(September 13, 2013 at 12:11 pm)Texas Sailor Wrote: There are several officials on an NFL field as well, but no matter how many people you have, none of them are impervious to error. When the games on the line, you want the right call. I just wish baseball was as progressive.
I wonder how much of the approach in baseball is based on some form of nationalist politics. Since it's considered to be "the American Pastime" and our national sport, it gets treated differently from other sports (note how long it held that ridiculous anti-trust exemption, and the extent to which congress has fallen over itself to investigate steroid use in baseball, but not in football).
Baseball is slowly adopting instant-replay, and I expect that at some point it will be used to determine close calls at the bases, and whether balls were fair/foul or caught/trapped. It may be a very very long time before it's used to call balls and strikes, but I think that will also happen someday. There is too much money riding on getting the calls right.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
