Posnanski: The spirit of the (replay) rule

From SABR member Joe Posnanski at Medium.com on October 13, 2017:

I thought a lot about the spirit of the rules when I saw Washington’s José Lobatón get called out on replay Thursday night. Whew, I’ve written about replay a lot, but I think I had small burst of clarity about what replay does in sports, why we love it and why we’re sometimes frustrated by it. Replay is great at parsing plays to the letter. No, “great” does not quite cover it. Replay is better at getting the calls right to the letter than anything mankind has ever devised.

Alas, though, replay is not just blind but hostile to the spirit of the rules.

Let’s talk for just a moment about the Lobatón play. It was the eighth inning, what Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” called “The end of a very long day.” The Nationals trailed the Cubs by a run. Every inning of this game was mesmerizing and exhausting and controversial and tense and fun and infuriating; there really has never been another game quite like it. I hear people say that it was an all-time classic, and I hear others say that it was a terrible game, and I somehow agree completely with both of them.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/joeblogs/the-spirit-of-the-rule-437cb7df2038



Originally published: October 13, 2017. Last Updated: October 13, 2017.