A Conversation in the Umpires Room: Ted Barrett, Chris Conroy, Angel Hernandez, and Pat Hoberg

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Bill Nowlin: Mainly, I wanted to talk to you about being a crew chief. Your last crew, you had a couple of different people from now.

Ted Barrett: We’re on our individual vacations now, so Pat’s in for Scott [Barry]. And in Chicago, they brought in a guy to assist us with the doubleheader. Tom Woodring.

BN: Marcus Pattillo?

TB: Marcus was there because Angel had to cover another crew. Someone was out so they had to beef up the crew so they took Angel.

BN: So your normal crew is you three and Scott. He’s on vacation now. [to Pat] This is your first year now?

Pat Hoberg: Second.

BN: In this room, you’ve got all the Hall of Fame umpires. Most of the rooms you go to around baseball, is there some kind of historical recognition, or is it kind of hit and miss?

TB: Hit and miss, yeah. Detroit’s got plaques of every one of them. Interesting story on that, there was these pictures of old ballplayers in Oakland, back to the Philadelphia A’s, and Ernie Harwell would always come in the umpires’ locker room and say hi. There were no captions, so I had no idea who these old players were. He’s looking and saying, “That’s Ed Rommel, and…” he’s going on and on. I thought Ernie’s losing it. He looks at me and says, “You know why these are up here” and I said, “Yeah, they’re the A’s and we’re in Oakland.” He said, “No, these are players who became umpires.” I thought that was kind of cool. Last one was….the guy whose son played in the National League.

Angel Hernandez: Kunkel?

TB: Yeah, Bill Kunkel.

BN: You’ve been a crew chief for a while now?

TB: This is my third season.

BN: Obviously, you’ve got to put in a few years to get there.

TB: Yeah, it’s seniority driven.

BN: (to Angel) I was wondering how that works. You started a few years earlier than Ted, but have you been a crew chief yet?

AH: I have no recollection of it. I don’t really follow those things.

TB: He’s a crew chief a lot of times when crew chiefs go, and he fills in. Bob Davidson is the other one.

AH: When a crew chief goes on vacation, the #2 guy basically just runs the crew. He’s the intern.

BN: What do you do as a crew chief?

TB: Basically, it’s just — probably the biggest thing is when it rains. That’s the biggest thing, is trying to coordinate with…

BN: Dave next door? [Dave Mellor, head groundskeeper]

TB: Yeah, and the ballpark personnel. Even now, with the technology. Other than that, it’s just on the field. Replay’s brought a whole new dimension to it.

BN: There’s two guys who go on the headsets.

TB: Always the crew chief and the other one’s the calling umpire. If that’s me, then the two-man, Angel, would go with me.

BN: If you were the calling umpire.

TB: Yeah.

BN: And the other two stand around.

Chris Conroy: Make sure everybody’s…

TB: There’s actually a lot of responsibility. They’re doing a lot. There can’t be any conferences, changes, and they also are thinking through what happens if a play gets flipped — what’s the count, what are the outs, where are the runners? When we come off the headsets, there’s a lot of information. If there’s something wrong, the runner’s in the wrong spot, or the count’s wrong on the board, I rely on these guys to come over, “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute…” before we start.

BN: It’s a whole new world, I guess. I don’t know how you feel about it. Some of the fans…it used to be kind of fun to see a good argument.

TB: Baseball purists, from the feedback I’m getting, they don’t like it. But it seems like our society’s so tech-driven now that they love it. And they want the machine to call balls and strikes, and I think eventually that’s going to happen.

BN: Well, if they get it just right, in three dimensions, it probably could.

TB: I think they would rather have it in its present state than us. But people who been around baseball a little more appreciate what we do a little more. I think this younger generation doesn’t….

BN: Did the crew chief used to handle things like hotel and flight arrangements?

TB: Not since I’ve been umpiring.

BN: There’s an agency that makes the arrangements for the flights, but you all make the arrangements with the agency?

TB: Yeah, we all individually do that. We have a guy — Chris handles our hotels. There’s a lot of leg work and Angel helps him. They’re on the phone constantly. Even on the way over here today, we were talking about our future reservations.

When I came up, the crew chief was a little more domineering. We would always get two rental cars and he would always take one that was at his disposal. You couldn’t take the chief’s car. The old-timers tell me that you didn’t answer the phone when it rang in the locker room. Only the crew chiefs did. The real old-timers — the chief showered first. These seem like ridiculous rules; that’s all kind of out of the window. We’re all really respectful of the crew chiefs, but there’s no more of that domineering stuff going on.

BN: Do you get paid a little extra?

TB: A hundred dollars a game. So when I’m gone, Angel will get the hundred dollars. It adds up over the course of the season.

BN: Are you guys all staying at the same hotel?

TB: This time we are, yeah.

BN: Do you think the role of the crew chief has changed over time? I’m not talking about what you already addressed, but umpiring on the field, or anything at all.

TB: I think, especially for younger guys — people like Pat — when Angel and I came up, the crew chief was the one who would really critique you, who would give you advice. Now, it’s more the supervisory staff. And we really almost have to stay out of their way because as we transitioned into that, we would tell them some things that might be counter to what they [supervisory staff] were saying. Then we’re just messing them up. So we try to stay out of their way and be a kind of support system.

BN: Do you hear directly from the umpire observers, or from the supervisors?

TB: The observers we don’t hear from. We get evaluations through the computer, from the observers. But the supervisors we’ll hear directly from. He’ll hear [indicating Pat] directly from the supervisory staff. We have a supervisor assigned to us. For our crew, it’s Ed Montague. So if we have an issue, we call him or he calls us. Our supervisor will look at the observer’s reports, and we’ll get them, too, but we don’t have any contact with him.

BN: But what he puts on the computer, you’ll see the exact same thing.

TB: Yeah.

BN: You don’t filter any of that information, as crew chief. It’s just there on the computer.

TB: Only in the case of somebody like Pat, somebody that is filling in. They might call me and say something like, “Pass this on to him” or Work with him on this.” But not with these guys [points to Chris and Angel]. They would contact them directly.

BN: [to Chris] Are you officially a major-league umpire now?

CC: Yes.

BN: And you’re a minor-league umpire [Pat]. That would be the dividing line.

TB: Yeah. There’s some crew chiefs that might maybe be a little more hands-on with that, but for me with on-the-field stuff, these guys are so good that….

AH: In my opinion, he’s a major-league umpire when he’s here. Because that’s what he’s doing. He’s working a major-league game.

BN: And he’s getting all the benefits of being a major-league umpire, too, while he’s here.

AH: And that’s exactly why they called him, because otherwise they wouldn’t have called him.

BN: [to Pat] How many games did you work last year?

PH: 120-something.

BN: That’s about as much as almost anybody works, right? So you’re basically just paying your dues, so to speak.

AH: This is his chance. He’s getting his exposure. That’s how everybody started. Vacation or injury, they’ll call the next guy that they’re looking at – a prospect. You’re looking at one. He’s right in front of you.

BN: What do you call them — “fill-in umpires”?

CC: Up-and-down umpires.

AH: Fill-ins. Call-ups. Prospects is what I say. The future.

BN: You were born in Cuba?

AH: Havana. I left when I was 11 months old. Yes, sir.

BN: I was just there a few months ago. Have you ever had occasion to go back at all?

AH: I never have. [Hernandez was selected to serve as the first-base umpire in the Tampa Bay vs. Cuba game at Estadio Latinamericano on March 22, 2016 in Havana. That became his second trip. In the 2015-16 offseason, Angel joined Ted Barrett on a mission to Cuba.]

TB: I’ve been there. I was there last year.

BN: International umpiring?

TB: No, actually on a mission trip. Religious visit, but then I ended up hooking up with the umpires through that.

BN: They have a woman umpire there, and one up in Canada, too. Yanet Moreno in Cuba — I didn’t get a chance to meet her.

TB: I did. She came to the clinic that we did. She did a good job. You know what, they didn’t have uniforms and last year when we went, we took them pants and shirts. Now they match. They were wearing…one had a blue shirt and one had a black shirt. One had a jacket.

BN: I think I saw five games this last trip and everybody I saw was in uniform.

TB: Maybe that’s the uniforms we took them.

BN: Could be. Actually, I noticed that some of them had something that looked like MLB logos on them and I wondered where they got them from.

TB: Yeah, we brought a lot of our extra old shirts.

AH: But I am not the first. The first was Armando Rodriguez. Mr. Richie Garcia was born in Key West, in the States. And Laz Diaz as well. Armando was the first. For the record.

BN: It’s all black and gray now pretty much, right?

AH: They kept the light powder blue color for hot games. So we still have them. For hot games, it’s needed.

BN: That could be tomorrow.

AH: I will be wearing it. You can assure yourself. [Indeed, game time temperature on July 12 was 86 degrees and the crew all wore their blue shirts.]

BN: Are you working the plate tomorrow?

AH: God willing. If He will allow me to, I will be, yes.

BN: You [Ted] were an American League umpire, and you [Angel] were a National League umpire before they came together. I asked you [Ted, on an earlier phone call] if there was kind of a rivalry between the two leagues, even though there was no interleague play until 1997, so you hardly would see each other. You said, yeah, there was, and I said something like just a joking rivalry, and you said sometimes it had a little bite to it.

TB: Yeah.

BN: And I was wondering, what’s that all about?

TB: I don’t know. I never understood that myself. I think it was just kind of a pride thing. I’d always kind of equate it to my son’s in the Army and the other’s in the Air Force, and they tease each other.

BN: Sure.

TB: And if anybody knows a Marine, they tease the other three mercilessly.

BN: Right.

TB: I thought it was like that, but there were occasions that I think it carried into a little more of a prideful thing. That’s gone now, now that we’re all together.

AH: Look at the history of it. They were really different. American League umpires wore the balloon, the outside chest protector. The National League umpires never wore that. They always wanted to be different. And they were different.

BN: And of course since the DH. You’d only meet each other in the offseasons, postseason, or the All-Star Game.

TB: Union meetings.

BN: Did people really say stuff like, “Our league’s better”?

TB: Yeah. There’s stories of fist fights.

BN: You were a boxer. Nobody’s going to pick a fist fight with you!

TB: By the time I showed up that was kind of gone, but there was still the teasing.

BN: Maybe one or two people were a little too thin-skinned?

TB: Back then, it was so different. Like Angel said, with the uniforms, the equipment, philosophies….

AH: Higher strike zone, lower strike zone because of the positions they worked with the different equipment. When we’d get together, there’d just be arguments about different rules and theories.

TB: Our way’s the right way.

BN: Obviously there weren’t brawls all the time, but once or twice somebody hit somebody?

TB: Yeah.

AH: The DH versus the no-DH, why the American League games were longer, why the National League games were shorter. Just discussions like that.

BN: The pace of game has come down some this year, but I don’t think it’s due to replay. I think it’s due to the clocks between innings and on the relievers and….

AH: There’s really no data for that yet. We’ll see at the end of the season. You’ve got to love all the changes that they’re making. They’re trying to make it better for the fans as well as the game and for everybody to enjoy. The beauty is, the gate’s always open for you. You pay to watch entertainment. If you don’t like it, you can always leave. You pay to go watch a movie. I’m a big moviegoer, but if I don’t like it, I leave. It’s entertainment.

BN: With the comings and goings throughout the season, you get into a working rhythm if things are working right. Is it a little disruptive, in a way…though you only typically have one person gone at any given time.

TB: Usually that’s not too bad when you’ve got one guy coming in. it’s when you have massive turnover — you look at some crews, they’ve just completely blown out. Injuries.

BN: On top of vacations.

TB: Yeah. And that can be disruptive. But when you just have one of our guys, like Pat, slide in for a few weeks, that’s usually pretty seamless. It’s refreshing to get a young guy in and try to help him out, too.

BN: Maybe it helps you guys, too, in a way. I mean, you all came up once, too.

TB: Yup.

AH: To give back, exactly. We remember, like I do, our first game. Excited. You never forget your first game. Where it was at, who you worked with, the score, et cetera. That’s a memory-filer, for sure.

BN: You guy who are major-league umpires, when’s the last time you actually rubbed up a baseball?

CC: It would have been back in Double A. You get to Triple A and the teams…ball boy, or whoever, start doing that. Double A was the last time I remember rubbing up a baseball.

BN: Was that your experience, too, Pat?

PH: Yeah.

TB: I did it until about the late 90s.

AH: Special mud. It’s really special.

BN: You’ve got some of it right over there inside that cabinet.

TB: I don’t miss it. You get tired of it. In the minor leagues, it wasn’t bad. It’s a couple of dozen and it’s kind of your routine. In the big leagues, there’s so many. You’re rubbing up seven or eight dozen and it’ll take a while.

BN: Dean [Lewis] says he does 12 or 14 dozen.

TB: Yeah, he probably does.

CC: When I was in Double A just four or five years ago, we were doing seven or eight dozen.

AH: Back in the day, and I don’t go that far back, the pitchers would be upset if the catcher…[many people talking at once] they would toss that ball out. Now you see it where every ball gets thrown out. Even take notice of the ball the catcher will throw to second and is short-hopped. The hitting coach is yelling at you, “Hey, change the ball!” So just to save time, we don’t even wait for them — we know it’s coming, so we go to the catcher, “Here’s a new one.” It’s such a habit that when they’re throwing it around to the third baseman, as opposed to tossing it to the pitcher, he’s throwing it to the third-base coach or throwing it to a kid.

BN: It’s good for the fans.

AH: It’s very costly, when you think of it.

BN: Working with the groundskeepers — and that is you, primarily, as the crew chief…?

TB: Yeah. He’ll usually stop in and give us the lowdown, what’s going on, and then if there’s a delay I’ll go over to his office to look at the radar. [Dave Mellor’s office is immediately adjacent to the umpires’ room.]

BN: [pointing to the closed door behind which is the home run replay equipment] Do you use this home run thing anymore?

TB: That’s in case of emergency. That’s a backup, if the system goes down.

BN: If the current replay system goes down.

TB: Yeah.

BN: But you used to use that for a couple of years.

TB: A couple of years, yeah, for home runs. We call that The Legacy. The techs refer to that as The Legacy.

BN: Nobody uses It anymore.

TB: No. If the system completely crashes down there…

BN: Has that ever happened yet?

TB: No.

BN: Let me ask the other three of you. [To Angel] How’d you first get interested in umpiring?

AH: My dad. Credit my dad for everything he did. He came from Cuba. He brought us up…I have five brothers…he brought us up playing baseball. He loved the game. Long story short, when I was old enough to start umpiring, I wanted to hit the streets, but in his mind there was no way I was going to hit the streets and catch up with my friends. Hialeah, Florida. Near Miami. So he started a program for umpires in the Little League organization. There’s where I started to umpire.

BN: What age?

AH: 14. Over 60,000 kids played there.

TB: How many major-league players came out of there?

AH: A lot. A lot of major-league players. Alex Fernandez. Ricky Gutierrez. Johnny Cangelosi. Palmeiro. That’s where it started, and I can thank him for that.

BN: Did you ever play ball, too?

AH: Just high school. My brother was a first-round, eighth pick in the nation, for the Brewers. Nick Hernandez. But he just basically quit. [Catcher out of Hialeah High School, in the 1978 draft.]

BN: Did you ever, at any level, happen to work a game he was in?

AH: No, that was before I went to school. I went to school in ‘81.

It’s happened. We have an active umpire who umpired while his brother was playing, but they would change him. They would change the cities for him. It’s a no-win situation. Jim Wolf. His brother is Randy Wolf.

TB: When I was in A ball, one of the guys in the league, his brother was the pitching coach for the Angels. Another guy’s brother played on an independent team. But the story I always tell when it comes to managers, there was an umpire in Triple A in the Coast League named Zack Bevington. His brother was Terry Bevington. He would do his games and everybody thought that… but as it came out, they hated each other. They wouldn’t talk. He ejected him one night. “You’ve always been a butthole.” They just quit talking.

AH: As a matter of fact, that question came up at umpire school. I went to Bill Kinnamon’s Umpire School. One of the umpires asked me, “So, if you get a chance to call your brother out on a strike…” I said, “I would have to be doing my job, so hopefully that would happen one day.”

BN: [to Chris] How about yourself?

CC: I can remember back when I was playing Little League baseball as a kid. For a reason I can’t explain, I can remember being fascinated and my eyes being drawn to what umpires did on the field. I thought it was neat. I thought the uniforms were cool. I thought the way they made calls…I used to find it amusing how different guys had a different kind of strike mechanic. From that point on, it always stuck in the back of my head that it looks like it would be something neat to do. I maybe worked a handful of games as a teenager just because I maybe happened to be going by the Little League field and nobody showed up and it was like, “Hey, could you help us out?” I liked doing that but I didn’t do a ton of it.

Then I was in about my mid-20s and I was single and just one day, I was like, “You know what? If I’m ever going to give this a shot, now’s the time in my life to try it and if it works out, great, if it doesn’t, then I tried and I know and I’ll move on with my life. I got in, and here I am. I was 25 when I went to umpire school.

BN: Which one?

CC: I went to Evans. I went in 2000.

PH: My dad was big into Little League. He did a little umpiring, so I started when I was 12, 14, somewhere around there, doing Little League games. I actually played basketball in college. My summer job was umpiring high school and college baseball, four games a day Monday through Friday. I decided when I was a sophomore in college that I wanted to do it so I did the research, graduated, and then went to umpire school. Grandview University in Des Moines.

BN: [to Chris] What were you doing until you were 25?

CC: I went to college. Graduated there in ‘96. I had a couple of jobs when I first got out of college. I was working for a YMCA. Then I spent a couple of years back in my hometown working on a youth recreation center. I was like 23, 24, making like 30 grand a year. It was OK for me but I just wanted more. In the back of my head. It was a time in my life I was just like if I try this now, it only impacts me. I’m not married, I have no kids. It’s as good a time as any to try it. They gave me a leave of absence from the job to go five weeks to umpire school. It’s all worked out OK.

AH: It’s the best experience of my life. I went at 18 and it was like a boot camp. Set up like a boot camp. They had lots of umpires there, trying to get into the game. And I never thought I would be one. Very competitive from the start. I remember calling my dad on a rotary phone back then, a pay phone, and he says, “Son, you’re young, so if you don’t get a job….” I said, “Dad, I’m up against men here. I shouldn’t even be here.” He said, “Give it the best you can.” The instructors were all major-league umpires and that was a phenomenal thing being in the presence of these guys. It was overwhelming — the experience and everything you learn. Besides the rules, they taught you positioning. You didn’t even really need to have umpired when you went to umpire school. They literally taught you everything to know about the game.

BN: It’s a pretty small percentage of people who go to umpire school and actually make it to the major leagues.

AH: Oh, yes, sir. The percentage is very low.

CC: I can remember the first day, you’re sitting in a big room with 120 or 150 other guys and they’d say, “Statistically speaking, in this entire room, one, maybe two, will be a major-league umpire someday.”

AH: And then you’ve got to endure the years in the minor leagues. I’ve worked with a lot of really good officials in the minor leagues. The opportunity was just never there for them when they were around, and they had the years in so they just passed them over, but they were quite deserving of working as well. I’ve worked with a lot of good umpires, guys who would go out there and work the job day in and day out.

Then there were the guys who found out it just wasn’t for them. The loneliness, the travel, the heckling. When you missed a call, back then they taught you, you never admitted it. The game’s changed a lot there now. It’s different.

BN: Did you enjoy the heckling sometimes?

AH: No. And it kind of scarred you. It made who you were. Those years in the minor leagues is what made you who you were. If you endured that.

There was a spectator in the Carolina League, and he called us all “muleheads.” You wanted to laugh but you couldn’t laugh. I wanted to grin and I had to bite my teeth together. He was hilarious.

[On the other hand, AH talked about anti-Latino slurs being thrown his way.]

 

BILL NOWLIN, known to none as “The Old Arbiter” since he has never worked a game behind the plate, still favors the balloon chest protector for its nostalgic aesthetics. Aside from a dozen years as a college professor, his primary life’s work was as a co-founder of Rounder Records (it got him inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame). He’s written or edited more than 50 books, mostly on baseball, and has been on the Board of Directors of SABR since the magic Red Sox year of 2004.