I'm not too sure about baseball, but for soccer most major professional leagues use video assistant referees (VAR) nowadays. Before the implementation of VAR, goal line technology was implemented as a way to immediately check whether or not a ball had crossed the goal line for a goal. I would say given goal line technology has been around a bit longer, it's been an overall plus for the game.

VAR initially was met with extreme skepticism across the world as I feel all technologies are not just limited within the sports world. Many would argue that the human element of officiating is what made the sport fun to watch, or that VAR would ruin the fluidity of the game and make it more a stop start game like American football. But now I think it's hard to argue against the fact that VAR and technology at large has made the game more fair.

The interesting part though is that each league has their own unique approach to using VAR. This has created criticism and confusion as a call that may be reviewed with VAR in one league might not be allowed in another. And sometimes a call that takes very fast to check in one league might take much longer in another, as was the case this year with the Premier League on average taking much longer for a call to be made compared to the Champions League.

Another issue with VAR is that ultimately the decision is reviewed and made by humans who are always prone to making errors regardless of how good the information they receive is. Nonetheless, I'm sure if the stats of officiating errors was being recorded and compared against the data prior to VAR and other technologies, we would notice a significant decrease in percentage of errors.

Ironically, VAR was developed and put in place in order to make the jobs of the referees easier and less stressful, but on the contrary has put more critical eyes on them as we now expect them to be near perfect every game. When I first started learning to referee games, my instructor told me to 'become part of the field' meaning that it is never my job to stand out or to make the game about me or my referee team and that I have successfully refereed if I end the game with minimal attention brought upon myself. But VAR all too often has put the spotlight on the referees instead of the game itself.

All in all, VAR is still in the process of improving. I think with more time and as things like AI become integrated into the technology it'll only serve to benefit the game further. I do feel though that everyone who plays or watches a sport should be obligated to officiate a few games of whatever sport they support in order to experience first hand the pressures and difficulties of refereeing. It honestly is a brutal job because you will almost never have a day in which you receive 100% customer satisfaction. And you often end up being the bad guy and receive all this blame over some game.

Anyways, I digress. My view of technology within sports has become more nuanced. I'm sure it's here to stay, and there will be more of it, and with time most of us will come to accept them as long as it doesn't completely ruin the games we love.