With the football season getting underway I wasn’t sure www.brushbackpitch.com would debut until sometime around the first of the year. After all, it’s not like the founders of this site don’t already have enough going on.

But this baseball season also has me intrigued, with Tampa Bay contending for the first time, the Chicago Cubs appearing to be one of the league’s strongest teams as they try to break the 100 year streak and the Milwaukee Brewers trying to make the playoffs for the first time since I was 7. So I’ll accelerate the schedule a little bit.

But the issue that has me most intrigued, or irritated, these days is the idea of a mid-year rule change introducing instant replay into Major League Baseball.

Commissioner Bud Selig, according to the Associated Press, expects an announcement “very shortly” that the technology will be available to assist umpires soon.

Why, oh why, would you change rules like this in the middle of the season? Why wouldn’t you test this in the winter leagues somewhere? Why are they trying to fix something mid-year that has never really been that big of a problem before a couple cases early this season?

Major league ballparks are being wired and Selig, who has the confidence of owners but of nobody else but his mother, says he has visited the “war room” in New York where officials will review video feeds. “We’ve spent a lot of time doing a lot of wiring of ballparks, doing a lot of checking,” he says. “Let’s just say my confidence is growing.”

Owners were told during a two-day meeting that an agreement with the umpires’ union was basically in place. Replays would be used to determine whether a ball leaving the field is fair or foul or whether it really went over the fence. It would not be used for close plays on the bases or on balls and strikes … for now.

I’m not sure how you ever put instant replay in place for balls and strikes. But there’s no way, if this works, that it doesn’t someday get expanded to plays on the basepaths as well. Some team will get screwed in a big game and the owner will whine and cry about how if the technology is good for homeruns it should be used for the rest of the game as well.

And you also have to know that in some way, shape, or form, this homerun replay technology is going to come back and bite Selig in the a$$ before the season ends. The electronics will fail or the camera angle will be wrong and the results of a playoff game will be influenced for the worse by a technology these folks are rushing into play because they think because it’s technology it’s automatically going to make things better.

Knee-jerk reactions to baseball’s problems dog Selig constantly. It’s how we ended up with the ridiculous idea of having the All-Star game, a fraud of an event whose participants are voted on by fans in a popularity contest, deciding who hosts the World Series.

Maybe instant replay is a good idea for the game. But for a game that is well into its second century you just don’t make that decision mid-stream. You test it. And when you are comfortable with the test results you test it again. Then, if everything goes well during the offseason, you implement it for Spring Training next March. And THEN you put it in play when the games matter for real.

Yes, the fact that they aren’t going to test it somehow, somewhere means that during the American League Championship series the technology will fail creating another negative storyline for the game. At this point it is nearly inevitable.

It’s Bud Selig. It’s the way it goes.