Many other sports already use cameras and instant replay to help their officials, in fact it’s hard to imagine life in the NFL in particular without seeing the officials disappear “under the hood” to look at a disputed call or play.

Now it seems that we will have to wait a little longer for the technological revolution to affect MLB scores despite only some six weeks ago the commissioner (Bud Selig) saying that it would be available for the new season, now only four months away.

Selig has said repeatedly over the last six months that baseball plans to expand replay to cover fair/foul balls and trap/catch calls in time for the 2013 season. But now there is a disagreement over how to implement the use of the technology, with a split over whether to use traditional replay, or new, experimental technologies, which were tested in the two New York stadiums late in the season.

Those “new” systems included the Hawk-Eye animation system used in tennis and golf’s TrackMan radar technology – officials are though sceptical are to whether either are a good fit for the type of calls that they would be used to adjudicate on in baseball.

So that leaves traditional replay technology, which is currently being used to review disputed home run calls. But in order for traditional replay to be expanded effectively for use on other types of calls, MLB probably would have to standardize the number of cameras, and even dictate specific camera angles, at all 30 ballparks.

Of course moving the game forward in this manner would incur a significant cost and there is another sticking point – where do you station the replay officials? Some favour having them at every ballpark while others would have them positioned in a central location – the addition of those replay umpires would have to be negotiated with the umpires’ union, however and that, too, would involve a major expenditure of dollars.

So while baseball continues to push toward more replay decisions, it appears to be running out of time to implement it in time for the 2013 regular season. That is despite having all the players, officials, league management and punters betting on baseball in favour of expanding its role. Unfortunately for all its proponents putting all the pieces together to implement the scheme has turned out to take much longer than even the commissioner of baseball ever envisioned.