Baseball owes players, fans use of replays

The baseball purist in me says no to instant replay.

However, the purist has been overruled by the progressive in me.

The ultimate goal for any official in any sport is to get the call right. If the technology exists to help the umpire get the call right when he may not have seen it with the naked eye, then baseball owes it to its players and fans to use it.

Logistics and time consumption will be the biggest issues here. Can the umpire walk over to the third-base or first-base dugout and check a monitor? Will he have to call upstairs or to the home office, as hockey referees sometimes have to do?

And how much time will replay reviews take. World Series games already push the four-hour mark, and regular-season games often drag on past three hours. The last thing fans -- or pitchers standing on the mound -- need is more dead time.

But the greater good outweighs these inconveniences. I'm all for replay in cases where the umpires can't tell whether a home run is fair or foul or whether a ball has hit the line in the outfield.

Wrigley Field presents one more problem where a replay would be helpful: the baskets atop the outfield walls. Often, it's difficult for the umpires to tell whether the ball has gone into and out of the basket quickly or whether a fan has reached over. The umps have missed a few because of the baskets.

So let's have replay.

Heck, maybe Cubs manager Lou Piniella can let off a little frustration by throwing the baseball equivalent of a "challenge flag" instead of heaving one of the bases or his cap.