Fatwa #26 Pro Umpire

A friend of mine was complaining again about the lack of replay and challenges in baseball.
He thinks the fact that people can now clearly see on television what the umpire can't see on the field is unfair and that it will drive people away from baseball.
I think that adding a replay or a challenge to an already leisurely paced/glacially paced game would kill it dead.
I also think that if baseball is to serve a useful social function then we must retain the tradition of the umpire making the call, even if it is patently obvious to others with technological hindsight that the umpire was wrong.
Why?
Because this is how we learn about the nature of the judiciary in a democracy.
A baseball heading toward the plate isn't ever objectively a strike or a ball. It is only a strike or a ball after the umpire declares it to be one or the other.
You may be able to see it better, but it is the umpire who creates the reality of the situation even if it seems to the whole world to be unfair.
You can already see the comparison to jury trials. Juries are not measures of objective reality. They make a decision, one which the whole rest of the world unfettered by blinkers and rules of evidence, can possibly see as patently wrong. But that's not how the system works.
And where do we teach our kids about this? Not in football where every play now comes with a flag, a coach's challenge and a battery of lawyers threatening to sue the other side and who drop the case in return for a settlement of 5 yards and a loss of down.
Not in basketball or soccer where as far as I can tell penalties are awarded for acting ability alone.
No, we teach our kids about the judiciary in baseball. It is in baseball that we learn that laws are not perfect, that they are administered not by omniscient, omnipotent beings, but by men, sometimes flawed, often short sighted, sometimes blind as a bat. Human beings. That is what baseball teaches us. That the administration of law is never perfect, that we are ultimately limited by our inability to see and know all and that the res publica, the common wealth, the good of the public, is ultimately served by our acknowledgment that nothing is ever perfect, that sometimes the best we can do is to watch a replay later that night, admit that the ump couldn't see it that way from the perspective of the ground, and try again some other day.
Why is this a good thing?
Because the opposite of that, the belief that there is such a thing as perfect human judgment is dangerously arrogant. The belief that mankind, with the help of technology can render perfect judgment on something as arbitrary as baseball is dangerous, because ultimately the very notion of a ball or a strike is not a divine revelation, but something that is always up for interpretation by an umpire. And the belief that you can measure that with a robot in the sky...well, at that point why bother playing the game at all? Why not just let robots play against each other with robots officiating? That way everything can be just perfect.
And you can take that perfect world, wrap it up in spandex put it on a bicycle and let it take up a lane of traffic on I-10 on a Wednesday afternoon at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.