Dr. KBJ,
Sorry about your team's blown perfect game. You just blogged that the more perfect games thrown cheapens the feat. This sparks a couple of questions.
1.) Should baseball expand replay use? If yes, did you feel this way before tonight's game?
2.) Would you rather have a third perfect game in 4 weeks, or a perfect game blown by a bad call—thus preserving the feat's rarity?
3.) Is this REALLY that bad of a call? The umpire Jim Joyce could have made the same bad call in the 3rd inning without experiencing the backlash and embar[r]assment.
Mark
Note from KBJ: (1) There should be no replay in Major League Baseball. I'm even opposed to those ubiquitous pitch trackers. (2) I have no interest in rarity. Saying (as I did) that the value of a thing depends on the supply of it doesn't mean that I want the supply to remain as it is. (3) The call was terrible, one of the worst I've seen (in 43 years of watching baseball). I expect Bud Selig to reverse the ruling and give Galarraga the perfect game he pitched. By the way, he could not do this if the botched call occurred earlier in the game. It's crucially important that the call, had it been properly made, would have ended the game.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 