“If they create a robot umpire that calls every strike exactly right,” the late, very entertaining baseball umpire Ron Luciano once said, “hitters will never let it survive. Whenever it makes a call against them, they will beat it to death with a bat.” Luciano’s comment is more than 40 years old, a reminder that the pending robot-umpire revolution has been an object of anxiety in baseball for a long time. Which is why it’s kind of amazing to learn that, when it finally arrived, it turned out to be so fun.

This last weekend, the first of the baseball season, marked the introduction of Major League Baseball’s Automated Ball-Strike system, and we got just about a little bit of everything. A Pirates batter made it halfway to first base before the computer told him he had actually struck out; a manager got thrown out arguing an ABS call. And we all learned, because of MLB’s spring-training measuring of every player (so to most accurately capture their precise and unique strike zone), that a whole bunch of players were pretending to be taller than they really were. (Which anyone who has ever used a dating app could tell you was already happening.)

But the real joy — and the thing that made you realize ABS could have crossover appeal — stemmed from that old-fashioned baseball pastime: making umpires feel like shit.

There was much to mock them for. The Mariners’ Randy Arozarena, unlike that Pirates hitter, was so confident that a home-plate ump had missed a call that he was already taking off his equipment and jogging toward first base while waiting for the strike call to be overturned — and he was right. C.B. Bucknor, long considered one of the worst umpires in the sport, had six calls overturned by ABS; it happened so often that Reds fans made their loudest roar of the day when third baseman Eugenio Suarez correctly got Bucknor overturned on two pitches in a row. It didn’t even matter that Suarez ultimately flied out in the at-bat: By beating the umpire twice, he had already won. (During a Brewers-Rays game Tuesday night, Bucknor blew a call at first base so badly that the managers of both teams started laughing.) Watching an umpire confidently make a call only to have the robots tell him how wrong he was has become the cause of cheering sections at stadiums all across the country, particularly when it involves an official who fans (and players) already disliked.

There is something inherently satisfying in getting a call overturned. For decades — centuries even — players, coaches, managers, and fans have been helpless in the face of umpire and referee power. They made their decision, and we’ve all had to live with it. Replay review has assuaged this a bit, though it often leads to interminable wait times for answers that aren’t nearly as definitive as we’d like them to be. But there has still been no way to change the most absolute of calls: balls and strikes in baseball. And as pitchers’ velocity and spin rate have climbed over the last decade or so, it has become clear that the human eye is simply incapable of determining the exact location of a pitch whistling and curving toward the plate at 100 mph. Many ball-strike calls are virtually indistinguishable from a guess. These calls make up the very foundation of baseball; the difference between a 2-0 count and a 1-1 count is dramatic. Until this weekend, you just had to live with it and be angry about calls that went against you, exacerbated by K-Zone boxes on telecasts that have never been entirely accurate but certainly made sure you were aggrieved anyway.

What we saw in recent days, that visceral pleasure at watching Bucknor be overturned over and over, was the culmination of a century of frustration, of all the years we’ve spent insistent that the ump was blind. Now we can prove it! In retrospect, of course a stadium full of people would cheer an umpire being made to look like an idiot: At last we all got the satisfaction of knowing we were always right to be hopping mad the whole time.

It is, of course, far more complicated than that. Challenged calls turned out to be overturned only 50 percent of the time; tellingly, pitchers and catchers are far more accurate (and likely less emotional) in their challenges than hitters are. Umpires, all told, are right far, far more often than they are wrong. A Fangraphs study last year showed that they got ball-strike calls correct 93 percent of the time. The challenge system, as currently designed, won’t tick that up to 100 percent or anything close; teams, after all, only get two a game (they lose one each time they challenge and are proven wrong, which, again, is happening half the time). In the short term, the ABS isn’t going to make that much difference, and you can probably expect, as teams get more used to it, that challenges will be limited to the most critical moments of the game, which is when it’s most important to get it right anyway.

What’s often missed in all this umpire mockery is that umpires are, almost universally, in favor of the technology. (MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said last year they’d even prefer a full-on all-robot-called strike zone to the current challenge system; it’s only cranky retired umpires who have come out against it.) These are not people who are worried about robots taking their jobs. We all like to believe that the umpire is trying to screw us, but he’s not: He’s just a flawed human being doing his best at a job that is, by all accounts, exhausting and entirely thankless. For the most part, people become umpires not because they want to get rich (obviously) or famous (the exact opposite) or because they’re on some power trip: They become umpires because they deeply love baseball, as much as (if not more) than the players themselves. Their priority — their purpose in life — is to make sure the game they love is correctly officiated, fairly and accurately. Some of them are great at their job; some of them aren’t. But they are on the same side as the rest of us: They want correct calls.

Actually, now that I’ve said that, I’m not sure it’s true. They want correct calls; we want calls that favor our own team. That difference — between what should be and what is, what we want to be true and what really is — is the reason people become umpires, and the reason umpires are in favor of technology that makes their job easier: The goal is getting it right. Umpires are more than willing to have you mock them in pursuit of that goal. They are, after all, used to it.

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