Interview with Rich Rieker, Director of Umpire Development

For the past six-plus years, since before the 2011 season, Rick Rieker has been director of umpire development for Major League Baseball. Rieker umpired his first major-league game in 1992, and worked as both a National League and then major-league umpire through the 2001 season. In 2002 he began work as an umpire supervisor. For 16 years, he worked as an instructor at the Wendelstedt Umpire School.

He is responsible for administration of Major League Baseball Umpire Camps (MLBUC.com), based at MLB’s Urban Youth Academy in California, and develops the Virtual Umpire Camp digital learning tool, available on CD-rom or flash drive. He coordinated the training and assignments of both major-league and international umpires for the World Baseball Classic. In short, through his position as director, umpire development, Rieker oversees a variety of training and educational initiatives.

Rieker start umpiring as early as age 11, working Little League games. He and his wife, Kathleen, first met in the St. Louis area; she was in Little League and they both worked in the same Khoury League Association. They met at an umpire meeting in the basement of a church. Many years later, they started dating.

Rich’s father was a letter carrier, and the whole family were big St. Louis Cardinals fans. His brother Stephen officiated football for many years.

Rich officiated basketball, football, and baseball through high school and college, attending umpires school during his junior year — but it was actually working a flag-football tournament in 1982 that first introduced him to the Wendelstedt Umpire School. “They sent a crew down to Daytona Beach for the first annual flag-football tournament in 1982. When we showed up for the tournament — we were there refereeing — unbeknownst to us, the umpire school was at the same complex. I saw what was going on over there and that’s what got me the fever.”1

He talked to Harry Wendelstedt and Randy Marsh and learned there were 90 students in the class, with likely 15 or 16 jobs available. Seeing some of the students in action, he not only thought that he could make it, but that that ratio of class to jobs was a pretty good percentage. Then when he showed up the following year, there were 262 students — the biggest class in history. But there were still only the 15 or 16 jobs. He did well: “Eddie Hickox and I graduated 1 and 2. I graduated number 1 and Hickox graduated number 2. I still give him trouble about that today.”

Rieker got hired and worked in the Midwest League for two seasons and the Eastern League for two seasons. He worked his first big-league games in 1992, worked four seasons as a fill-in umpire, and was officially hired in 1996, just two weeks after umpire John McSherry died on the field.

He’d had a couple of neck surgeries while in the minor leagues, and when he herniated his third disk in 2001, he had to give up work on the field. He had worked in exactly 1,000 major-league games.

Still on salary, Rieker was fortunate that Ralph Nelson, then MLB’s vice president for umpiring, asked him to work as a supervisor. It was a staff that included Marty Springstead, Frank Pulli, and Richie Garcia, and — later — Jim McKean and Steve Palermo.

“For the last six years, I’ve worked for Peter Woodfork [MLB’s senior vice president for baseball operations] and Joe Torre [chief baseball officer]. Randy Marsh and myself became directors five or six years ago. In our offices, there are five directors — myself, Randy Marsh, Matt McKendry — who’s director of administration. He’s out of New York. He does all the admin and scheduling, stuff like that. The director of medical services is Mark Letendre. He’s the best. And we have the director of replay the last three years, which is Justin Klemm, former minor-league umpire and former big-league call-up, who is out of New York.

“My responsibilities include major-league supervision. Randy Marsh is director of major-league umpires and I’m director of umpire development, but a lot of our stuff is overlapping, the major-league stuff, to where if we have to handle something with a club or through a manager if we’re asked to do it. We evaluate the umpires like all the supervisors do. We help select umpires for the postseason. And under my side of the house is the Triple-A development side, which just finished the Fall League.

“Basically, when an umpire comes through the system, they have to work at every level. Instead of there being four levels — Rookie, A, Double A, and Triple A, like it was when I came in, now there’s six levels. They divide Rookie into two levels and they divide A into two levels. So you can’t go from the (New York-)Penn League to the Florida State League. You have to go through the South Atlantic League in between, even though they are all A leagues. To advance through those six levels generally takes between five and seven years. Then when they get to Triple A, we get them. Those five to seven years at the beginning, those are done by Minor League Baseball Umpire Development. Dusty Dellinger.

“Then the guys come up to us. We have several supervisors. Tom Lepperd. Cris Jones. Chuck Meriwether. Ed Rapuano. We get some help from Larry Young and the major-league supervisors like Ed Montague, to see guys throughout the season in certain areas. We have a meeting in August where we have all the written reports, any video we need — every Triple-A game is broadcast in some way, shape, or form, whether it’s a static camera or several cameras. We’re able to evaluate, along with reports from league presidents, we’re able to evaluate the Triple-A umpires.

“The top prospects go on to the Arizona Fall League, which is a six-week prospect league for both players and umpires. That’s just concluded out in Scottsdale. There are six teams, and there’s three games a day. We try to dispatch two supervisors — at least two, sometimes three — to cover these games in Arizona, to watch these umpires and their progress.

“We just had a conference call yesterday and now we’ve ranked them for spring training, so that when spring training comes out, we assign the umpires. Major-league guys get their names stuck on there first and then we look for holes for the Triple-A guys. In other words, if there’s a need for an umpire in Jupiter, a Triple-A guy goes in there. We’ll give the Triple-A guys a full schedule as well.

“They all get spring training. Major-league guys get a full schedule or a half-schedule. Major-league veterans who don’t live in Florida or Arizona, they just take a half and the other guys take a full. It just depends on what the guys want to do that particular spring, but every major-league umpire has to work spring training.

“When we hire a guy, he has been purposefully vetted by all the games that he’s worked. We have all of his plate data, his accuracy on the bases, replay data, situation-management data, all of his Triple-A reports. When we hire a guy, you can imagine any job out there and you put a camera over your employee 24/7, monitoring his whole shift, you’re going to pick the right people. That’s what we have the luxury of doing. We have everything these guys do, and we obviously take the best of the best. The supervisor recommends a name to me, I take the name to Peter Woodfork and Joe Torre. They take it to the commissioner, and when he’s cleared, the umpire is hired.

“Unfortunately, some of those umpires don’t get hired. Some of the guys on the call-ups don’t work out. They get released in the minor leagues. If you’re in Triple A for three years, and there’s no interest by the big leagues, then you are subsequently released from your minor-league contract.

“We have so much data, but it’s important to know that data is just the starting point. When somebody’s getting the same amount of pitches right as the big-league guys and somebody’s getting the same number of plays right to our very high standards, you’ve got to look at what kind of employee this guy’s going to be. How are they administratively? The same things you would consider for any other job. You want to make sure the reports are on time. That they’re polite and courteous, that they handled their situations on the field in a professional fashion, and they’ve got to hope there’s an opening. Some guys fall victims to the no-openings.

“Minor League Baseball told me that from ’99 to 2008, I think there were three openings for minor-league umpires. From 2008 on, they told me, there were 20 that we’ve hired.

“That’s on the major-league side. On the other side, we run our annual umpire camps. We have open tryouts from MLBUC — MLB Umpire Camps, which we started over 10 years ago. Using these camps in one way, shape, or form, we’ve helped place in the umpire schools [students who became] over 140 minor-league umpires. Our first two paybacks — our first two success stories — are Carlos Torres, who’s working in the big leagues part-time, and Ramon DeJesus, the first Dominican umpire. Those guys were eight years ago. We’re starting to see that these guys are coming back through our system. Last year — ’15 — we had eight camps.

“We take our staffs to these one-day camps. The staffs help pick the people they think can walk and talk and display some athleticism during that three-to-five-hour camp — and the people who have the desire. They are subsequently interviewed by Cris Jones. They fill out a background check. They fill out a lot of paperwork. And then of the people who pass that process, they will get a scholarship down to Fort Myers for December 27. Last year 35 people went. Twenty went on to umpire school. Eight of those were full scholarships paid for by MLB. The whole Fort Myers thing is paid for by MLB. So once you get invited from one of these free camps, you don’t have any out-of-pocket.

“Out of those 20 who went to umpire schools out of our camps, 14 are working in the minor leagues, including our first female candidate from the camps. This year, we’re looking at 25 to 26 down there in Fort Myers and we’ll do the same thing all over again. This is our third year. It more or less makes us like a 31st ballclub to where we’re actually scouting and prospecting, if you will. We’re also offering opportunities for those in urban areas who can’t afford it.

“It’s fun to do the camps because that’s the one day of the month and the four days in December that we roll up our sleeves and we help people go in the right direction with being ahead of the curve, helping to train people, and really, it’s refreshing because it comes at no cost to them and my staff loves doing it.

“I don’t get to do as much as I’d like to in the minor leagues — I went and saw a three-game series and they had three arguments on the bases. I think they got the calls right and they handled themselves fine. I talked to the guys after the games and I said, ‘Those three arguments are more than you’re ever going to have in your whole big-league career on the bases anymore, because of Replay.’

“What we’ve found is that if you have a 162-game season, and the pressure has to get let out of the tire somewhere before the tire explodes, it’s a long season and arguments are part of the game, it’s all going to be on balls and strikes and checked swings, really. Now the umpires are really engaged with all that. The bases are not a day off, but they are definitely not what they used to be. Our guys still try to get them right, because we record everything. They don’t want to be standing there with the headset on, looking up at the big board, and finding out that they made a mistake in front of the full stands at Fenway.

“It’s a dynamic that has really split the minor-league umpiring off from the major-league umpiring. But it’s a good one for us to have because we can test their mettle more than just the ball-and-strike ejection, which is pretty much a check-box thing. You see the guys get upset about this, the umpire warns him, the player goes away, nothing happens. But if the player turns around, now he’s going to get ejected and then the manager comes out: ‘Why’d you eject him?’ It doesn’t have the open debate any more on the tag play at second base when the manager comes out and says, ‘What have you got?’ You have an open debate sometimes, and that’s when situations are either squashed or they are accelerated. Those really don’t exist anymore, save maybe for a random balk call or obstruction or interference maybe.”

Rieker is responsible both for hiring people and letting people go, but for the people who get hired, he often has the chance to give them the good news.

“That’s a great call, when you can finally do that with Joe [Torre]. Usually Randy Marsh is on the call. And Peter. Every call every year is different but we have to tell more people that they can’t make it. I have heard that 55 percent of College World Series umpires are former professionals, so most of our guys that are call-ups can literally put in their résumé to a college in a major conference and those guys are almost always hired. Normally, they are going to four-umpire crews. There’s a lot of opportunity now. You can make $2,000 a weekend, sometimes. A lot of our guys — three or four in just the last year or two — have gone on to major college conferences. That’s what we encourage them to do. In effect, we are actually probably training more college umpires than we are major-league umpires.

“Now there’s more money involved and college umpiring is much bigger and more traveled now than it ever has been. Bill McCallum is a former Triple-A umpire. He is now the NCAA supervisor for the Northeast region. He’s working for us at the Fort Myers camp coming up. He instructed for 15 years, and we like to show students that there’s other things available to them as well.

“We like to think we’re one big brotherhood of umpiring and whether you work at the Little League, high school, college, or pro level, we’re all basically doing the same job and we like to help whenever we can.”

Rieker is the one who makes the decisions on the call-up umpires. How do they make use of the evaluations?

“We’ve got the four supervisors — Leppard, Jones, Meriwether, and Rapuano. Larry Young sees some of the guys. Ed Montague sees some of the guys. When they work in the big leagues, Steve Palermo, Randy Marsh, Charlie Reliford see the guys. We’ve got an extensive database of major-league and minor-league reports on our desktops. Each umpire in Triple A is seen an average of 25 to 30 games per year. When I was in the minors, you were lucky if you got seen five games. We now blanket the country and it’s the responsibility of our guys to get every umpire seen and then we come up with cross-checking so we come up with a good idea of who might be the guys to move up. We’ve got all these reports in a database. Those are all in the same system.

“Umpire Observer Kevin O’Connor could actually evaluate a guy in Pawtucket and a week later, if the guys gets called up, he’ll evaluate him in Boston. We try to have Kevin see all the guys in the (International League) who come through Pawtucket. That all goes into our desktop. These reports are combed over by supervisors. We try to look for deficiencies so we can try to help the umpire with these reports. We look for positives. We look for field presence. We look for judgment when we get the tapes. We look for mechanics. We look for mobility. All the different things that we would look for to stack these umpires up. Then we take all these reports and then over Labor Day weekend we meet and we pick the guys for the Fall League. So there’s a bevy of data there. Not as much for a major-league umpire. If you’ve got a Gabe Morales or a Ben May, who’s in the big leagues 200 or 300 games already, we’ve got all the big-league data on them, but we don’t have the strike-zone data at the Triple-A level.

“One thing we do in the Fall League, by the way, we do shoot ZE — the strike-zone measurement — at them three or four games each, so we actually train them on that. We take one day and basically break the machine down and put them all upstairs and show them how it works, to train them because if we evaluate employees, we have a responsibility to train them, too.

“The other thing we do in the Fall League is we bring a high-def camera out, and our video director, and we bring a college team out and we throw as many close plays as we possibly can — it’s banger after banger after banger — to try to get a baseline on the umpire’s judgment, because until they get to the big-league level, we don’t really have the cameras to decide whether he’s getting all those plays right in the minor leagues or not. Maybe there’s a judgment issue or a mechanical issue — that that umpire’s not looking at the foot or the glove, or turning their head too soon off of a force-play throw. We try to look at all that, and that’s another thing we do in the Fall League, to try to ramp that up and get that data.

“And then the phone call we had yesterday with all the supervisors who were at the Fall League, we selected the top three to five who are going to spring training. Based on all that data and all those reports.”

It’s Randy Marsh who selects the crew chiefs.

“Randy’s a good partner in all this. He was my chief instructor at umpire school when I went, and then I worked with Randy at the school. Randy handles travel and all that.”

How are umpires selected for the All-Star Game, and for the postseason?

“The supervisors — we have calls on that. We have a weekly call anyway and we generally know who’s getting close for the All-Star Game. The supervisors, Randy, myself, and McKendry, who the supervisors recommend to Peter Woodfork and Joe Torre, and then they take those to the commissioner. So, yeah, we are the ones who push those things. We have a playoff meeting in September where we do the same thing. Again, we’ve got a year’s worth of evaluations, conference calls, notes. Each major-league supervisor is assigned four or five crews that are in their pod — that they have to watch if there’s an issue, you know, strike zone or situationally.

“With the instant replay and the data we collect on the strike zone, I challenge any profession to say they’re as thoroughly evaluated as … maybe a physician or an air-traffic controller, I don’t know, but there’s not much umpires can do that’s not evaluated now. And it’s important that we do that. Obviously these guys maintain the integrity of the game and they do a great job doing it. It’s our job to make sure that’s all going well, and it is.”

It is Matt McKendry who does the scheduling, working with somebody who does it. The schedules are done blindly, through 19 schedules, and then the crew chiefs — by seniority — select. Each umpire gets two or three weeks of replay and they get four weeks’ vacation — you know that — but the schedules are done across the board blindly. Really, they’re pretty generic. You could almost throw a dart, but I think some of the umpires look at “where am I coming out of vacation?” because this is where my crew is from. Maybe one guy’s from Florida and one guy’s from California. How does this benefit this person? They’re all pretty close. Some of them might have a couple extra days in Replay. It’s up to that crew chief and his crew’s preferences. He’ll consult with his crew and then make a selection out of those 19. The last guy, number 19, he gets what’s left over, but since they’re done blindly — I’m not saying they’re all the same, but they try to balance out all the miles and seeing the clubs and all that sort of stuff.2

“Guys can go two or three years without seeing a park. I’ve talked to umpires who, say, haven’t been to Kansas City in a couple of years, or Detroit. It’s just the way the schedule works out. And, his crew might have gone there but he might have had that week off. Injuries, all kinds of stuff plays into that.”

In 2007 St. Louis magazine quoted Rieker in an article: “Basically we’re the buffer between league management and umpires. We hear the umpires’ problems and try to be counselors.”3

But he clearly is management. “Obviously the umpires are in a union, and we are management. We get messages from our bosses and have to get them out to the umpires — whether it’s an inconsistency on how to handle situations, or pace-of-games issues. Since we’re former umpires, we have to take the message from Major League Baseball that we want enforced, and get it out to the crews so that the commissioner’s policies and procedures are adhered to. We are the deliverers of the messages in many cases. Likewise, we have to take some of the umpires’ frustrations and take them back up the chain if it’s worthwhile. That kind of buffer is still there, but we are management. Make no mistake about that.

“We’re personal counselors, too. Marty Springstead — “Springer” — Marty was a great man. He spent 20 years in the field and 20 years in the office, and he insisted this is a human business. No matter how much automation, simulated training, and technology there is, he always said this is a people business and don’t ever forget it. There’s a lot of times when umpires have issues that we try to help them with, because we’ve been there. There aren’t many people who aren’t in the game that they can talk to about umpiring in the game today. So we’re also sounding boards, if you will, and we try to counsel them and help them along the way, too.

“I love my job and I love working with the guys. Even though I’m not able to work the games anymore, I consider myself blessed to be able to do this part of the game and to be able to help these guys, to counsel these guys, and to help them succeed — to be able to put them in a position to really do the best they can. That’s all we can ask for from the supervisors. Marty just would say, ‘Remember, this is a people business. Don’t ever forget it. There’s all this technology that comes out, but number one, this is a people business and if you remember that, you’ll be fine.’”

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.

 

Notes

1 Author interview with Rich Rieker on November 22, 2016. All quotations are from this interview unless otherwise indicated.

2 A study on the process of scheduling umpires is Michael A. Trick, Hakan Yildiz, and Tallys Yunes, “Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires and the Traveling Umpire Problem,” Interfaces, Vol. 42, No. 3, May-June 2012: 232-244.

3 Leslie Gibson McCarthy, St. Louis magazine, March 30, 2007.