Major League Baseball is the only sport that still uses landline phones in their stadiums (Business Insider). These washed-up phones have been know to stir up some trouble with teams and performance over the recent years. We saw it first in the 2011 World Series with the Cardinals.” In the 2011 World Series, then-Cardinals manager Tony La Russa was unable to communicate with his bullpen, which resulted in the Cardinals twice bringing in the wrong pitcher and ultimately losing the game,” simply due to the landline phones still used in baseball today (Business Insider). Even more recently, the dugout landline phones struck again this previous playoffs during a crucial game. “The landline phones between the dugouts and bullpens stopped working during Game 4 of the American League Division Series between the Astros and Royals, the most recent reminder that the communication system is antiquated and in dire need of an update” (Business Insider).
If so many problems come with these phones and they are affecting games, why is Major League Baseball still using them? Andrew Keh states, in his article posted in the New York Times, that maybe it’s because “the attitude among baseball clubs is a familiar one in a sport tied tightly to old-fashioned ways: why change what works?” (The New York Times).
If the phones are causing such issues, the MLB needs to do something about it. Teams and managers are tired of dealing with the discrepancies that come with these phones. “In 2013, ESPN’s Darren Rovell reported that the MLB planned to implement T-Mobile cellphones in dugouts, but the technology is still being tested” (Business Insider). If this is their plan of action, they need to speed up the process. How many more important games being lost because of this issue is it going to take? It’s 2015— it’s time to hangup the old-fashioned, corded landline phones and upgrade to a more efficient, modern way of communicating between the dugouts and bullpens.
Video: Even David “Big Papi” Ortiz hates the landline phones!
Works Cited
Keh, Andrew. “Dugout Phones: Last Bastion of the Landline.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/sports/baseball/world-series-dugout-phones-last-bastion-of-the-landline.html?_r=0>.
Knowlton, Emmett. “MLB Playoffs Once Again Plagued by Problems with Landline Phones.” Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 12 Oct. 2015. Web. 10 Dec. 2015. <http://www.businessinsider.com/mlb-landline-phones-fail-2015-10>.