It happened again last night. Two calls — Ryan Howard’s catch that wasn’t a catch in the sixth inning; an eighth-inning double play turned by the Yankees that wasn’t a double play because Chase Utley was safe at first, which robbed us of Howard facing Mariano Rivera with runners on first and third with two outs and the Phillies down 3-1 — went the wrong way.

Twitter exploded, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver agreed that these were not the correct calls. I’ve been a proponent of instant replay before. And I’m going to lobby for it again.

First, as PostmanE wrote last night, this Bud Selig explanation about why baseball won’t institute further instant replay is bunk:

“I think my position has been clear,” Selig said. “This is a game of pace. I’m worried a lot about that.”

Selig is against delaying a game for a few minutes and making a pitcher wait while a decision is made. MLB began to use replay in August 2008 and was the last of the four major sports to employ some form of replay to correct calls.

“You’re always concerned about pace,” Selig said. “You’re always concerned about how the game goes. And I haven’t changed my mind at all.”

Come on, Bud. Baseball gets its “pace” interrupted all the time. Players can call timeout pretty much whenever they want. There is no shot clock, there are no minutes ticking down until the end of the half. If a call is bad enough, a manager will go out and argue for (sometimes) several minutes. Couldn’t we instead use that time to figure out if a call is right or not? Shouldn’t that be baseball’s most paramount concern? Getting the call right? And what’s the difference between a pitcher waiting for an instant replay call, and waiting for a manager to stop yelling at an ump? Both disrupt the flow of the game.

But beyond all that, I think there’s a larger issue here. And it has to do with technology, society and a human being’s limits. Part of the reason we knew Howard didn’t actually catch that ball last night is because FOX has a zoom-in cam that showed us as much. (Also: Howard threw the ball to second; if he had caught the ball, he would not have done that.) We simply have video technology now that is better than ever before, that can lead us to the correct answer in an instant. But what do we have in the first-base umpire? A guy that was standing behind Howard, a guy that even if he was in proper position might have made the wrong call, because it was very close. It was a tough call.

Simply put: an HD camera positioned on a player that can be dialed down to slow-motion is perfect. An umpire, a human being, is imperfect, yet we ask them to do a perfect job. This is unrealistic. (This is also an oversimplification: what instant replay really does is give a human better tools in which to judge the outcome of a call. It’s still on the human at the end of the day to render judgment from the technology.) In other industries, in society, in life, we’ve accepted the idea that technology not only makes our life easier, but makes it better. We have DVR, we have automatic vehicles, we have heat and air conditioning in our homes.

In this ideology, baseball is behind the times. But that’s for a reason: this is baseball, goddamnit. This is America’s national pastime, and the powers that be want to keep it as that simple, aw shucks, down-to-earth game it’s always been. Which is an argument I love on the surface, but it’s not very logical. We already have instant replay in baseball … for home run calls.

There was a time when the NFL got a lot of close calls wrong. But because of instant replay, that (rarely) happens anymore.

The longer baseball keeps going against society’s technological advancements, the longer fans and teams are robbed of the right calls on the grandest of baseball stages — the World Series.

And even the biggest baseball purists have to argue that’s just not right.