On the selective nature of instant replay

There's really nothing left to say about last night's Tigers game.  The call was bad.  I watched it live and I knew before even seeing the replay.  Galarraga knew, hence the grin.  This isn't what I want to talk about.

A bad call also gifted the Mariners a win in the 9th inning of a 1-1 game.  The full speed replay is fractionally closer than the Galarraga call, but slow-mo inspection and still photos clearly indicate that the runner was out, which would have ended the inning.  Instead a run scored, Twins lose, because an umpire made a bad call.  This also isn't what I want to talk about.

Baseball instituted a restricted form of instant replay in the summer of 2008, after a sequence of increasingly dodgy and incorrect home run calls.  It's only used to determine home runs, whether they clear the fence, whether it was fair or foul, and whether the ball was interfered with by a fan.  That's it.  Base calls, balls and strikes, balks and errors are still handled solely by human beings.  This follows similar setups to basketball, which only reviews buzzer-beater baskets, and football's arcane list of reviewable infractions.  The concept that some decisions can be reviewed and some not is rather firmly enshrined in professional sports.

However, there's an inconsistency here.  Basketball doesn't want to review foul calls because these are largely judgments that don't translate well to slow-motion.  Incidental contact happens.  Football's happy to use replay for precision measurements (in or out of bounds, ball placement) but again they don't want to be in the business of adjudicating interference and holding calls after the fact.  These are decisions that are largely interpretive and require the context of the moment for trained officials to determine whether a jersey grab is infractionary enough to draw a flag.

Baseball's safe-or-out baserunning calls are not interpretive.  There's no wiggle room.  You beat the ball to the bag or you didn't.  TV networks have been doing slow motion reviews of base calls for decades.  This is precisely the kind of situation where instant replay is appropriate.  It's not about an inch or two on the strikezone, or about a batter's intent to swing, or a pitcher's movement towards home plate.  Did the foot hit the bag before the ball hit the glove.  It's a yes/no answer.  There's no room for interpretation.

It's mindboggling that MLB doesn't have replay for this.  I understand that they're resistant to digital encroachments into the mystical strike zone, but we now have a situation where, in one night, umpires changed the outcome of a game in one situation, and changed baseball history with another, because the league is too proud to be accurate.