You’ve likely all seen it by now. Jim Joyce missed an out at first base that cost Armando Galarraga and the Detroit Tigers a perfect game Wednesday night.

It was a terrible call. Horrible. The fans were cheated. Galarraga should have had the third perfect game in Major League Baseball in less than a month. But come on now. Joyce, by most accounts is a pretty good umpire. He did not miss the call on purpose. He is not Satan. And he immediately owned up to the mistake after the game. Let’s give him credit for that.

The Twittersphere is abuzz with reports that Joyce is distraught about the blown call. [Update: Joyce admitted to the botched call after the game and clearly felt like crap about it.]

This is being blown a bit out of proportion. Even Galarraga sounded resigned and accepting of his fate more than upset. He acknowledged that he spoke with the Joyce after the game. “He feels bad,” Galarraga says in a conversation with ESPN broadcasters Rick Sutcliffe and

He adds that Joyce “kind of” apologized to him. Sutcliffe gave props to Galarraga for how he handled the call, keeping his composure, not getting into an argument with the umpire and immediately retiring the next and final batter of the game.

“I was so nervous I didn’t know what to do,” Galarraga told Sutcliffe and . “My first reaction was to smile.”

Kudos to Galarraga. He handled the disappointment with far more class and tact than many fans did. A Facebook page titled “Jim Joyce Sucks” had nearly 1,600 fans just about an hour after the game.

Wikipedia had to freeze Joyce’s entry to keep people from vandalizing it.

Troy from West Virginia had a bit of a meltdown after Joyce blew the play.

I guess these reactions in the heat of the moment are understandable. Baseball history should have been made.

Others got a bit more ridiculously out of hand. WBRU called it the “worst non-steroid tragedy in baseball’s history.”

Really? It was a bigger tragedy than when Ray Chapman was killed after getting hit in the head by a pitch? Bigger than the earthquake during the 1989 World Series? Bigger than when Don Denkinger blew a call that may have cost the St. Louis Cardinals the 1985 World Series?

ESPN’s announcers on Wednesday night’s coverage of the St. Louis-Cincinnati game were slightly less dramatic but no less irritated by the call.

The fans “were cheated out of a big big part of history,” Sutcliffe said.

“Somewhat unforgivable,” added O’Brien.

Again, I can understand those feelings in the heat of the moment. I have no idea what Joyce saw. Maybe it was a slight bobble Galarraga had just before getting control of the throw from Miguel Cabrera. Who knows. It was a terrible call.

I’ve been critical, as have others, of umpires inserting themselves into the limelight and getting into the faces of batters and managers arguing calls. But let’s keep in mind that Joyce has been an umpire for more than 20 years and has worked some of the game’s biggest events during those two decades. He’s called two All-Star games and two World Series. He had a bad night. He made a bad call.

A very bad call.

But that doesn’t make him Satan.