Kids hear this all the time from us old people: “Thank God there were no cell phone cameras when I was young!” Junior rolls his eyes — not because the sentiment isn’t true, but because it’s the 50th time he’s heard it this week. Still, he knows, deep down, that mistakes are better left to memory. More than seven million American children still play baseball. Most of them will never see an automated strike zone. The cultural critic Susan Sontag warned that the camera changes not only what we see, but also that an unquenchable “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” Professional sports are strung out on instant replay, and Major League Baseball has just upped its dosage as it moves toward its Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system. Using tracking technology, the system evaluates pitches with far greater precision than a sweaty umpire ever could. For those concerned with fairness and efficiency, the goals of ABS are difficult to oppose. The results are indisputable. Yet in eliminating bad calls, instant replay and ABS also eliminate much of baseball’s humanity. Baseball is so difficult that imperfection is unavoidable and failure is woven into the game. From Fred Merkle’s baserunning blunder in 1908, to Bill Buckner’s error in 1986, to Jim Joyce’s blown call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game in 2010, some of the game’s most memorable moments emerged from mistakes. They were painful, frustrating, and undeniably “unfair.” Yet they revealed true character, and the stories endured because the mistakes were transcended, replaced by stories of accountability, forgiveness, resilience, humility, and grace. At its core, baseball is ultimately about failure. “If you fail seven out of ten times at bat, you’re headed to Cooperstown,” remains true. In baseball, there is real utility in embracing defeat and disappointment because if you don’t, you’re going to lose your mind and quit. The murky, interpretive space of a particular umpire’s strike zone has always been a part of the rubric. Players and managers have to deal with a mercurial strike zone, and if they argued balls and strikes, it was an unwritten rule that they would be tossed from the game. The lesson here is that life isn’t fair; deal with it. Major League Baseball is, of course, a business, but if we continue to call it our National Pastime, it also bears some responsibility for its negative knock-on effects, in what it normalizes and how it shapes the expectations of the game. More than seven million American children still play baseball. Most of them will never see an automated strike zone. They play under volunteer coaches and imperfect umpires, where bad calls are not technological failures but an inevitable part of the game. One wonders what responsibility the MLB has for that, as what they normalize, the youth imitate. Most youth leagues will never have access to instant replay or automated strike zones. So if the MLB teaches kids that every mistake should be corrected by technology, what message does that send? How will a young player deal with bad calls when their parents and coaches show them those calls on their iPhone 17s? Sports are incubators for civic life. They teach children how to live in a world that is not perfectly fair. That is why they are such a prominent part of schooling. They teach kids to respect authority, even imperfect authority. They teach them perseverance, self-control, and resilience. With our increasingly grievance-over-grit culture, do we really want sports to reinforce the idea that every mistake is a system failure requiring technological correction? A free society depends on folks tolerating imperfection and continuing to participate in institutions despite frustration and disagreement, not on perfect enforcement of rules. Technology like instant replay and ABS may offer “rational solutions,” but we should recognize what we are sacrificing. Baseball has always been a teacher. It has taught generations of Americans how to handle failure, adversity, disappointment, and unfairness with grace. In trying to perfect an imperfect game, we may inadvertently diminish its unseen beauty. Modern culture is addicted to capturing every moment and litigating every slight, whether on a smartphone camera or an automated replay screen. But baseball’s greatest contribution has never been about perfection. It’s about teaching us how to move past errors and “get ’em next time.” These types of lessons can only be learned when we put down the phones, switch off the sensors, and allow ourselves to simply deal with it; whatever that “it” might be. READ MORE from Peter Connolly: Graduated, Not Educated The Radicalization of American Politics The Inevitable Result of Government’s Addiction to Spending Other People’s Money