Baseball tries to hold onto traditions more fiercely than a jilted husband holding onto his mistress.
There are rituals and songs. There are retributions so basic that medievalists smile down upon them from heaven.
Yet technology tries to drag the game forward with a base stealer's insistence.
The game now has instant replay, but instead of an off-field umpire relaying a decision, we see dark-shirted beer bellies bounding off the field at the rate of an inebriated tortoise.
Who can be surprised, therefore, that the man who runs the game has never sent an e-mail? This is the claim related by the Sport Business Journal's Eric Fisher.
Indeed, Bud Selig's full quote is: "I've never sent an e-mail and I never will."
Instinctive scoffers will say that Selig is 79. They will say that other retrograde sporting personas, such as ESPN's Chris Berman, claim to steer clear of this fancy form of communication.
Yet I fancy these people might be more wily than they seem.
Selig is a former car dealer, who surely understands that commerce moves in mysteriously human ways.
His own business bathes in its curious anomalies -- such as an antitrust exemption and a history with drug use that seems to meander from the startling to the humorous.
Is it any wonder that he would smile at the revelations that the National Security Agency might be recording everything we say and do and think?: "I saw you guys coming a long time ago."
So I wouldn't be surprised that -- even though Selig reportedly admitted he just invested in a brand-new iPhone -- the most important meetings and decisions in baseball are run with a level of discretion that modern humans should envy.
I just tried to find Bud Selig on Facebook. The site brought me to a profile with a picture of the man himself, his finger inserted deeply into his nostril.
That can't be real. Or can it?
Kids, if you want to learn about discretion, this Bud's for you.