Many a human endeavor has come to grief through the obsessive pursuit of perfection. Sadly, this seems to be the case with Major League Baseball, which increasingly relies on instant replay to review umpires’ decisions. 

A fair sampling of televised games through the first three weeks of the current season leaves a couple of impressions. One is that a replay review, or the managerial contemplation of asking for one, has become nearly a default option on just about every bang-bang play. We doubt that this is what baseball had in mind when it instituted video second-guessing a couple of seasons ago; more probably it was intended to rectify egregious umpire blunders that alter the course of a game, something that happens occasionally but not all that often. The second impression is that even with the aid of replay cameras, officials in New York are often unable to quickly determine whether the umpire’s call on the field was right or wrong. The result is a significant interruption of the game’s natural rhythm, as players stand around uncomfortably on the field for a couple of minutes, or more, waiting for the jury’s verdict.

The supporters of replay argue that this is a small price to pay for accuracy, and we have no doubt that many fans agree. We are, however, great believers in imperfection. It’s what makes us human, rather than divine, and the last time we looked, baseball is played, and officiated over, by humans. Yes, umpires sometimes make mistakes, but so do players and managers (although the latter’s errors in tactics are often harder for casual fans to discern). If baseball gets overly tangled up in the men in blue and their decisions, something important about the game will be lost.

One thing that seems already on the way to being lost, or sadly diminished, by the polite request for a replay review is the colorful rite of the managerial meltdown, in which the enraged skipper goes nose to nose with the offending umpire, sometimes accompanied by spectacular finger wagging, arm waving, dirt kicking, hat tossing and ripping out of bases. The umpire, impassive at first, listens to the manager’s appeal stone-faced until either the tantrum runs its course, the ump himself blows a gasket and starts barking back, or the manager utters one of the “magic words” that result in automatic ejection. Those words are nowhere specified in the baseball rulebook but are commonly thought to include offensive reference to lineage or certain unnatural acts. Umpires, however, contend that it is not the magic word itself that seals the ejection, but the manager’s decision to precede it with “you.”

In our viewing sample we have seen nothing this season or last comparable, for instance, to the 1978 outburst by then-Twins Manager Gene Mauch, who returned to the dugout at Fenway Park distraught at the injustice of being ejected by the ump and hurled onto the field every bit of equipment he could lay his hands on as his stunned players looked on. The estimable Earl Weaver and Lou Piniella are but two others who compiled distinguished records of unbridled dissent during their managerial tenures, and whose eruptions live on via the Internet. 

Of course, you know and we know that this is bad behavior to model for young and old fans alike, who are expected to agree to disagree in a civil fashion in their life outside the ballpark. But we would also note the irony that as the high-decibel, out-of-control shouting match ebbs as an institution in baseball, it is becoming a staple of political discourse, as this year’s presidential debates have conclusively demonstrated. All in all, we prefer our irrational arguments carried on between the white lines of the baseball field.