frame any way you want to. These things have to be looked at within the context of a game that happens at high speed.

The only place where I think it works in football is determining whether a receiver had both feet in bounds, because that’s not a judgment call. He either did or didn’t, and the replay can show that. In basketball, replays that show whether a shot beat the buzzer are OK. The National Hockey League doesn’t get much credit for it — heck, the NHL doesn’t get much credit for anything — but they’ve done a good job with video replay to determine whether the puck crossed the goal line. We saw an excellent example of that Wednesday night, when the overhead camera clearly showed the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup-winning goal crossing the line, despite the fact that it happened so quickly that the on-ice officials never signaled that the puck had gone in.

But other than these specific uses, it’s tough to make a case that replay is a good thing. Ultimately, reviewing the play in the Armando Galarraga game comes down to a judgment call: When did he have the ball in his glove? That particular play was easy to see. But if you have to do frame-by-frame analysis, as if it were some terrorist video being broken down pixel by pixel in the bowels of the CIA headquarters, then the technology has overstepped its bounds.

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