I wrote a long post about how instant replay is an absolute necessity and how the arguments against it are utter bunk, and I clicked to submit, and my computer or bloguin or somebody ate the entire post. I don't have the stomach to write it again now. Condensed to three things:

1. I've written it all before, in a context that didn't hit quite so close to home.

2. Umpires are not an essential part of baseball's tradition or lore or anything else. Umpires only matter at all when they screw up; the only notable things about umpires are the stereotypes that they're fat and stupid and blind. Not that I'm arguing for removal of umpires completely (though if anyone has a workable idea, I'm all ears), just that each and every one of their decisions that don't affect continuing play before the next pitch (such as, oh, say, when a ball lands completely in fair territory and then bounds into the stands, or when an outfielder either catches or traps a low liner with no one on base, or on one of those absolute crapshoot check-swing calls) can and should be instantly reviewed in a matter of seconds in high definition.

3. Cuzzi didn't lose the game for the Twins. Delmon Young and Joe Nathan and (especially) Carlos Gomez did. But Cuzzi's call very well may have changed the outcome of the game -- there can really be no doubt that Mauer would have scored if it's a double rather than a single, which means that Teixeira's homer (which travelled all of like 20 feet and wouldn't have been out in any other park, but I digress) could only have tied the game -- and while Delmon and Gomez and Nathan made mistakes, those are baseball mistakes, made by baseball players. Those happen, and are part of the game. Cuzzi's mistake was the unfathomably incompetent mistake of a person who has no business impacting the game on the field, and it was utterly avoidable.

Instant replay now. Or, you know, in 2010.