Robots, not humans, should be calling balls and strikes at every Major League Baseball game. It should have been this way for years. There was a sad reminder of the reluctance to automate this aspect of umpiring on Sunday night when Marty Foster ended the Tampa Bay-Texas game with one of the worst ball-and-strike calls imaginable.

Of course, we won’t be seeing the game utilizing computers to greater effect anytime soon. Commissioner Bud Selig and his inner circle have shown a shocking incompetence in regard to most of the key issues facing the game–instant replay, home-plate collisions, the untenable stadium situations of the A’s and the Rays, the Mets festering ownership crisis–procrastinating rather than acting. These failings have been papered over by the sport’s runaway profits, which have everything to do with the explosion of regional cable and its hunger for a quantity of family-friendly events that defy time-shifting, and little to do with anything in particular that Selig has done.

What are the arguments for not using software to call strikes? There is a tradition of catchers framing pitches, purists will say, which will be lost. A small sacrifice that will eliminate larger issues. You don’t want that much variance in the execution of the rules of any sport, with the egos of the least-important “participants” taking center stage. A loose application of rules also opens up the possibility of officials tilting games for illicit purposes (not the case with the Foster call, of course). And inconsistent outcomes due to human error is one of the reasons why boxing has seen such a decline. (Knowledge of the impact of head injuries has been just as damaging, thinning the ranks of talent.) Professional basketball’s referee scandal of a few years back occurred because the rules of the game allow for far too much interpretation. That needn’t be the case with baseball.

The human element will be lost, the stalwarts argue, not acknowledging that baseball is not some pastoral pastime but a multibillion dollar industry, and one that can easily afford to ensure its integrity if it weren’t for the lethargy and myopia of its highest ranks.•