Roy Edroso says "je refuse!" to video review in baseball, with a plea for the charm of the old school:
I'm an old crank and I want players to wear baggy pants and have names like "Cap." Well, not really. But too much tech is too much tech, and baseball's threshold of too-much is lower than that of most other endeavors.
I like the baggy pants, high socks, and funky names as much as the next crank. It's one reason I like the players with old school affectations like Nick Swisher or Barry Zito or even El Duque. The latter has the cojones to tug his socks high, wear cashmere turtlenecks off-field, and use an absurd swanlike windup. He even throws an eephus pitch, the very antithesis of modern power pitching techniques.
Edroso says that video review would slow the game down too much, and make mere mortals of the umpires, who are supposed to be Jehovan authorities on-field. I heartily agree here. But I have to disagree with him when he says that the batters' stepping out of the box is contributing to the intolerable slowness of baseball. The between-pitch routines are absolutely essential to the subtle psychology between batter and pitcher. Each is trying to upset the other's rhythm, timing, and routine. With each aware that the other is doing this, the guesses and second-guesses and third-guesses and nth-guesses stack upon one another in an infinite regress unmatched in any other sport. "He knows I like to hit a first-pitch fastball, so I'll probably see something else, but he knows that I know that he knows this, so perhaps he'll surprise me with exactly what I want." And so on. Without the cat-and-mouse stepping in and out of the batter's box, or on and off the pitcher's rubber, this self-contained mutual guessing would fade into the background, and the pitcher-batter relationship would not have nearly the subtlety it does.
Video review would violate the relationship too, by injecting a new element to upset timing. The pitcher and batter provide the timing for every play. Without their mutual agreement, there can be no play. If video review is allowed to interrupt the game, their centrality is destroyed. New tools like Questec pitch tracking, which lets the league penalize umpires for bad ball/strike calls, works non-invasively: the information is collected and only released to the umpire after the game. It's standing over the umpire's shoulder, yes, but it isn't speaking. Video review would produce a new and disruptive "voice" on the field, one which would drown out the pastoral quiet and self-contained simplicity that defines the game.