Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
The Land of Umpires
Where do you find such a man: A man involved in a game who has the authority of
a sea captain, the discretion of a judge, the strength of an athlete, the eye of
a hunter, the courage of a soldier, the patience of a saint and the stoicism to
withstand the abuse of the grandstand, the tension of an extra-inning game, the
invective of a player and the pain of a foul tip in the throat? He must be a
tough character, with endurance and the ability to keep his temper and
self-control, he must be unimpeachably honest, courteous, impartial, and firm,
and he must compel respect from everyone!
– Branch Rickey
Just about the first thing they teach you at umpire school is how to yank your
mask off without upsetting your hat. Umpires place great stock in their
appearance, and if you’re trying to make a call or follow a play with your hat
askew or caught in your mask straps or – the worst – spilled in the dirt, you
look foolish, inept, exactly the image you don’t want the ballplayers, the
managers and coaches, or the fans to have of you.
Like everything else in umpiring, or at least in umpire instruction, the method
for removing the mask is reasoned and precise. You keep your head straight, your
eyes forward, and move your hand to your mask, not the other way around. The
only reason you remove your mask in the first place is to watch a play on the
field, and you never want to turn your eyes down, away from the play, even for a
moment. There’s no worse feeling, umpires will tell you, than looking up from an
instant’s distraction, seeing the ball on the ground, and not knowing how it got
there.
Anyway, you grab the mask with your left hand, wrapping your thumb, forefinger,
and middle finger around it at seven o’clock. You don’t use your whole hand. You
can’t, really, because your ball-andstrike indicator is also in the left hand,
held snug against the palm by the ring finger and the pinkie. So with the three
available fingers, in one swift motion you pull the mask straight out from your
face to clear the bill of your cap, then straight up and off. You don’t toss it
aside; the catcher is the only one who ever throws a mask. If you have to come
out from behind the plate and run to a spot to make a call, if you have to hold
up your arms to signal foul, even if you have to use your left hand and pump
hard with your elbow to sell the call that a ball was touched in fair territory,
you hold your mask tight.
This is all, of course, rudimentary, something a professional umpire will do
with muscle memory and a shrug, the way a concertmaster will toss off a warm-up
arpeggio. But the reward is real. When you do it right, with the casual
adroitness that approximates instinct, it looks both graceful and aggressive,
leaving you, the plate umpire, properly possessed of the authority and dignity
of your office.
Naturally, for a beginner it is a harder trick to perform than it sounds, and
for me, a fifty-two-year-old student umpire, it was the first of many skills
that looked simple and proved annoyingly resistant to mastery. During school
drills, I’d get it right a couple of times, then let my concentration slip,
undoubtedly because of something else to focus on. I’d come out from behind the
plate to follow the path of an outfield fly ball or to straddle the third-base
line to judge a line drive fair or foul, pull off the mask, and my hat would end
up on the ground – usually smack-dab on the baseline so it was marked with a
telltale streak of lime – or merely jostled and tipped crooked, the bill
off-center like a rapper’s, or tipped forward and shading my eyes. How you can
pull your mask upward and have your hat tip forward I don’t know, but that it is
possible I am a witness. It wasn’t until school was done and I went out on the
field to work an actual game and my frustration continued that I solved the
problem for good (or thought I did) – by buying a hat with a narrower brim. Who
knew different-size baseball-cap brims even existed?
It turns out that an ordinary baseball cap has a brim about 3 1-4 inches wide,
with eight seams sewn into it. The brim of a base umpire’s cap is a little
narrower, maybe 3 inches and six seams wide, and the brim of an ordinary plate
umpire’s hat, which is what we were issued in school, is narrower still, 2 1-2
inches and four seams. The gradations downward continue until you get to a kind
of skullcap with a 1 1-2-inch brim that looks like an appetizer portion of
cantaloupe. Umpires call this version the beanie, and when you remove your mask,
it makes you look like a refugee from the nineteenth century. But I liked the
eccentricity of it and bought one.
Umpires, however, cannot afford eccentricity. Later I would discover a scene in
the popular film A League of Their Own in which the actor Tom Hanks, playing a
manager, accosts an umpire wearing the beanie. “Did anyone ever tell you you
look like a penis with that little hat on?” he says. But I wasn’t aware of this
at the time, and the first game I wore it, I noticed the teenaged players
giggling at me behind their hands. Whenever I made a call one of them didn’t
care for, he rolled his eyes and gave me a look – what a geek!
Immediately after the game, I went back to the store and bought a hat with a
two-inch brim, and when I came back the next day to work a game in the same
league, I held much more authority in the eyes of the players. Or so it seemed
to me, which is really all that mattered.
At this point perhaps you are thinking, okay, taking the mask off, enough
already. This is far too much detail about a mundane thing. And that’s correct,
except that the process I just described is a perfect analog of learning to be
an umpire. You master the fundamentals, you cast them off when they don’t serve,
and in the end you accommodate yourself to the game and its participants. It
turns out you’re not alone out there. It only feels that way.
The impetus for this book was a visit I made in January 2005 to the Jim Evans
Academy of Professional Umpiring in Kissimmee, Florida, in order to write a
story for the New York Times, where I work as a reporter. I thought it would be
a lark, a chance to talk baseball rules and baseball trivia – I’m the kind of
baseball fan who has never gotten over his boyhood obsession, who reads the
sports page before the front page and pores over box scores as though they were
hieroglyphic finds – not to mention a chance to wear short sleeves in
midwinter.
But what I found there in three days of observing – the whole course of
instruction runs five weeks – was weird and intriguing, an amalgam of strict
vocational schooling in subject matter as concrete as auto mechanics and
behavioral instruction as delicate and interpretative as you’ll find in any
acting workshop. Moreover, virtually everything I saw was new to me.
The experience persuaded me to write two more stories for the paper that year
about umpiring. For one, I went on the road with a crew of Double A umpires,
three young men locked together for a season, traveling long distances in a van
packed with their belongings through Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. For
the other, I met in major league ballparks and four-star hotels with Bruce
Froemming, then the senior umpire in the major leagues.
I came away from these three stories convinced that a land of umpires exists,
that it has citizens, laws, and a culture, and that it is exotic enough – both
in the context of baseball and the context of, well, the known world – to
warrant further exploring. Indeed, the presumption of this book is that
professional umpires are an unusually isolated and circumscribed group, sort of
like the inhabitants of a remote country that few people have ever visited, and
that I am the sociologist who was dispatched to send back word of what life is
like there.
I spent just about all of 2006 and 2007 and part of 2008 in the land of umpires,
beginning when I went back to the Evans academy and enrolled as a student in the
five-week program. From then on I went where the tales of professional umpires
took me, sort of like a ball bouncing erratically across a pebble-strewn
infield. It wasn’t a comprehensive investigation, but for the most part it was a
lot of fun.
Among other places, my travels took me to Cocoa, Florida, where a team of former
professional umpires was evaluating umpire-school graduates for jobs in the
minor leagues; to Cedar City, Utah, where a former air force engineer, Grant
Secrist, was keeping alive his quest to create a simulator, akin to the one used
by fighter pilots, to train major league umpires in calling balls and strikes;
to the exurbs of Phoenix, Arizona, and the farm country of Ohio, homes of two
former umpires – Don Denkinger and Larry Barnett, respectively – who made two
of the most controversial calls in World Series history; to southern Connecticut
to visit with the candid ex-commissioner of baseball, Fay Vincent; and to
central California, where Doug Harvey, the legendary National League umpire who
narrowly missed being the ninth umpire inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007,
waxed formidable and egocentric about what it takes to make it in the major
leagues.
I spent several weeks with minor league umpires in places like Boise, Idaho;
Huntsville, Alabama; Omaha, Nebraska; Bowie, Maryland; Des Moines, Iowa; Fresno,
California; Trenton, New Jersey; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania; and Portland, Maine, getting to know some of the young men (and
one young woman) who were willing, remarkably, to put up with endless
indignities – rotten pay, long road trips, mediocre hotels, cramped locker
rooms, not to mention the utter thanklessness of the umpiring task – for up to
a decade or more in pursuit of the unlikely possibility of a major league job
opportunity.
To talk to major league umpires, I went to spring training in Florida in 2006
and Arizona in 2006 and 2007. I went to the 2006 All-Star weekend in Pittsburgh
and over two seasons spent regular-season series with different big league crews
in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, and St. Louis.
I spent the 2006 World Series traveling between Detroit and St. Louis with Randy
Marsh, Tim McClelland, John Hirschbeck, Mike Winters, Wally Bell, and Alfonso
Marquez, the six men who’d earned the privilege of officiating the games between
the Tigers and the finally triumphant Cardinals; during the 2007 World Series, I
went to Denver, home of the Colorado Rockies, and sat down with five of the six
crew members – Mike Everitt, Ted Barrett, Ed Montague, Laz Diaz, and Chuck
Meriwether – before the Red Sox completed their four-game sweep and everybody
went home.
In the end, I conducted about two hundred interviews with working and retired
umpires, with players and coaches in the major and minor leagues, and with
baseball executives both current and former.
Both in baseball generally and in umpire-dom particularly, these were eventful
years. During this time, minor league umpires, testing the power of their
fledgling union (it was incorporated in 1999), went out on strike for the first
time over the issue of their pitiful salaries. Ria Cortesio, the only woman
umpire in professional baseball and the sixth in history, was dismissed, after
nine years in the game, by minor league officials. After a flurry of miscalls in
which rightful home runs were ruled foul or in play – or fly balls that should
have been foul or in play were ruled home runs – the use of instant replay to
help umpires on batted balls near the home run boundaries was instituted toward
theend of 2008.
The revelation, in the summer of 2007, that a National Basketball Association
referee, Tim Donaghy, had been providing inside information to gamblers and
betting on games he himself was officiating sent a shudder not only through
basketball but other professional sports. Donaghy’s actions cast suspicion on
all officials, who are hardly viewed with respect under the best of
circumstances; the result in baseball was that the administration of the game
tightened security around the hiring and monitoring of umpires, probing into
their lives with investigative checks that umpires found humiliating and
invasive.
And of course the issue of performance-enhancing drugs grew steadily in
prominence, culminating, on December 13, 2007, with the release of former
senator George Mitchell’s report on his twent-ymonth investigation into the use
of steroids, human growth hormone, and other illegal substances by major league
players, and the subsequent challenge to his findings by Roger Clemens. Clemens,
possibly the preeminent right-handed pitcher in baseball history, was merely the
biggest name in a 409-page document that identified eighty-six players by name
and concluded that the use of these substances was widespread and that it had
been at best overlooked and at worst condoned by both baseball’s administration
and the players’ union.
Umpires essentially shrugged; they had been aware for a decade or more that some
players were juicing. They could tell by the players’ bodies and also by their
temperaments. When I asked whether they ever thought of reporting what they saw,
several umpires said yes, they thought about it, but decided not to because it
wasn’t their responsibility.
“If I went to a manager and said, ‘Hey, do you know your third baseman is so
high he’s foaming at the mouth?’ he’d just tell me to mind my own business,” one
veteran umpire told me. “‘You do your fuckin’ job and I’ll take care of my
team.’ That’s the mind-set.”
Indeed, the reaction of many umpires to the Mitchell report was with perhaps the
one essential umpire emotion: indignation. As one umpire wrote to me in an
e-mail, “Why don’t you ask baseball about the perception for the last ten years
of the umpires being the aggressors on the field when we now know that most
players were on either steroids or amphetamines?”
What was most striking about all these events was what little effect they had on
the way umpires do their jobs and live their lives. As a group they are
remarkably unshakable and certain of themselves. It wasn’t much remarked on, but
anyone who was paying attention during those years could see that the criticism
of umpires was steadily escalating. On talk radio and Weblogs, the excoriation
was high; the disdain from the broadcast booth was regular and severe. In one
extraordinary moment in September 2007, Chipper Jones, the star third baseman
for the Atlanta Braves, spurred by his displeasure with home plate umpire Rick
Reed, exploded in a postgame interview:
“It’s a joke,” Jones said to George Henry of the Associated Press, as part of a
long tirade about umpiring in the big leagues. “Major League Baseball ought to
be ashamed. It’s abysmal. It’s awful. Not all of them but some of them. It’s
awful.”
The level of disdain began to approach that of the 1990s, when the print media,
supported by substantial dissatisfaction among baseball’s club owners and
administrators, led a public-opinion revolt against umpires with a wave of
stories complaining about their weight, their arrogance, their lack of hustle,
and their missed calls, often with animosity-provoking headlines such as “The
Belligerent Men in Blue,” which appeared in the Sporting News.
But when I brought this up to umpires, suggesting they were going through
another bad patch, most of them shrugged. Nah, they said. Business as usual.
Indeed, what I found in the land of umpires was a society with rock-solid
traditions of both thought and deed, and if current events tended to have any
effect on those traditions, it was only to harden them, to make umpires more,
well, umpirish.
To speak generally, umpire nation is a place buried deep in the conservative,
middle-American heart, where the prevailing and not-necessarily-consistent
values are similar to those you’d find on the floor of a large factory: The
union is lionized, management is held in suspicion, yet the privilege and
affluence that come with managerial power are nonetheless coveted.
In umpire nation, Applebee’s and Chili’s are high-end establishments, steak is a
gourmet meal, and, for some reason, lite beer is preferable to regular beer.
It’s a place where the playing of the national anthem before a ball game is
serious business, where women are discomforting, Jews are a novelty, homosexuals
are unwanted, and liberals tend to keep their opinions to themselves.
In umpire nation travel is so relentless that it is more deadening than
broadening. It’s a place where outward confidence is a must, and the mistakes
that erode the foundations of self-esteem are obsessed over. The denizens are
proud of what they do and resentful they aren’t better paid and better
recognized. They are defined and held together by the powerful bond of their
singular profession, but, as in a large dysfunctional family, the differences
among them are varied, deep-seated, and often bitter.
Umpire nation also has its own language, or at least a patois, and it is
anything but delicate. The usual four-letter imprecations are well represented
in the daily umpire lexicon, but it has one especially distinguishing feature:
the word “horseshit.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from As They See ‘Em
by Bruce Weber
Copyright © 2009 by Bruce Weber.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 2009
Bruce Weber
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9411-9
