The Left hates baseball, mostly because it is the one sport that has resisted the cultural nonsense we see in other sports. Blacks don’t dominate and there is little opportunity for them to showboat. That vexes the Left greatly. It’s also the sport with the highest percentage of old stock owners and front office people. Throw in the fact it has thrived, despite not being a TV friendly sport and its existence seems like an affront to the ruling orthodoxy. Therefore, the Left is always agitating to change the sport in order to ruin it.

A fine example of this is Major League Baseball’s decision to implement replay next year. There’s no need for this. Umpires certainly make mistakes and those mistakes alter the outcome of games. No one has ever been able to make the case that the overall results of the season have ever been altered by umpire mistakes. If I have to make ten decisions to save my life, one mistake kills me. If I have to make a million decisions and each one may shorten my lifespan by five minutes, any one call is meaningless to me.

That’s the case in baseball where each game features hundreds of small decisions by umpires. According to people who claim to have studied it, they get it right 90% of the time. That does not count the five hundred decisions on balls and strikes. Given that no one can come up with an example of a mistake costing a game, which then altered the outcome of the season, a big portion of the 10% in question either is self-canceling or irrelevant. That and the mistakes often cancel one another out even in the course of games.

There’s nothing to be gained by adding instant replay. There’s also the fact that the games are long enough now. In fact, they are too long. When I was a kid, games last about 2.5 hours, with games often coming it under two hours. Today, games last three hours and in the post-season, they last four hours. That’s too long. Adding another reason to slow the flow of the game just means the games will drag out even longer. Frankly, if you wanted to ruin the game, making the games longer is what you would seek to do.

Frankly, I’ve never understood the fetish to turn sports into battles between teams of robots executing code. No one pays to see an ATM machine perform tasks. Put two chess playing computers on TV and no one watches. People want to see humans make mistakes. That’s the point of sports. The guy who overcomes a bad call to win is a hero, while the guy who lets a bad call ruin his focus is a loser. In baseball, arguing with umps is a part of what makes the game fun. A baseball game is not heart surgery.

There’s an error rate that is acceptable and for 100 years the game has existed within that error rate. The people obsessed “with getting it right” don’t get the point of the game. These are people who have become convinced that making columns in a spreadsheet happy is the point of life. Culture is about celebrating what makes us human. Sport is popular because it reenacts the ups and downs of life. It also features the conflict of men, but in a format in which no one dies in the combat. Replay advocates don’t get that.