I was at Camden Yards last Wednesday night, sitting behind the Orioles dugout with a clean look straight down the left-field line. Pete Alonso hit a ball that should’ve been his 30th home run of the year. From where I sat, it was fair. So did most of the ballpark — and yes, I’m a lifelong Orioles fan, but this isn’t homer bias talking.
MLB’s own replay system said no home run. And here’s the part that should bother every fan of this game, not just ours: it couldn’t fully explain why.
Replay exists because baseball once got a call wrong and owned it. In 2010, umpire Jim Joyce blew a call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game. Baseball didn’t bury the tape. It fixed the system. That’s the origin story, and it’s still paying off — MLB even rolled out Hawk-Eye tracking technology for the strike zone this year. Good.
But the rule for overturning Alonso’s call required a “definitive” camera angle, and Camden Yards doesn’t have the one that would have settled it. I’m not the only one saying so. Chris Bassitt, our starting pitcher, called it “crazy in 2026.” Manager Craig Albernaz pointed out the dugout iPads were already showing ball-tracking data that contradicted the call on the field. Alonso himself proposed the fix: a pylon camera, like the NFL uses, shooting straight up the line.
Here’s the twist that should make the league sheepish: MLB isn’t short on cameras. It installed that Hawk-Eye system in all 30 ballparks this year — real money, real infrastructure, real commitment to getting calls right. It just pointed the cameras at the strike zone and left the foul poles and lines alone. MLB has the calculator. It keeps choosing to do the math by hand.
And this is not uncharted territory. Tennis makes automatic, final line calls with 18 cameras and zero judges. Soccer mounts cameras on every goalpost and pings the referee’s watch within a second of the ball crossing the line. The NHL just outfitted all 32 arenas with cameras aimed at the blue lines and the net. Even the NFL’s imperfect pylon cams at least try to answer the question.
‘Could not definitively determine… the call stands’ isn’t a ruling. It’s an institution hiding behind a rule instead of using the technology it already owns. Process is not the same as trust. MLB can own the miss, or it can keep hiding behind procedure. It has the cameras. It has the vendor. It has thirty ballparks and thirty foul poles.
Install the cameras. Get it right.
