As an umpire, I have a variety of feelings on the subject:
1. If it's true that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports, it may also be true that judging whether any part of a pitched ball passes through any part of the strike zone is the hardest call for a sports official to make. In other sports, officials judge where balls land or where feet are positioned in relation to painted lines. In a baseball game, the plate umpire has to make a couple hundred calls a game about the location of spinning, sinking balls in flight when pitchers are trying to pitch as close to the edge as they can and hitters are trying to be as selective as they can about which close pitches nick the zone and which ones don't. Thus, when a writer trying just a little to hard to be hip refers to "lovably blind" umpires, I assume he has no clue about the subject he has undertaken to write about.
2. I have no sympathy for the argument that human error is part of the game to the extent that it encourages complacence with unnecessary inaccuracy. However, I have a lot of tolerance for errors made by trained, prepared, conscientious, objective umpires. I had a professor in business school who often said the job of managers isn't to be right all the time; their job is to decide and to hope enough of their decisions are right to help their companies make money and fulfill their obligations to customers, employees, and the community. This principle applies to baseball, too. There is a game to be played. It can't drag on for days like a cricket match, and it is more important to maintain its rhythms than to adjudicate every fine-as-frog's-hair distinction to scientific precision. As long as the calls are being made conscientiously by an umpire with training appropriate to the level of ball being played, that's almost always good enough to have a fair competition.
3. "Getting it right" has its limits. Although I know I make mistakes every game, probably every inning, I also know my view of the strike zone is better than the batter's, and my ability to tell where the pitch was is almost always better than the batter's ability to predict where it will be in the future. So when it comes down to that hard-to-call pitch, if I mistakenly ring up a batter, the "injustice" is less outrageous than it seems. Sometimes the batter does get hosed, but it's almost never because of his superior perceptual skill: when he takes a close pitch with two strikes, it's usually because he got fooled or frozen or handcuffed by a pretty good pitch. I don't lose sleep over missing a two-strike pitch by a fraction of a ball's radius--that batter had it within his power to overrule my feeble judgment. If he's right and I'm wrong, it's usually a coincidence--unless I really blow it, which I admit can happen from time to time.
4. The object of umpiring is not perfection; it is fair competition and good sportsmanship. If you want perfect, you're missing the point of sports.
5. Despite these observations, if I had the ability and authorization to resort to technological resources on a limited number of important calls and it could be done without tedious delays, I would welcome the assistance.