and seems a serious affront to the integrity of the game

I have no doubt Selig will do something about it…

wait…

Throw out the mythology surrounding the position. Umpires are middle management, hired by the leagues to move things along, arbitrate disputes, and keep the players from killing each other. Some umps are better than others, some clearly worse, and nearly all have a much more grandiose view of their role than is warranted. When players strike, the game stops. When umpires strike—or quit en masse—people sigh in relief and mock the arbiters for their misguided arrogance. Umpires make from $84,000 to $300,000 per year. What does that mean? No umpire is worth as much as the scrubbiest player on a roster.

So if a player’s left hand scrapes across the plate just before a catcher sweeps his glove hand across the sliding player’s back, that player is safe, and the run counts. It shouldn’t be not so because a 45-year-old man couldn’t see through the catcher’s legs to where the player’s fingers were, but could see the tag. When a 2-2 slider, moving in three dimensions at 88 miles per hour, runs off the plate by two inches, and the batter correctly reads the break and takes the pitch, he shouldn’t be called out on strikes because the man standing slightly behind and to his right wasn’t able to correctly discern the location of home plate and the baseball, a task for which human eyes are poor tools at that level of detail.

Bring on the technology to get these calls, and every one like them, right. Perhaps in the early days of baseball, when contact rates were sky-high and the value of control of the strike zone was as low as it ever would be, when hurlers threw 80 with nickel curves, you could stick a man behind the catcher and assign him the job of discerning hittable pitches from unhittable ones. That hasn’t been the case for some time now, however, perhaps not since the development of the slider. Today, the act of calling pitches on the margins is guesswork for everyone involved, so much so that the strike zone looks nothing on the field like it does in the rule book. We have the technology to fix this, and we should use it. For all the whining about the run-scoring levels in the modern game, and the style of play that has become prevalent, the single fastest way to change both of those things is to call the rulebook strike zone. Give pitchers back the the four inches from the belt to the letters, and you change the game. At the same time, call a 17-inch wide plate, instead of the 19-, 21-, and 23-inch versions so prevalent today.

Machines can do these things better than people can. That’s not an insult, that’s a fact. There’s a reason they let machines get involved in tennis now: the balls move too quickly for the human eye, even the well-trained one, to track. Machines don’t have that problem. Systems have now been installed in all 30 major league parks (and will be installed in each of the new ones coming on line) that can do a better job of calling balls and strikes than people can. They should be used for that purpose, because the game will be better for it.

I think baseball should keep the human element for calling pitches athough it does need work.
I dont understand why they dont implement instant replay for home runs,first base calls,calls at home plate,any defense really. Its not going to slow things down that much, and I think it could add a little more suspense.
Give managers 2-3 challenges a game, its pretty simple. let them use the challenges for called strikes/balls while your at it, but you only get 2-3 for the whole game.

But this was about the most horribly umpired series I have ever seen. Just brutal.

Seems like college basketball has made a concerted effort to have refs consult with each other, and it has improved refeering considerably. The NFL does this as well with great results. Its time for the NBA, College Football and MLB to get on board and require this of their refs/umps.