The Miami Herald has a long and interesting piece on the debate over using instant replay in sports. With lots of obvious and not so obvious blunders in the CS and World Series, the piece examines why baseball is reluctant to embrace what lots of other sports have embraced.

The Herald provides some terrific history:

It was nearly 43 years ago, on Dec. 7, 1963, that revolutionary CBS producer Tony Verna changed the way America -- and eventually the world -- watched sports.

Verna believed there was too much dead time during football game broadcasts. ''You could eat a ham sandwich in the time it took Norm Van Brocklin to get back to the huddle,'' he told reporters.

So, he came up with the idea of reshowing plays immediately after they happened. Until that point, replays were available only at halftime and postgame. Verna chose the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia as a guinea pig because Roger Staubach was the hottest quarterback around.

He spent three quarters trying to get it right, at one point discovering an I Love Lucy episode where he had hoped a football play would be.

Finally, in the fourth quarter, he got it to work and alerted game announcer Lindsey Nelson, ''Here it comes.'' Viewers got an immediate second look at Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh's 1-yard touchdown.

''This is not live!'' Nelson screamed into the microphone. ``Ladies and gentlemen, Army has not scored again!''

Voila! Instant replay.

Within a few years, it was a regular part of sports programming.

RTWT