Baseball has decided to postpone looking at instant replay after major-league GMs split on continuing its review:

Upon further review, baseball will hold off on taking a look at instant replay. After watching umpires reverse almost every missed call in the postseason, major league general managers split 15-15 Thursday on whether to keep exploring the subject.

"Based on that vote, it's unlikely we'll do anything substantive in the next year to pursue instant replay," MLB executive vice president Sandy Alderson said.

In the past twenty years, baseball games have bloated from an average running time of two hours to well over three hours now. I used to be embarrassed for Los Angeles fans who ducked out after the sixth inning, but now if you have kids you can't keep them up past that time for a night game. Increased advertising time, needed to pay the skyrocketing salaries of the players, combined with egotistical batters and pitchers playing mind games to make one baseball game last as long as doubleheaders did in years past.

Now they want to use instant replay? Putting that in place will make an average ball game last longer than the director's cut of Lord of the Rings: The Return Of The King. If the experience of the NFL is any gauge, the extra time won't result in significantly better calls, as most challenges seem to result inconclusively.

One possible solution to the plague of marathon games came up in the meetings:

Alderson and umpire supervisor Rich Rieker made a presentation to the GMs on Thursday, showing that nine-inning games were played in an average of 2 hours, 47 minutes, up a minute from 2003.

In something that could someday lead to a speed up, the Arizona Fall League is experimenting with a rule requiring hitters to keep one foot in the batter's box, rather than stepping out after each pitch. The penalty is an automatic strike, and Alderson said the rule might get a tryout in a low minor league next season.

Now that's more like it. Nothing gets more frustrating that watching a batter take a stroll between every pitch. It's bad enough at the park, and it's excruciating on television, where the commentators fill the void with inane anecdotes. This sounds like a good approach to the problem, and hopefully it will be combined with a time limit on pitchers as well.

Baseball should concentrate on "Play Ball!" instead of "Roll Tape!"

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