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Law Talk With Epstein & Yoo #11: Debt Is The New Gay
This week, the professors and host Troy Senik delve into the debt crisis, debate the legality of a balanced budget amendment, deconstruct cell phone tracking, and do diligence on the Patriot Act. But all that is a wind up to a very spirited debate on perhaps the most important legal question of our times: the use of instant replay in Major League Baseball. Who’s for it and who’s against it? You’ll have to listen to find out.
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Baseball and hockey do not easily lend themselves to analogy. In hockey, if you miss a goal, within a minute you can just blow the whistle and award the goal, then nullify a few seconds of play and have a faceoff.
In baseball, the immediate subsequent play often splits toward one of two extremes as the result of an umpire’s call. For example, a fly ball being caught or dropped is the difference between the runners continuing on to the next base or returning to the previous base to tag.
Another example is on a third out call, the players on the field basically stop what they are doing and head to the dugout. Assume that if the call had been safe, the defense could have put another runner out at third base. If the out call is reversed, where would you put that runner? Whether you award him third base or send him back to second, the offense benefits from the reversed call plus they get a runner in scoring position who otherwise would have been out.
I eagerly await Richard Epstein’s thoughts on sabermetrics. Seriously. Troy, please, make it happen.
I haven’t listened yet so I’m going to go ahead and guess: Richard as an originalist is opposed to instant replay, while John with his penchant for executive powers wants to grant video machines unprecedented authority and influence over America’s pastime!
My gut tells me the opposite: Richard showed a willingness to make pretty significant changes to the rules of soccer in an effort to improve the game, so he would favor adding replay to baseball.
John would oppose instant replay because he likes the strong executive authority of umpires.
Give me five minutes on the field with Richard and I’ll change his mind…
Since Richard is such a big fan of baseball history and tradition does he support ending testing for steroids? 50 years ago PED testing was not done then testing technology developed which baseball has adopted to combat PED use.
I look at it this way. If you were the baseball overlord had a blank sheet and wanted to create the best game possible would you use IR? Hell yes is the answer. The game would be better with IR run much like hockey and not the stupid system the NFL has.
How stupid is the NFL IR system? The coach gets a red bean bag which he can use to challenge two or maybe three plays a game because there can’t be any more then three bad calls go against a team in one game. After a bad call the coach then watches for the replay on the big screen TV and waits to throw the bean bag while the opposing team rushes to run another play before the challenge bean bag can be thrown.
Mr. Yoo, your comments on Canadians….. well, I’ll say this, our banks are not failing and we have a Conservative government at this time, looks like the US is playing catch up :)
Not to mention we have real beer!
My complements to Blue Yeti for his choice of closing music. It actually had me smiling while waiting in line at the Secretary of State office to renew my driver’s license.