A lawyer representing big-league umpires in their rage against the machine noted, "Umpiring is a skill, an art form."
Which explains why one umpire's strike zone is a shaped like a lily pond in southern France, while another's is shaped like a woman with one eye and three breasts.
I don't know much about art, but I know what I like, which is a baseball strike zone that wasn't flung against a canvas by Jackson Pollock.
The umps have their berets spinning in artistic angst over the spy cams installed in 13 ballparks, the intent of which is — depending on whom you ask — either to standardize the strike zone or catch the umps stealing office supplies.
Curt Schilling, noted patron of the arts, struck a blow for the umpires recently when he took a bat and smashed a QuesTec camera at Phoenix's Bank One Ballpark.
Some might consider Schilling's act a childish tantrum. The umps see it as the modern civil-disobedience equivalent of the Boston Tea Party.
Schilling's defense, when the fine comes down, will be that he merely was trying to adjust the horizontal hold. Anybody knows that before you send an electronic gizmo to the shop for expensive repairs, you first give it a whack.
Schilling was mad because umps working at Q-cam parks are under pressure to call pitches in sync with the camera. He says umps tell catchers that they want to call strikes on many of Curt's pitches, but the machine won't let them.
In other words, an ump working a Schilling performance at the BOB is now compelled to call strikes only on strikes.
Schilling is one of the game's great pitchers, so him whining for strikes is like Bill Gates kicking the hell out of a vending machine that eats his quarter.
(Schilling is also the only pitcher in history to demand that his ballpark's dome roof be raised for him even in beautiful weather, because of his belief that balls carry more with the roof down. This is a guy who knows how to look out for No. 1.)
But really, this whole QuesTec thing is crazy. Why are the meddlesome nellies in baseball's home office wasting time and effort on standardizing the strike zone when the umpires were doing such a bang-up job of it on their own?
Sure the individual strike zones were like snowflakes, but fans could pass boring stretches of games speculating on which hallucinogens might cause such strange spatial perceptions.
What the umps are struggling with now is having their divine privileges revoked. Now they can't give Schilling that strike 3 inches off the plate. Now they can't create special zones for Barry Bonds and other superstar hitters.
Gradually over the last couple of decades, the umps have hijacked the strike zone, twisted and shrunk it, all part of their evil plot to take over the world. There is great power in defining and controlling the strike zone.
Of course, the umps oppose the QuesTec Umpire Evaluating System. They also oppose the solar system, the digestive system and the Dewey decimal system.
I love umps. They are colorful and cantankerous and add charm to the game. However, they are so anti-technology that most of them launder their clothing on rocks in the stream bed.
The QuesTec system isn't perfect, but neither was Pong, and we didn't pull the plug on that game. We allowed video-game technology to evolve, thus bettering mankind by creating today's massive global market for drool cups.
The umpires' gripe is that they now have to think about their calls, which must agree with the machine 90 percent of the time for a passing grade.
"We're almost umpiring against a machine," ump Tim McClelland said.
So? Now the umps know what hitters and pitchers have endured for years, trying to adjust to strike zones that shift based on the ump's astrological chart.
Some baseballers prefer the old way. Felipe Alou said Sunday he's OK with the human element of umping.
"You can't make all the hitters the same, or all the umpires the same," Alou said. "I think it's a matter of reaction. The cameras all see the same. I don't believe every human eye and every human reacts the same. That's my opinion, an old goat."
Right now, the umps have some slack. In noncamera parks like Pac Bell, they are free to create their own artistic version of the Zone.
In the camera parks, though, the umps are working scared. They are being graded and evaluated, and you know what happens to an umpire whose judgment is deemed badly flawed and wildly arbitrary.
He gets shipped to the NBA.
E-mail Scott Ostler at sostler@sfchronicle.com.