As one who has long opposed the idea of instant replay in baseball, I have to admit the umpires are making a strong case for introducing replays on a game-wide basis. How can they be so bad?

Three weeks ago they couldn’t count to four, as in four balls. The other night an umpire couldn’t see a tag right in front of him. The tag was clear enough that it was seen by everyone watching on television and the fans who remained in the 19th inning at Turner Field in Atlanta.

The call by umpire Jerry Meals would have been bad in any circumstance, but the timing made it worse. It decided the outcome of the game between two playoff contenders, the Braves and the Pirates.

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Two years ago, not long after the All-Star break, maybe the beginning of August, I declared that the Minnesota Twins would win the American League Central title. The Twins, at the time, were somewhere from four to six games behind Detroit and hadn’t posed a challenge to the Tigers all season.

The problem was I didn’t make my declaration to anyone but myself; I never wrote it anywhere so I couldn’t take credit when the Twins pulled even with the Tigers on the next-to-last day of the season, then beat them in a one-game playoff.

I’m not going to make that mistake again. I will say simply they’re back.

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The Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays began the week with the season’s 39th 1-0 game, but it was far different from any of the first 38. It took them 16 innings to score the game’s solitary run.

How can two major league teams play 15 or 16 innings against each other without scoring a run? There is no easy answer to that question, if any at all, at least not that the people I talked to found.

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