If I can expand a little bit, the way baseball is officiated is idiotic. It is literally not the 50th best way you could do it.
Baseball’s officiating system is a relic of the past; it just does not make any sense at the professional level, and is set up the way it is not only because it started when there were no computers, cameras or replays, but because it started when even major league teams didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford to have a lot of officials.
Setting automation aside, the way umpires are aligned on the field is silly. The fact that there are only four umpires is silly, too. (Or six, in the playoffs.) If a top professional tennis match can have 11 officials, why can’t baseball? the most egregious problem with this is the chekced swing call, which is sent by appeal to either the first or third base umpires, who are in a terrible position to make the call, a call which by the way is based totally on opinion and precedent and not any sort of specific rule. Logically, you should have officials parallel to the front pof the plate off to the sides whose job it is to make that specific call. You should have outfield wall officials whose job it is to make home run calls, as opposed to asking a second base umpire who may be 200 feet away. Having just 4/6 officials and then being surprised when they blow calls-by-inches that are 100, 200 feet away from them is imbecilic, and given that baseball is rolling in money, pointless.
As to opposition to automation, it’s stupid. I’m sorry, but it’s just stupid. Bad calls add no value to baseball, none whatsoever. It create bitterness and takes attention away from the real sport. I have never in my life known a bad call to make baseball, in total, a better thing.
And of course we would never go backwards in any other sport. Imagine if, instead of having electronic timing, we just had a ref eyeball who won the Olympic 100m dash. Hey, don’t want to take the human element out! Wouldn’t that be stupid? Of course it’s stupid. If Smith beat Jones 9.92 to 9.93 but the track and field version of Angel Hernandez gave the gold medal to Jones, that would not make track a better sport; it would make it WAY worse.
Asking umps to make ball and strike calls is asking them to fail. Umpires miss a huge, huge percentage of close calls. The overall percentage they get right is something like 90 percent but that includes pitches right down the middle and ones that bounce in front of home plate; for pitches where you really need the call made, they get two out of three at best. During the course of a game, at least a few at bats, and often more, are determined not by the skill of the players but by the umpire blowing calls, and it’s not always split evenly between the two teams.
There’s no benefit to this, none. Baseball is not better for having outcomes altered by umps blowing calls; in no way does it helps the game. It transfers the outcome from player skill to umpire incompetence, which is bad. It creates resentment and doubt over outcomes, which is bad. It causes arguments and ejections, which is bad. Everything about it is bad. It’s every bit as bad as having people eyeball the results of 100m dashes and the only reason anyone accepts it is because they don’t know any other way and have put no thought into it.
In all seriousness – it’s a matter of opinion. No accounting for taste.