MLB hoping for large replay expansion in 2014

Major League Baseball appears set for a vast expansion of video review by umpires in 2014 and is examining whether all calls other than balls or strikes should be subject to instant replay.

Replay has been in place for home run calls since August 2008. Commissioner Bud Selig initially wanted to add trap plays and fair/foul calls down the lines for 2013, but change was put off while more radical options were examined.

‘‘My opinion has evolved,’’ baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday after MLB executive vice president Joe Torre gave an update at a quarterly owners’ meeting.
Torre hopes to have proposals by the Aug. 14-15 session in Cooperstown…

‘‘That really caught my eye and caught my attention with the fact that there was more conversation about that instead of the game itself,’’ Torre said. ‘‘There’s no question we’re considering much more than the trap play and fair/foul. But again, one of the decisions we have to make is how much of this do we want to do without really disrupting and putting people to sleep?’‘

Keown: What the MLB committee will find

The committee members need to see the industry of youth baseball for what it has become: A business enterprise designed to exclude those without the means and mobility to participate. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the proliferation of pay-for-play teams in youth baseball—and the parallel proliferation of parents willing to pay for them and coaches willing to cash their checks—has had more of an impact on African-American participation than anything another sport has to offer.

It’s become standard in youth baseball for parents of supposedly “elite” kids to eschew the riffraff of Little League and cast their lot with travel teams that play as many as 130 games a year. Both preposterous and routine, it’s based on the questionable theory that the more you pay and the farther you travel, the better you will become. Longtime big leaguer LaTroy Hawkins said it directly: Baseball in the United States has become a sport for the rich.

This is the root of the issue, one that Selig’s committee doesn’t seem to be assembled to address. With the possible exception of Southern University coach Roger Cador, most of the esteemed committee members come at the game with either an ethereal or nostalgic viewpoint.

If I were Selig, I would give each committee member a reading assignment: Amy Shipley’s fantastic piece in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel on the travel-ball industry. I’ve seen this world close-up, and it’s shaping what baseball looks like in this country. It’s contingent on year-round participation—which either eliminates or severely reduces the possibility of playing other sports—and a level of parental involvement that often goes far beyond reason.

ESPN: MLB Sued Wrong Man

MLB seems to be just grasping at straws here:

Two sources familiar with the case told “Outside the Lines” that MLB was looking for a man with a similar name believed to have been a black-market PED connection for Bosch, though it turned out not to be da Silveira.

“They realize he has no involvement whatsoever with Biogenesis or distributing performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes,” said Emil Infante, who represents the 30-year-old da Silveira.