Hey, Bud, on further review ...

I’m a closet purist about baseball, but even I have to admit that full use of instant replay might be the only rational option baseball officials have to save their game from the blundering men in blue.

As a former baseball writer, I sat in ballparks and watched too many games decided – or altered -- on a call the umps missed.

But no blunder was more clear – or more egregious -- than what I saw the other day in the Angels-Yankees game. Umpire Tim McClelland, his ability to reason having been left in the umpire’s locker room, decided a base-running mix-up wasn't double play but one out, a ruling that allowed a Yankee base-runner to remain on third base even after he was the first of two runners tagged out at the bag.

McClelland butchered the call, something he acknowledged postgame upon seeing a video replay. Had baseball allowed him to use replay, he would have spared himself the public ridicule of explaining the unexplainable.

For there was no disputing that video. It could have done what McClelland and fellow umps couldn’t that night: get the call right.

Replay has been a contentious topic. I have weighed in on the subject. I know baseball has never been perfect and never will be. The sport relies on humans, and humans make mistakes – plenty of mistakes. Baseball is, at its essence, a game of failure – as an Albert Pujols or a Derek Jeter 0-for-20 slump can prove.

Failures and blunders aren’t in the same ballpark, and to see games turned upside down because of the latter worries a purist, particularly when the blunder affects the team they root for.

Throw out the clowns in blue. Send in the cameras.

Now, I’m not really suggesting that umps have no place in baseball. I wouldn’t wantdronescalling balls and strikes. Technology can take away the game’s humanity. But technology does have its place – a bigger place than Commissioner Bud Selig has given it.

Grudgingly, Selig dipped the sport into the technological waters when he approved instant replay for disputed calls on balls hit along the foul lines and for home runs.

"I said at the time when replay was instituted -- It was limited to that, and it will stay that way," Selig said in a recent Wall Street Journal article. "I think the human element is vital to baseball."

To bring replay into the sport at all took a truckload of disputed calls. Selig, a purist like me, had to admit the umps missed some of them. All along, his concern, as well as mine, was replays would slow the game. But he had seen replays in pro and college football, and the systems those sports put into place had worked well.

The NBA turned to replay as well, using it for shots that raised questions about whether they beat the clock. Replay has sorted out these dispute, the game no worst for its use.

Hockey and tennis use replay, because those sports care about accuracy. They know the shortcomings of humans. Baseball needs to recognize those shortcomings.

I would never expect Selig and baseball’s leadership to be on the cutting edge of a technological change of this kind, though. On some level, they still wrestle with the merits of the designated hitter. But if their choice is between slowing the game’s pace or ensuring a bad call doesn't taint a game’s outcome, Selig & Co. has no choice but to do what other forward-thinking sports tsars have done: rely on replay.

The integrity of the game is at risk.

No justice in Plaxico's prison sentence

He looks like the portrait of injustice. That’s about all you can say about Plaxico Burress as he walked into a New York courthouse Tuesday and prepared to begin his sentence of two years in state prison.

Yeah, Burress broke the law, but if his punishment reflects the best of American justice, I prefer something else.

I guess if I hadn’t seen lesser crimes than his earn a “perp” probation, I wouldn’t feel as I do about this sentence. I also know that if I liked Burress more, I might even be more outraged about it.

But he’s hardly a player whose behavior engenders warm feelings. Burress exudes a cockiness this is off-putting, and he doesn’t help his public profile when he lets his appetite for high style trump substance. He often displays a smug callousness that borders on self-righteous, although he’s hardly the lone athlete who does so.

Yet athletes who flaunt their wealthy lifestyles win few popularity contests. Fans yearn to see a star's profile packaged with humility, the sort of image they extol in Peyton Manning, Kurt Warner, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, CC Sabathia and Derek Jeter: classic cool instead of hip-hop crass.

Image is everything, isn’t that what Andre Agassi told us a decade or so ago? Agassi had it right, but when that image carries a hard, urban edginess to it, it isn’t much of an image in some people’s minds.

That image never sits well with the larger public, and when that image is that of a black athlete like Burress … well, that’s an altogether different discussion.

In some ways, I suspect what happened to Burress, the New York Giants star, had less to do with his skin color and more to do with bad law. I do understand New York City’s interest in getting unlicensed handguns off the street; I applaud the city’s efforts. Laws should be in place to punish people who run afoul of that effort; the remedy, however, should be a sentence that reflects all circumstances.

The law should have some bend to it, all things considered.

For if it did, I doubt anybody would find two years in prison an appropriate punishment for a man who shot himself in the leg – an unlicensed .40-caliber Glock or not. The person that Burress hurt was Burress.

I know others might argue that he could have hurt someone else. His Glock went off inside a Manhattan nightclub, and a gun that goes off in such intimate surroundings threatens more than the gun’s owner. The bullet could easily have ricocheted and taken a bystander’s life.

Had the bullet killed or injured another person, New York City has laws to address the taking of a life. Nobody, athlete or not, could expect a free pass, not even a man with Burress’ access to the best lawyers.

But when the law itself has no bend -- gives no consideration to an extraordinary set of circumstances -- it becomes a law that needs to be changed. For no man deserves two years in jail for shooting himself.

Punishment should always fit the crime, but the crime of stupidity, which Plaxico Burress pleads guilty to, shouldn’t put a man behind bars for two years. I see no justice in that.

( Photo of Plaxico Burress by sholmes10191's photostream)