For all those who said that baseball had no precedent for overruling the blatantly erroneous call of umpire Jim Joyce and validating the perfect game that Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had so obviously pitched, please travel with me back to Yankee Stadium on the sultry afternoon of July 24, 1983, when a two-run home run by George Brett of the Kansas City Royals was voided because an umpire ruled that Brett had too much pine tar on his bat. The Royals protested–at first vehemently, on the field, and then rather more decorously in the office of American League president Lee MacPhail, who decided that the rule was a technical one and since Brett “did not violate the spirit of the rules” with his tarry bat, he voided the Yankee victory, restored the home run, and ordered the game resumed from the point of Brett’s home run.
MacPhail evidently had not only the good sense that Bud Selig lacks, but a better appreciation of baseball’s role in American life. “The spirit of the rules” is precisely the sort of thing that needs to be invoked at this time. It needs to be invoked because Galarraga was so obviously jobbed, because nobody would be in any injured by an act of magnaminity, because no untoward precedent will be set because nothing like this will happen again in our lifetimes, because once, just once, I would like to see a person of public responsibility strike a blow for justice. And what if something like it did happen again? Well, let’s leave it to our descendants to act in the spirit of the rules as they sort through the issues. They couldn’t do a less enlightened job than Selig.