The baseball was beautifully struck, sending the crowd to its feet as the fly ball traced an arc across the outfield and disappeared over the fence. Some spectators swore they saw the ball graze the foul pole. So, when the umpire ruled a foul ball, the crowd howled. The batter circling the bases stopped abruptly. A teammate barreled off the bench ready to tussle with the ump.But the call stood.The hitter was Jim Whitney, not Pete Alonso.It was May 6, 1887. Whitney returned to the batter’s box, and his Washington Nationals played the rest of the game under protest. They lost, 2-1, to the Philadelphia Phillies. After the game, according to an article in The National Republican the next morning, angry fans surrounded the umpire “in a threatening manner, but wiser counsels prevailed, and, under the escort of two policemen, he was safely landed in the club house.”In baseball, arguing over which side of the foul pole a fly ball flew is a dispute almost as old as the sport itself, from Whitney’s wallop 139 years ago to a similar controversy Wednesday night in Baltimore. Alonso, the Orioles slugger, thought he swatted a go-ahead home run 20 rows deep into the left-field seats at Camden Yards. And it looked that way on video, too. But umpires ruled that the drive did not stay inside the foul pole, leaving Alonso standing in the basepath pleading, “That’s a fair ball.”As Major League Baseball has embraced the technology age — adding replay review, pitch-calling devices, an automated ball/strike challenge system, and cameras tracking each pitch, swing and biometric movement — it has not yet figured out how to accurately rule, in real time, on fly balls crossing above the foul pole.Pete Alonso argued to no avail that his potential game-changing home run was a fair ball. (Greg Fiume / Getty Images)“It takes one of those moments to be like, ‘Hey, maybe we should add something,’” said Cleveland Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan, contemplating a modern fix for a century-old problem. “If they can do it in tennis, I’m sure they can do it here. Unfortunately, you need one of those moments to make it a discussion. Maybe this is that.”Orioles players raised a question Wednesday night that quickly became a talking point across baseball. Why doesn’t MLB utilize Hawk-Eye technology — a system already installed in stadiums that uses a series of cameras to provide precision tracking across various sports — to determine if home runs are fair or foul? The league already uses the tech for Statcast data. Why not further broaden its use?“I know managers have talked about that at the Winter Meetings,” said Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “Every stadium has Hawk-Eye. It’s pretty easy to just shoot it up the foul pole. We’ve got a lot of technology, and we got ABS this far off the zone, and we can’t do that?”