Sports is about the theatrics of it all. It’s not mechanical; it’s organic and weird.

My friend Rich Lowry — normally a pretty sensible guy — wants the robots to ump your baseball games.

Baseball is taking a small step away from human umpiring with a robot challenge system for balls and strike[s] next year.

This is welcome but insufficient. Human umpiring of balls and strikes is a travesty that is terrible for the game.

Check out this third-strike call in the Blue Jays vs. Red Sox game last night. George Springer was rung up on a ball in an absolutely key situation with a division on the line. (Jomboy has a breakdown of the at-bat, which included a dubious foul call, and the aftermath.)

Ah, I see, Rich — what we can’t have is anything in this life that makes things interesting, uneven, or human. Like the Soviet collectivization of the Ukrainian wheat harvest, Rich’s dream of perfection in baseball umpiring is utopian and dystopian all at the same time!

Well, I for one, will not welcome our new robot overlords.

Part of what makes sports great is the drama of the officials’ calls and, critically, the players’, coaches’, and fans’ reaction to the very-human refs making very-human attempts at objectivity. I don’t go to as many baseball games as I used to on account of my brood of young progeny — more’s the pity — but one of my favorite parts of the experience of baseball is getting to kvetch at the umps. Shouting, “Open your eyes, blue!” is as American as apple pie. Rich wants to replace the groans and moans and cheers of the ballpark with nerds and AI and lasers and computer programmers. But baseball is a game that values tradition and pine tar, the manual scoreboard at Fenway Park, and the entirely unreasonable superstitions like the rally cap, avoiding stepping on the foul lines, not changing out a hot bat, and not talking about a no-hitter.

Sports is about the theatrics of it all. It’s not mechanical; it’s organic and weird. Rich points out Jomboy’s breakdown of a recent at-bat that featured some very dubious calls from behind the plate as evidence for out-of-control umpiring that he claims needs to be fixed. But think about it: Part of what made Jomboy famous as a sports commentator is his breaking down the crazy interactions between managers, players, and umps as they disagreed about calls. Does Rich think that Jomboy’s viewers on YouTube want to click on his entertaining bad-umpiring breakdowns or some analysis of how the season’s balls-and-strikes calls were accurate to the 0.0087 percentile as compared to the median of the previous season’s calls as computed by an independent analysis of the Department of Mathematics at MIT in conjunction with the Sports Science Lab at Georgia Tech?

We all know the answer, of course — but Rich wants to ditch all that. At this rate, I’m sure he’d jump at stretching the concept of robot umpires to other sports as well.

The single most entertaining play in football is a fourth-down stop when the chain gang has to come out to measure and everyone crowds around and the head official signals first down (or not). That’s awesome! It’s dramatic. No one claims it’s the most accurate way of doing things! But you’d kill all that by putting a GPS chip into the football so that you could know exactly where it ended up under the pile — as some propose, including, I assume, Rich.

Last week, in the Oklahoma vs. Auburn college football game in Norman, which I was lucky enough to attend with my oldest boy, there were three or four HUGE calls that were reviewed by the refs and could have gone either way: a crucial fumble returned for a touchdown in the first quarter, a “was that legal??” substitution trick play by Oklahoma for a touchdown in the second, multiple pass interference calls (or no calls) in Auburn’s fourth-quarter touchdown drive, and a massive “did he actually catch that inbounds!?” call in the final minutes of the game that ended up going Oklahoma’s way. It was awesome! The drama was huge — and the arguments, after the game and between fans online, were simply fantastic. It was entertaining!

Argument, debate, and (sometimes) feeling like your team got screwed by the refs are part of why sports are great — and it’s part of why they’re genuinely fun. The whole thing activates the tribal genes in our lizard brains.

But robot umps and GPS chips in the balls and AI-powered play calls for the coaches flattens sports and takes some of the brilliant color out of it. At the rate we’re going, someone is going to be asking why we play the games at all. Couldn’t AI take very meticulous measurements of all the players and then simulate the season for us? There’d be no need for chewing tobacco, or rain delays, or disorganized, grubby, organic things like blood, sweat, and tears. Don’t be surprised when some misguided sports “fans” embrace all that, too. C’mon, Rich; some people already think that a virtual-reality headset that simulates sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium is a good-enough replacement for the real thing. I know you’re not there yet, but you’re going down that road with your embrace of robot umps.

“Take me out to the ball game,” the old song says. Yes, indeed. And part of the reason we long for the green grass and the white lines of the ballpark is because sports are messy and weird and human — and because we get to grumble at the umps with our friends.