Brain Lemon

There are a few things that animate people on Twitter like no other.  In my sphere a major political event does the trick.  Other potential culprits include a popular TV show, awards show, or movie.  But often all of these pale compared to a major event in sports.  One team winning, another losing, an amazing accomplishment, or an athlete’s stupid behavior can all get Twitter going quite well.

Tonight’s event was the near perfect game by Armando Gallaraga of the Detroit Tigers.  In the next 24 hours many people will see the video, so I won’t bother posting something that will be on many sites and on TV.  The short story is this – an umpire, Jim Joyce, blew a call on the final out, ruling a runner safe when he was clearly out.  This blown call resulted in a single hit that destroyed the perfect game.  Fans of all allegiances were justifiably outraged.  Within seconds, all manner of nasty things were being said about the ump.  Only after he graciously apologized for his error did the attacks die down.

Now, clearly an inevitable result of this event will be the resurrection of the debate regarding instant replay in baseball.  Replay is something well known to fans of football, hockey, tennis, and other sports.  Each of these sports utilizes cameras and technology to help correct erroneous calls.  Fans have become completely accustomed to the football challenge especially, and the red flag that signifies such a challenge.  I don’t see any significant movement in play to go back to the days before the challenge.  The idea essentially amounts to this – fans want the right call to be made.  With the game often on the line, being accurate is important.

With baseball, though, some fans tend to react quite differently.  This is largely because baseball, unlike football or hockey, has a great deal of romance to it.  It is deeply linked with American history and is viewed as a quintessentially American thing.  Baseball fans, then, view any change to the game with skepticism, especially one that removes what is viewed as part of baseball’s “magic.”  These fans, then, argue that instant replay expansion would destroy the crucial human element of the game.  To them, the failure of the umpires to make perfect calls is one of the important parts of the game.

In my view, these fans are misguided.  I can understand the need to preserve the “essence” of baseball – it is my favorite sport, after all.  But fans that refuse the introduction of modern technology into baseball are ignoring the fact that such technology could potentially eliminate many of the questionable or flat-out wrong calls that plague every team.  When something as meaningful as a perfect game is on the line, it is simply too big to be robbed by an obvious human error.  The fans who oppose replay seem to be fetishizing this sort of preventable error, as if the baseball gods will be pleased that we kept their sport unblemished. (Though, in terms of blemishment, I’d say baseball is pretty damn damaged already by widespread steroid abuse.)

An analogy I could make here is to those who are purists in the political arena.  There is a certain subset of any political group that insists on total purity, and in candidates meeting every requirement and proper opinion.  They are willing to accept defeat and minority status in order to maintain such standards.  In a similar way, baseball fans who oppose replay seem willing to accept that their beloved sport will be filled with easily-correctable mistakes, including earth-shattering ones like tonight’s, in order to maintain the sanctity of the sport.  They are willing to see history prevented, games lost and won wrongly, records affected, and seasons changed by generally honest mistakes that could be erased.  And all to preserve this sense of baseball as something more than a sport, in almost a religious fashion.

I come at it from the complete opposite direction.  I’ve long thought, for instance, that computer assistance could be used in many parts of the game.  While I am sure such changes won’t be adopted, I’ve thought computer-assisted strike zones and safe/out base calls could be implemented using current technology.  Both of these changes would be accepted in time and eliminate a huge amount of uncertainty and frustration for players, managers, and fans.  And in time, such events as occurred to tonight could be avoided entirely.  The game would change, for sure, but it would be into one where winning and losing is not affected by an umpire being distracted or a constantly changing strike zone.  And I, for one, think that it would be a better game for it.