I have received an overwhelmingly negative response to my instant replay suggestion, which has spawned at least one boycott of NR.

Here is a pretty typical anti-email:

–Part of the charm of baseball is that, like life, it is often unfair. The game is a great character builder. I would think a conservative would understand this intuitively.
Blown calls, sure, but another chapter in baseball lore. Twenty years from now some guy in a bar in Anaheim, Calif., will be ranting “We wuz robbed!” about the A.J. play in Game 2 of the 2005 ALCS.
Thank the baseball gods for that!
I was talking the other day with a fellow, a computer expert, who tells me that the technology exists today whereby we don’t even need umpires. We could install computer sensors to call the balls and strikes or even to make the call on a stolen base or the play at the plate.
I shuddered at the prospect.
Spare me instant replay. I can live with Don Denkinger’s blown call, Jeffery Maier’s interference and the hapless Steve Bartman. All fodder for great baseball colloquy.
If football wants to jack around with instant replay, fine. I don’t care.
Now for my principal objection to your post–no “flow” to baseball? Can you possibly be serious? I thought you were a baseball fan.
The “flow,” dear Rich, begins with the first pitch and ends, like it did the other night, with a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth by a fellow who hit zero–zip, nada, zilch–home runs all year long.
Just another installment in the greatest game ever invented.

And here is a pretty typical–if surprisingly temperate–traditionalist rant e-mail:

– No. No. No.
And no interleague games.
And no designated hitter.
And return to a balanced 154-game schedule: 2 leagues, 2 divisions in each league, each division having 8 teams.
And no wild-card game.
And smaller gloves.
And at least half of the League Championship and World Series games should be during the daytime.
And mandatory drug-testing with severe penalties for violations. (And I say this as a SF Giants fan, so you know I’m serious. Bye-bye, Barry.)

Thanks to everyone who sent e-mails. A few quick things. Don’t worry: Instant replays won’t suddenly make baseball fair or perfect–there will still be plenty of bizarre occurrences and unfair breaks. As for the flow of the game, I think no game is better at building tension than baseball. I love that about it. But there are delays all the time, visits to the mound, pitching changes, arguments, etc. (that sometimes is part of the tension-building). What we’re talking about here is the period that now is taken up with a manager stomping around on the field after a controversial call as everyone watching on TV looks again and again at replays from every angle. Under this modest proposal that period would instead be taken up with an umpire looking at a screen off to the side of the field as . . . everyone watching on TV looks again and again at replays from every angle. Hardly a radical shift. Regarding the traditionalist rant, I agree with the last two items. One wonderful thing about the Yankee-Red Sox series at the end of the season was having consequential games played with those autumnal shadows on the field. Real traditionalists, by the way, should check out this Wall Street Journal article from the weekend about increasing numbers of people playing baseball by 19th century rules.