A month from now, baseball’s general managers will meet for four days in Orlando, Fla., to backslap, glad-hand, and vote on procedural matters. Behind closed doors, it will doubtless be little different than any meeting of 30 regional managers of a large national corporation might be. Unlike a conclave of Jiffy Lube district managers, though, this one will be consequential — fateful, even.

Friday, the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, said instant replay would be on the agenda at these meetings. To his immense credit, he does not like instant replay and is not shy about saying so. “I think it sometimes creates as many problems or more than it solves,” he told the Associated Press in Phoenix. Still, he said, “I am willing to say we’ll at least talk about these if people want to talk about it. I’m going to let the general managers discuss it, let them come back and make recommendations.”

Selig does himself credit by putting instant replay up for discussion despite his feelings on the matter. After the preposterous call that put the Colorado Rockies in the playoffs — Matt Holliday, out by a mile, was called safe at home in the bottom of the 13th inning of a National League one-game playoff, unfairly ending the Padres’ season — it’s probably a good idea to see how GMs feel about the issue. This is nonetheless a case in which I might prefer a bit of autocracy. Instant replay is such a ridiculous idea that any step that makes it more likely is simply to be scoffed at.

This isn’t true because there’s something inherently desirable about the current state of affairs. Human error and umpire incompetence are not charming quirks of the game to be preserved for their own sake; they unjustly rob teams of fair chances of winning, depriving fans of the joys of victory and owners of the joys of money. (Jeffrey Maier may be a folk hero in New York, but he also robbed Mike Mussina and Davey Johnson of the chance to win a World Series with Baltimore.) Nor should they be preserved for historical reasons. There is no doubt that baseball’s pioneers would have used something like the computer systems that judge whether or not balls are foul in tennis had they been available, as the effort to ensure neutral umpiring is one of the dominant themes of the game’s early history.

Error and incompetence, we should admit, are vile, not something to be romanticized as “the human element of the game.” They are, however, unavoidable given the nature of the game, which is obvious if you think through how instant replay would be used.

The main question in implementing a system would be in deciding when it would be used and who would decide that it was needed. This involves limiting its use. Unfortunately there are no practical ways to do so.

Only using it in the late innings would be silly; a blown call in the first inning can cause an unfair loss as surely as one in the ninth. So one way to limit its use is right out the window.

Allowing managers to issue unlimited challenges wouldn’t work, because no one wants to see master strategist Tony LaRussa making his 19th call to the booth during another eight-hour ballgame. Leaving the challenge to managers while limiting their number makes no sense, though, as the point is to eliminate bad calls, not to allow umpires two a game. And there’s no way to punish managers for issuing an unsuccessful challenge. Anything less than a base or an out would be too light to discourage a manager from issuing too many challenges, but such harsh penalties would disturb the balance of the game, penalizing fans and players for the manager’s stupidity.

Ideally, umpires would be the ones to call for the replay, but there are practical problems with asking even the best, most honest umpire to admit when he’s not sure he, or one of his peers, has a call right. At best it just doesn’t look good, and at worst umpires will reject legitimate challenges to cover up their own mistakes.

The best-situated man for the job would be the official scorer, who sits in the press box and has both a vantage over the whole field and immediate access to televised replays. Scorers are often retired sportswriters with vast experience in watching baseball. They are, though, also generally paid less than $100 a game, and already susceptible to hometown pressures. How is their utter neutrality and complete lack of susceptibility to gambling interests supposed to be assured? I have some ideas, but they all involve Major League Baseball spending large amounts of money and managers, players, and umpires complaining about the game being put in the hands of unaccountable parties using an opaque process.

Because there’s no good way to implement it, I don’t think for a second that baseball’s general managers will recommend an inquiry into instant replay and don’t for a second believe that Selig would do anything but hem and haw before filing such a recommendation in the nearest garbage can. Still, this is the same crew that devised the wild card and vested home field advantage in the World Series in the results of the All Star Game, so anything is possible. If we see LaRussa making that 19th call for a replay just as he’s making the fourth pitching change in an inning two years from now, at least we’ll know who to blame.

tmarchman@nysun.com