No instant replay for Diamondbacks-Dodgers series in Australia

A new era will dawn when the 2014 Major League Baseball season begins in March.

Well, kind of.

Baseball’s instant replay era is upon us, but its much-anticipated debut won’t take place in the first game of the season. Nor will it take place in the second game.

When Arizona Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall joined the Doug and Wolf Show on Thursday as part of Newsmakers Week on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM, he touted the advantages of instant replay to fans in attendance at Chase Field. But Diamondbacks fans in attendance at the team’s first two home games will enjoy no such advantages, as the games aren’t being played at Chase Field, but at the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia.

“The two games in Australia, we will not have replay,” the Diamondbacks president mentioned in the interview.

“The cameras are not there, the infrastructure’s not there.”

When the team returns to its U.S. home, however, they’ll enjoy a myriad of technological benefits, thanks to baseball’s advances on the replay front.

“We haven’t been able to show any instant replay in-game,” Hall explained to the show.

“There were times where we got fined by Major League Baseball because we showed something we weren’t supposed to show.”

On one occasion, the Diamondbacks were fined $100,000 by the league for showing a pair of strikeouts which ended in a called third strike on the Chase Field video board, as Hall recounted. His organization doesn’t have to worry about that this season, though.

“Now we’re able to show those replays,” Hall said. “We can slow it down, we can freeze it.”

The advantages seem endless and Hall was thorough in pointing them out.

“Why should someone at home have an advantage over someone in the stadium?” he asked, rhetorically.
This season, Chase Field’s 46′ x 136′ video board will show the same replays as seen on television.

“We’re going to use our own cameras, we can also use (MLB’s) angles to show up on video,” Hall told the show.

Instant replay will make its MLB debut March 30, when the Dodgers play their third game of the season in San Diego against the Padres on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.