While some, yesterday, were calling for instant replay to be instituted in major league games after the botched call on Victorino's "home run", it turns out that irony isn't without a sense of humor.
Now isn't that a coincidence?
The first night Major League Baseball tested instant-replay equipment at Citizens Bank Park, it had a controversial home-run ball in the seventh inning in the Phillies' 8-2 loss to the Florida Marlins.
Shane Victorino's two-run homer off Renyel Pinto looked foul on instant replay. Third base umpire Dale Scott called the ball fair and the umpires conferred after the Marlins protested. But the call stood, cutting the Marlins' lead to 4-2. Scott acknowledged after the game that the ball was foul.
Unfortunately for the Marlins, MLB was testing the equipment it could use in the future only to see how it works. In other words, umpires had no opportunity to run to a TV screen to check it out.
I'm not a big fan of having instant replay infiltrating the game. Once it is in place, I'm afraid it won't stop at just home runs or whether a ball is fair or foul. And that it will be eventually extended to trap or caught balls. And then to whether the runner was safe or not. And after that, God forbid, balls and strikes.
There is an old Arab saying, not that I collect them, that goes: "If you let the camel put its nose in the tent, pretty soon the whole camel will be in your tent".
That is my concern about instant replay.
But this post isn't really about whether instant replay should be employed or not, it is about: how weird was it that on the first night of testing that a home run call was wrong and shown to be wrong by video replay?
You just can't make this stuff up.