One reason that I think baseball is a purer game than other sports is that there aren’t fouls and penalties that fundamentally alter the outcome. This obviously isn’t true of football, basketball, and soccer. (As far as I can tell, without penalty kicks, no one would ever score in the World Cup.)

I bring this up because the illegal-screen call at the end of the Iowa–UConn women’s Final Four game will be long argued about. The dilemma there was: Do you have the game determined by a ref’s whistle, or determined by an open three made possible by an illegal screen?

Baseball, by and large, doesn’t have such dilemmas. Safe and out calls matter a lot, obviously, but instant replay pretty much guarantees getting them right. The realm where flawed, subjective umpire judgments still matter is balls and strikes, but that can easily be addressed with a laser strike zone, which is hopefully coming very soon.