i'm a very very complex person

Even the most casual followers of baseball know what happened between Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce last week: Galarraga, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was one out away from a perfect game against the Cleveland Indians when Cleveland rookie Jason Donald hit what should have been a routine ground ball. He hustled to first, where umpire Jim Joyce made the biggest mistake of his career by calling Donald safe. The perfect game was lost, a storm of outrage was provoked, and another defining moment was entered into the annals of baseball history.

The response was instant; almost before the game was over, someone had created a facebook group called "Jim Joyce Sucks." The call sparked controversy in part because it was so significant and dramatic (the last out of a perfect game!), but also because millions of people watching the game on television knew instantly that the call was wrong. Within moments of the play, viewers had seen the replay in slow motion, at speed, in freeze frame, and from multiple different angles. Joyce's mistake was immediately--and unequivocally--evident to everyone except the people on the field. Many fans and commentators have taken this incident as irrefutable proof of the need for instant replay in baseball, but to me it is the opposite.

The beauty of baseball is in its humanity. Human error has been a part of the game since its inception, on the part of both the players and the officials. Umpires have no tools besides their own fallible senses and brains to rely on in making hundreds of split-second decisions over the course of the game. Of all the major sports, baseball is the least mechanized. There isn't even a clock ticking off the number of seconds left to play; the game lasts as long as it takes. As fans, we don't have to be happy about the role that error plays in the game (I, for one, am never happy when Gordon Beckham bobbles an easy play at second base. Nor when an ump calls a pitch a strike when I am absolutely certain that it's a ball), but we have to accept it.

There has been a spate of perfect games recently. Galarraga's would have been the third this season (after Dallas Braden's for Oakland, and Roy Halladay's for Philadelphia), and my favorite pitcher of all time, Mark Buehrle, threw one last year. But the current profusion of perfect games is deceptive--these things are really rare. And the possibility of blown calls is one of the reasons for that. We have no way of knowing how many other perfect games were nipped in the bud by a blown call, because each call changes what comes after it. What if Jason Donald had hit his grounder and mistakenly been called safe in the third inning instead of the ninth? How might that have impacted Galarraga's pitching for the rest of the game? Pitchers pitch differently with men on base, and for some pitchers, giving up hits totally changes their psychological approach to the game. Perhaps, if the blown call had come early, Galarraga would have gone on to give up 10 hits in the game, and no one would be talking about him now.

If instant replay were introduced to baseball, we would lose some of this sense of malleability and delicate ambiguity. And what about the strike zone, that invisible box of air that is both the most crucial and most ephemeral element of any baseball game? We must accept the fact that baseball is a game that was never designed for exactitude.

But even more important than losing ambiguity, if instant reply had been available to correct Jim Joyce's error, we would have lost what happened next. Armando Galarraga did not lose his temper. He didn't throw his glove, or storm of the field, or unleash a hateful tirade as some pitchers might have done. And Jim Joyce, as soon as he saw a replay of his call, realized his mistake and was distraught. He immediately went and found Galarraga in the locker room, and wept as he apologized. Galarraga, with a dignity rarely seen in professional sports, accepted the apology. Every one of us has made mistakes when acting quickly and under pressure. Likewise, we have all, at one time or another, been the victim of mistakes made by others. Though both Galarraga and Joyce suffered as a result of this blunder, they transformed their suffering through character and respect.

Baseball fans all know the story of the boy who said, "Say it ain't so," to Shoeless Joe Jackson on the steps of the courthouse after the Black Sox scandal in 1919. Although there are now many reasons to believe that Shoeless Joe was innocent in that scandal, the decision to ban him from baseball has never been overturned and he will never be elected into the hall of fame. This baseball mistake is the reason that I'm a White Sox fan: my great-grandmother was so convinced of Shoeless Joe's innocence that she decided to support the White Sox from that moment onward. She passed her love of the Sox on to my father, and he passed it to me. Perhaps there may be Tigers fans three generations from now who trace their fandom back to the injustice visited on Armando Galarraga. Perhaps not, but either way, this is the way our game works: imperfectly, beautifully, with many ugly moments, and the occasional moment of grace. Let us not try to change that.