"Buster Posey Injury, Instant Replay, and collisions at the Plate.... The New Age of Baseball"I am sure the baseball purists are going to attempt to hack this one up with a machete, but I am sorry to inform those people that their day is done. Baseball is (attempting) to enter the 21st century. Word on the street is that there is even some revolutionary technology which allows officiating crews to make accurate calls with almost absolute 100% accuracy. Such technology should be debated and beat to a pulp, argued over, and blogged about. I mean come on, in a sport which billions of dollars is involved, why would you want the correct call made when you can have the "human element" of the game make a billion dollar mistake? Instant replay is a positive thing, and the new age of baseball needs to get over its ancient historic self and get on board. Every other sport has incorporated instant replay in some format, and I declare all instances successful. The increased length of the game argument is nonsense, and absolutely untrue. MLB, get instant replay into games immediately.
The next advancement past the dark ages is the MLB rule (policy, concept, etc) of collisions at home plate. Unfortunately, as all too often the case, someone must suffer to cause change. That person is Buster Posey. A young, very promising catcher for the San Francisco Giants, Posey was plowed into at home plate, snapping his leg like a twig. Posey's season is over, and the outlook is grim for the Giants as well. Don't get me wrong, Posey is not an innocent victim. He came up playing the catcher position, and undoubtedly took several home plate collisions. He should know how to position himself safely for this violent play. This time, Posey decided to essentially kneel down and lay back over his legs to block the runner from touching home plate. The result was gut wrenching, will undoubtedly change the Giants season, and could possibly alter the career of one of the most exciting up and coming players in baseball. The play by Scott Cousins was 100% legal, was in no way illegal, and I do not condemn him whatsoever. My issue is with the rule which allows collisions at the plate. There is no reason for this play, and baseball needs to eliminate it. Baseball is a one on one sport for the most part, with bits and pieces of team play in the field. It is non-contact, non-aggressive sport, at least not in the way other sports such as hockey and football are. No other player in the field is allowed to bump an opposing player, charge, or make any form of aggressive action during the game. There is no reason to have baseball players running full speed, full contact into a non moving player, who's first objective is to catch a ball coming towards him from a completely different direction. It is unsafe, careless, and is just leaving a window open for serious injury. The NFL and the NHL have both made extremely significant strides towards protecting their players by eliminating headshots, hits to defenseless players, and head to head hits. They have done this by fining, penalizing, and suspending their players for such actions. These sports are popular because of their violent nature, and they glorify it, yet they have realized steps were necessary to protect its athletes from serious injury. MLB does not even need to punish their players, they simply need to make an adjustment to an obscure curious rule from the past. I like to see a good collision at the plate as much as anyone, but to see a Ryan Howard or Lance Berkman charging full speed into the bodies of 200 pound catchers with the intention of dislodging the ball causes me to squirm a bit. Take one look at the Buster Posey video, and you can see the potential harm. A big argument I hear is that these catchers have so much equipment on, that it doesn't matter. Another ridiculous argument. The catcher's equipment is designed to protect him from 95 mph fastballs being deflected in 1/20th of a second in a direction physically impossible for a human to react to. It is not designed for, and in no way does it protect them from physical collisions. The NFL and the NHL's players are the most protected (as far as equipment) of any sport, and yet they have taken the aforementioned steps to protect their players.
Using the Posey play as an example, I would have felt the same excitement had Cousins taken a wide angle and tried to make an athletic play into home, while watching Posey (not on his knees in such a horrid position) make a catch and try to bring the glove across on top of Cousins. Anyone who has played baseball knows that this is not an easy play to make, and would have had a much better outcome for the "defenseless player" that in this case is the catcher. MLB, make this change now, and take a step into the new age. Hopefully then we will not need to see another terrific athlete like Buster Posey in a cast attempting to recover and save his career at age 24 after a lifetime of hard work.
