Is instant replay really the answer?

With instant replay being used in football and basketball it was only a matter of time before baseball jumped on the technology bandwagon.

But Little League Baseball?

Major League Baseball has yet to finalize just how to bring instant replay to the big-league games, but that didn't deter Little League World Series officials from instituting a program of their own. The impetus, officials said, was a close home run call that cost a team a title.

Like basketball and football, the athletes and coaches are very supportive of the use of instant replay. They say they work too long and too hard to have an official make a mistake, especially during the playoffs. And anyone who has watched sports for even a single afternoon knows, officials make mistakes — some more than others.

But technology isn't an inoculation against human error.

I have heard athletes and coaches say "The tape doesn't lie." But sometimes it does. Or, more accurately, two people can watch the same play, live or on tape, and see it differently.

We recently watched the Game 6 of the 1998 NBA playoffs between the Bulls and the Jazz with college basketball officials. One of the most enlightening aspects was learning that even in slow motion, we may just have to agree to disagree. We watched two different plays over and over, moving the pictures as slowly as possible, and then we argued and argued over which player fouled or whether it was a travel.

In fairness, replay isn't used in every situation in football and basketball, and its use has seemed to bolster the credibility of the game with fans. Because there are only a few situations in both sports when it can be used, coaches don't try to have every call second-guessed. In football, it also costs a coach — and his team — if he's wrong.

But neither of those sports has a problem unique to baseball.

The biggest drawback in baseball is that it's already a very slow-moving game. Adding reviews, which could take place anywhere from a dugout to inside the offices of a stadium, could be the death knell for a sport that already has a tough time captivating the attention of a generation that tends to multi-task more often than not. Most of those in their 20s or younger can listen to an iPod and text on a cell phone while solving quadratic equations.

It is, for these motion-aholics, like watching paint dry.

Most of them don't have the patience for baseball without instant-replay breaks.

Sadly, it isn't even the fact that adding replay might lengthen an already long game that bothers me most. It's the fact that we can't live with the idea that a referee got a call wrong. We violate all the rules we grew up with and pin a ballgame on one call.

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