“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........

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