OK, so I haven't been watching much baseball before this year, but I don't understand everyone upset about the commissioner of baseball refusing to "overturn the umpire's call," even though everyone understands Jim Joyce's call was wrong and it robbed Andrés Galaraga of a perfect game.

But it's wrong to overturn a call when other action has happened on the field. This is the same problem baseball has with broader instant replays—if you go back and find that the runner on second base was out, what do you do with the runners who advanced past third? Does a run come back? Does the play stop at the point of the officiating error? There's rarely a "dead ball" during a baseball play, so this isn't as easy as with football.

In the most-cited example of overturning an umpire's call, the "pine tar incident," the umpire's call to eject George Brett ended the game. In other words, nothing else happened afterward but arguing. Everyone who argued was ejected when the game resumed, so there was nothing else to unravel.

In Galarraga's imperfect game, there was another batter. Yes, he just grounded to first and was thrown out to end the game as a no-hitter, but the at-bat happened. To advocate that the commissioner assume God-like powers to erase at-bats, change rulings, and otherwise reverse past actions on the field is just asking for a world of trouble. It's a bad, bad idea, and the only surprise to me is that even Bud Selig had enough common sense to run far away from it.

That said, the comissioner's office is the exclusive keeper of statistics. I see no reason why Selig cannot decide that, due to extraordinary officiating error acknowledged by all parties in the game, Galarraga's game is declared to be a "perfect game" with 28 batters: 27 outs and 1 batter awarded base due to umpire error. Unlike other pitchers who lost perfect games after 26 outs, there is clear and irrefutable video evidence that the call was in error. There is no doubt the call was wrong. There is no judgment to be made in overruling the ump on something close; the error is very clear.

In addition, it should be noted that this would not work if Galarraga had not gotten the very next batter out to end the game. If you can't ignore what happened on the field, then even giving Galarraga credit for the umpire error, he couldn't have then gone on to let anyone else on base, or let the runner steal second base, or anything like that. In other words, if you remove the batter who got on base due to umpire error, it was still a perfect game.

I don't think Selig wants to set a precedent of such things, but I think his office can clearly and rationally declare that Galarraga threw baseball's 21st perfect game. The asterisk doesn't go by Galarraga's name—it goes by the "28" in "28 batters faced" to note that one batter was allowed on base due to verified umpire error.

You can't overturn the call, but you can declare—rightfully—that it was still a perfect game.