The temptation would be to overrule the call ...

Boy, I haven’t felt so divided about a decision in years. It’s almost thorny enough to make me feel sorry for Bud Selig, and that’s saying something.

There’s a part of me that wants to say let the commissioner step in and with a scratch of his pen give the Galarraga kid the perfect game he so handsomely earned last night in Detroit.

At first blush it’s hard to see the downside of such a move. Doesn’t affect the actual outcome of the game, merely adds a rather significant component to the historical record. Nobody with any dog in the fight is likely to complain about such a correction, though there would certainly be howls from baseball purists. More on that later.

But.

Such a move would raise the ugly precedent of having one game adjudged by methods and standards not applied to all the rest of them. I can guarantee you that in every no-hitter or perfect game in MLB history, there were missed ball-and-strike calls and probably a few misfires on the bases, but there was no redress. In short, it would disturb the integrity of the game, and we all know how assiduously the sanctimonious solons of MLB are willing to apply that particular standard.

Umpires have blown literally thousands of thousands of calls over the 135 or so years of ostensibly major-league play, and it seems a little creepy to jump in an overrule one of those after the fact.

And while my own desires about how this would be resolved don’t amount to a bucket of warm spit, I can with more enthusiasm wade in on the question of what is likely to happen in the wake of this blown call.

The screams for use of instant replay will be unending, possibly even to the point of getting it put into place in some modest fashion – at first. After all, we are a great nation for getting serious matters addressed after the devastation of same has already taken place.

Thus we dutifully take off our shoes at the airport because of one idiot, even though what he perpetrated will likely never be attempted again. And we’ll probably provide some legitimate concern about oversight of offshore oil drilling now that we’ve quite possibly suffered the greatest environmental disaster in our lifetimes, and just as soon as our economy actually does tank over the avarice of Wall Street we will grudgingly try to sidestep the appalling indentured servitude of our legislators and enact safety measures that might protect, oh, I don’t know, say the livelihoods of 300 million citizens.

If I seem to digress I do not. If we enact arduous replay regimens because of this one horrid event that has already taken place, it’s no different than any of the other ex-post-facto nonsense that we’ve collectively undertaken over the years.

So, we’ll likely address this troublesome issue of blown calls by overreacting and installing cumbersome replay routines that will make baseball more like football, with all the gee-whiz obeisance to technological wizardry that we can muster.

But how cool is it that baseball is a game that can go on for more than century before a perfect game gets torpedoed on what would have been the final play?

Aw, what the hell. Go ahead and overrule it, Bud, and give the kid his perfecto.

See, I told you I was torn on this one.