by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–Following baseball all of my adult life,and since the first days as a small kid, the great game of baseball is going through some changes. Three are clocks in all 30 major league parks, so that every half inning moves at the same pace, plus other changes that have have shorten the duration of the games, the replays, the strike-zone. Most of these changes in which technology have been introduced to the games are coming for the benefit of television, which is a huge revenue stream for Major League Baseball.

A couple of years ago Time Warner Cable paid $7 billion dollars to the LA Dodgers for the rights to broadcast their games for the next 20-years. Today we know that they are set to lose $1 billion because Time Warner cable had required other cable distributors to pay an increase in fees. These increases are passed to the viewing public in the huge Southern California television market. The LA Dodgers have also lost a great amount of viewers, because of this discontent by Dodgers fans, many who refuse to pay the extra money to see their favorite team on the tube.

Nevertheless, television is now basically the engine that generates the big bucks in Major League Baseball. At the start of this 2015 season, the MLB Network,a network solely dedicated to baseball is primarily owned by Major League Baseball and is available to 70 million households via cable and satellite television.

All replays of every game(disputed plays)are reviewed from New York, but next season Major League Baseball will open another review location in San Francisco, which will be more convenient, for the late games held here in the west coast, instead of having to go to New York on an extra inning game at Oakland which is at 11:45PM(west coast time)that is reviewed in New York where it is 2:45 in the morning. It makes sense to open this other review office in San Francisco.

But the old saying “we cannot put the toothpaste back inside the tube”, technology is part of our lives. I am personally not a fan of the “replay”which takes a lot of the human factor from this unique game that we love. Yes, we can see the mistakes the umpires make today with this new system of replays, but umpires are human and they will always make mistakes. Teams also make mistakes, they are called “errors”, are we going to change that also in the future? What would baseball look 20 years from today? Would anybody be surprised if umpires are replaced with machines in each base? A lot of bank tellers were replaced by ATM machines. Think about it, more changes are possible and probably 20 years from today baseball will not even look close to the same as today.

This is just my opinion. You might agree or disagree. I am not an enemy of technology, or progress, I like the instant communications, although I do not have to be attached to twitter or instagram.

Baseball is a unique game, it has it own pace, and its own choreography, we should not mess too much with it, or basically it will not be baseball anymore, it could; become some sort of a live video game of we keep making changes.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish TV voice for the Angels and the Spanish radio voice for the A’s and does News and Commentary at http://www.sportsradioservice.com

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