Major League Baseball’s implementation of instant replay for home run calls last week was a great step in the right direction for the leadership of a sport that has long had a resistance to modernization rivaled only by Raiders owner Al Davis.

The decision was lauded far and wide within the game, too. Home runs are too important to blow, goes the company line.
We have the technology to get it right, and we will.

Well, guess what, Bud? You have the technology to get EVERY call right, and using said technology only to determine whether a ball cleared the wall, was interfered with, or was foul or fair isn’t enough.

Not nearly enough. Sure, home runs are important. But no more important than the obviously blown call at first base with two out and a runner at third with the score tied in the sixth game of a playoff series.

Most managers, players, executives and Bud Selig himself say the expansion of the current instant replay system would be a mistake. It would slow the game down, they say. It would create too slippery a slope. It would erase the human element.

The human element? Are you kidding? Why are we romanticizing the human element? It calls to mind a great line by comedian Chris Rock, who once said, “I like the concept of people. … But people [mess] it up!”

And they do. All the time. The human element? That’s what makes umpires give a 15-year veteran pitcher a slider eight inches off the black and call the same pitch by a rookie a ball.

The human element is what makes an umpire with an axe to grind call the player who had the temerity to question his terrible call two weeks ago in Kansas City out at the plate today in Boston.

The human element? That’s why we have serial killers.

That’s not to draw a parallel between the men in blue and the men behind bars, but give me a break.

There need to be limits, of course. You can’t review every single questionable call. That would, indeed, take too much time and turn every game into a five-hour affair. But there should, at the very least, be a challenge system in place similar to the one employed by the NFL.

Three times a game, a manager should be able to ask for a second look. If he’s wrong on the first, he only gets one more. If he’s wrong on the second, he’s done.

If he’s wrong on the third? Well, I haven’t thought that one out yet. For now, he has to brush Bud’s nasty teeth.

Just get the calls right. All of them.