It's not the umpires, it's us. (Not just about baseball)

Much of the attention in postseason baseball to date has been on the umpires- they blew this call or that, they should have instant replay for more things. To me, this sounds like "Waah, it's not fair!" Something a nine year-old would say. And baseball should know better. Baseball is a game of failure. The best hitters fail nearly 70% of the time. Even when you hit the ball, more often than not you will not get on base and on any given play the probability of your scoring a run, which as far as I know is the object of the game, is tiny.

People don't like to fail, and when they do fail, for many people the first instinct is to blame someone else for your failure. In many aspects of life, you can blame others and get away with it, because often nobody knows the truth except you. One of the nice things about sports is their relative transparency. You can see with your own two eyes who tripped, dropped the ball, struck out, or walked in a run. This is true for baseball in particular, because even though it's a team game it's mostly a game of individual confrontations. Pitcher versus batter, runner versus fielder. Baseball has a very good system of allocating success, failure, and ultimate responsibility; there are very few opportunities to blame others.

There have been missed calls by officials in sports since there have been sports. They are part of sports' fabric. I don't really think anyone is saying that umpiring is worse now than it used to be. What's changed is our ability to evaluate how well the umpires are doing their jobs. Baseball was around for close to 100 years before instant replay was invented in 1963. And part of the sport's (or world's, for that matter) history is about arguments. Given the lessons of we can learn from the history of the world, one might rationally expect that if instant replay arguments were eliminated that we'd find something else to argue about.

Again, the point is here isn't that it's okay to make mistakes. The point is that no matter what you do, people are always going to want to blame others for their own shortcomings and whine about it, even if there somehow invented a perfect officiating system. Although I'm pretty sure "It's not fair!" is the rallying cry more of the baby boomers and their progeny than it was of prior generations, I'm just as sure that blaming others for one's own mistakes is either innate or intrinsic in the core value systems people live by. And the population at this point in history, where most popular communications technologies are in their relative infancy and society as a whole feels like it's in flux, the time is ripe for complaining about other people's mistakes.

So over the winter they'll decide whether to offer instant replay for a few other kinds of calls (and let's see them try to make a machine that can tell you if Chase Utley actually got hit by a pitch tonight). But I'm betting that whatever they decide will not significantly change the amount of arguing or whining. It just comes too naturally to us.