Hitting The Cutoff Man

By now, the story of Armando Galarraga's Jim Joyce-fueled not-quite-perfect game has already been rehashed and dissected a million times, so I won't bother with relating the basics or my plan for replay or anything like that.

What I will say is that this incident is a symptom of something that drives me nuts about baseball. Now, obviously I love baseball -- why else would I be writing a blog about it? But in my mind it's also the world's most self-important sport, this side of polo. Allow me to explain.

Other major sports -- football, basketball, hockey and tennis, for example -- have to varying degrees embraced the same ethic that pervades American life in general: a yearning for progress, a love of technology, a desire to move forward. These sports understand that the power of the human eye pales in comparison to the ingenuity of the human mind and the solutions it can come up with to combat the eye's shortcomings. Hence, they deploy some form of technologically driven replay system to help correct what baseball "purists" lovingly describe as the "human element."

In baseball, the technology exists for a comprehensive replay system that could quickly and easily overturn egregious calls by umpires. But so far, that technology has only been deployed on home run calls, and even that took a while.

It all fits with this feeling some seem to have that baseball is somehow special and traditional in a way that precludes an advancement out of the Dark Ages.

That's a bunch of crap. As much as we cherish baseball and its rhythms, its deliberate pacing, its intellectual nature and its history, it's still a game. More than that, it's a game with hundreds of millions of dollars and people's livelihoods on the line, not to mention the emotions of hundreds of thousands of fans. Those are stakes that demand a respect for the truth more than some vague devotion to human fallibility.

When it comes to any other aspect of modern life -- communications, travel, business, medicine, finances and so many other things, not to mention other sports -- we happily waive our right to the whims of the "human element" for the benefits of accuracy, safety, convenience or whatever the case may be. It's time for baseball to quit holding out.

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