The stupid, stupid Braves took a walk-off victory over the lovable, upstart Pirates in the 19th inning last night on this call. No doubt you know about it already because the Internet is on fire this morning. What’s to be done about these terrible umpires?

Umpire Jerry Meals admitted, upon viewing the replay, that he blew the call. He said he thought Pirates catcher Michael McKenry missed the tag, so he ruled Julio Lugo safe. So that sucks. It sucks for the Pirates and their fans, most of all, but it sucks for Meals and it sucks for baseball to have an otherwise awesome game end on an umpiring mistake.

But I am still not convinced that umpiring is getting worse. I’ve been through this before. Why would it be? Has there been a massive overhaul in personnel? Have the standards for umpires slipped? The players are getting better, the executives shrewder. Every other aspect of baseball, we think, is improving as the game is honed and sharpened with time. Why would just this one be systematically decaying?

All games are broadcast in high definition now, with more camera angles and HD super slow-mo replay. We notice more umpiring mistakes because we have the technology with which to see them. Plays that we might have shrugged off as close calls five years ago we now know to be wrong and cite as evidence in the case for robot umpires.

Plus, there’s confirmation bias at play. We have decided that umpiring has gotten worse, so every time a bad call is made, we say, “oh, another bad call! Man, the umpiring has sucked this year!” But as far as I know there’s no good way to prove that the quality of umpiring actually has changed, since there’s no way to retroactively watch games from the 50s in HD with all these camera angles.

(I am open to this possibility, though I’m probably letting my imagination run wild here: It could be that the new technologies have put so much pressure on umpires that they now overthink calls like the one last night, in which the ball beat Lugo to the plate by several feet.)

Of course, that’s immaterial. Even if it has always been this way, it can still be improved. There’s no reason to hamper the game any more than it should be by the human element, and if there’s a way to conveniently add a replay official to clear up close calls in an efficient manner, so be it.

But — and I think this came up in the comments section here before — expanding replay in baseball exposes the league to some rather nefarious possibilities. Unlike those in the NFL, most baseball broadcasts are handled by regional sports networks in contract with teams. Those networks stand to benefit if the teams they cover succeed. I’ve seen the way things work inside regional sports networks and I don’t imagine such conspiracies would exactly run rampant, but expanding replay in the game would mean putting some small element of how the game is judged into partial hands.

And last I checked, robots can’t even make pancakes or fold laundry. Screaming about this stuff is great fun, I realize, but for now, maybe it’s best we all settle down, accept that humans mess stuff up constantly, and start coming up with real, feasible solutions.

It is a perennial late-game conversation starter at Giants home games: “How do the gulls know to swarm to the ballpark during the ninth inning?”…

This season, the Western gulls, which nest on Alcatraz and other nearby shorelines, have been swooping into stands even earlier, gobbling up dropped fries, soiling fans and prompting officials to consider using falcons to chase them away.

– John Upton, N.Y. Times.

Do it. Do it.

Of course, the article goes on to detail how the falcons would be professionally controlled, curtailing my fantasy of a scenario wherein the Giants were then forced to bring in some larger bird of prey to control the out-of-control falcon population, and so on, turning every night at AT&T Park into an airborne avian royal rumble.

Also, it’s worth noting that I really hate seagulls. Like way more so than most urban and suburban scavenger pests. Is that worth noting?