Why should baseball change its rules and overturn obvious errors, as in the recent umpire-botched perfect game? Baseball is the way it's always been, right?
If umpires such as Jim Joyce are going to continue to put themselves in the middle of baseball's biggest plays -- as he did on this slide to home by Detroit's Magglio Ordonez on Thursday -- must big-league baseball remain tied to 1900s thinking in a digital world?
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Designated hitter. Interleague play. Wild cards.
Maple bats. Cowhide balls.
Jets.
It's a good thing Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, whose vision for the game makes myopic umpires Jim Joyce and Don Denkinger look like eagle eyes, wouldn't set a precedent by overturning a blatantly bad call that ruined the recent almost-perfect game of Detroit's Armando Galarraga against the Indians.
Blind Bud knows baseball should always stay the same.
A three-tiered playoff system. West Coast teams. A Canadian team that won it all, twice.
Latinos. Asians.
Blacks.
While Selig had a hand in some big changes, enough is enough.
Why, if you could just bring Ty Cobb back to life, although why anyone should want to do so is unclear, he would say it's the same darn game, right? Only in more colorful language.
Then again, the cuss words would be the only things of color in it.
On-base Plus Slugging (OPS). Walks plus hits per innings pitched (WHIP). Total Player Rating (TPR).
The slider. The splitter.
No spitter.
Baseball should change as little as possible, say those who want to keep the game "pure."
Mascots. Domes. Retractable domes.
Artificial turf. World Series games, at night, and in November.
Instant replay boards.
All Denkinger's gaffe cost the St. Louis Cardinals was a very good shot at winning the 1985 World Series. All Joyce's flub cost was perfection. Instant replay showed both of their hugely missed calls again and again, in excruciating detail.
But bad calls happen. Deal with it.
Steroids. Greenies. "Red juice."
Sosa. McGwire.
Bonds.
Bad records happen, too. Deal with them. (Although baseball didn't, until it was too late).
Videography. Computer modeling. Mission statements.
Radar guns. Pitch counts.
QuesTec.
Baseball will have none of this new-fangled technology and fancy Dan business school jargon. Except selectively.
Tennis uses a triangulation system that relies on high-speed cameras that are extremely accurate to adjudicate line calls. But baseball can only go by what it sees. Except for balls and strikes and home run calls.
Nor does baseball want to stop the breakneck pace of the game when Rafael Betancourt is on the mound or when Mike Hargrove was in and out of the batter's box.
It will have none of those NFL coaches' challenges to umpires. It will have no stoppages of play when a referee peers at a replay screen under a shroud, looking much as Matthew Brady might have when he took Honest Abe's photograph with flash powder and a puff of smoke.
Baseball will take vehement manager/player/umpire arguments without much possibility of redressing injustices instead.
To purists, baseball was just perfect the way it was in the old days, when the in-shoot and the out-shoot were the new pitches and "Wee Willie" Keeler was hitting 'em where they ain't, when players rode the rails and played two, and when 16 teams in 10 cities made up the major leagues.
Cuban defectors. The World Baseball Classic. The Olympics, for a time.
Big markets. Small markets.
Free agency.
Some naysayers will rail against the baseball Luddites who refuse to use replay to review egregious calls. These radicals will oppose leaders like Selig for his refusal to correct obvious errors.
Such insurgents live in the modern world, with all its fuss and worry. They do not reside in a dream world, in a rural country, in a safer time, when Morse Code was the big new thing.
Change? Why, baseball hasn't changed, the purists say. Just look at the Yankees.