Bill Nowlin conducted this interview with Kevin O’Connor at Fenway Park on July 30, 2015.

Major League Baseball wants its umpires to be the best that they can be. Toward this end, they have an extensive and lengthy process through which an umpire takes many years to reach the major-league level, and is individually graded at every step of development. Not only does MLB invest in umpire health and conditioning, but it maintains a group of evaluators and supervisors to monitor umpires, both new umpires and the most established ones. Major League Baseball is spending millions upon millions of dollars to make sure that umpires are performing their jobs as well as they can.

The MLB website, accessed in August 2015, lists the following individuals under the title “Umpire Executives.” It appears the website may not have been updated since 2012. Because of the creation of the replay center in New York, the list is no doubt a more extensive one today.

At the top of the list are four men:

• Joe Torre — Chief Baseball Officer
• Peter Woodfork — Senior Vice President, Baseball Operations
• Randy Marsh — Director, Major League Umpires
• Rich Rieker — Director, Umpire Development

There follow seven Umpire Supervisors:

• Cris Jones
• Tom Lepperd
• Chuck Meriwether
• Ed Montague
• Steve Palermo
• Charlie Reliford
• Larry Young

And a number of other staff:

• Ed Rapuano — Umpire Evaluator
• Bruce Froemming — Special Assistant, Umpiring
• Matt McKendry — Director, Umpire Administration
• Justin Klemm — Director, Instant Replay
• Ross Larson — Instant Replay Coordinator
• Mark A. Letendre — Director, Umpire Medical Services
• Steven M. Erickson, M.D. — Medical Consultant
• Cathy Davis — Specialist, Umpire Administration
• Freddie Hernandez — Video Coordinator
• Steve Mara — Coordinator, On-Field Operations
• Michael Sansarran — Coordinator, On-Field Operations
• Raquel Wagner — Coordinator, Umpire Administration

There are also 11 Umpire Observers:

• Dave Buck (Chicago)
• Terry Christman (San Francisco/Oakland)
• Larry Hardy (Arlington)
• Travis Katzenmaier (Phoenix)
• Matt Malone (St. Louis)
• Mitch Mele (New York)
• Dr. Hank Nichols (Philadelphia/Baltimore)
• Kevin O’Connor (Boston)
• Rick Reed (Detroit)
• Steve Rippley (South Florida)
• Bill Russell (Los Angeles/Anaheim)

Many of the supervisors and evaluators have career backgrounds as former umpires working at the major-league level. All help to implement and oversee SURE, the Supervisor Umpire Review and Evaluation system, used to evaluate MLB umpires.

The Umpire Observers, as of the time the list was accessed, have a combined total of over 116 of umpiring experience, but also count years of experience as player, manager, scout, pitching coach, and officiating in other sports. One of the observers is Kevin O’Connor, who talked about his background and his work during a July 30, 2015 interview.

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Kevin O’Connor: I was born in 1963. I’ve lived my whole life in Oxford, Massachusetts. Same town as Steve Palermo. I grew up with Steve’s brother Mike. He was a year older. At a young age, I knew about umpiring because of Steve. [Steve Palermo umpired 152 American League games in 1977, when Kevin O’Connor was 14.]

We just lived sports. That’s all we did since I was 10. Back in the day, at the basketball courts at the center of town, we played basketball with Jim McKean, Mike Reilly, and some of those guys. When they came to Boston, a lot of times they would stay at Steve’s Mom’s house. She was a fantastic cook. They always went down there, so we got to meet some of the guys at a young age. I knew that after high school I was going to go to umpire school.

I was the youngest of six, and I was always the catcher. And I would call balls and strikes when I was catching. We actually had a pitcher’s mound — a legal pitcher’s mound — which my dad built in my backyard. My father was a big sports fan. And my mother. One of my brothers was an extremely good pitcher. Played in college. If he had pursued it, I think he probably could have played in A ball. He wouldn’t have gone further than that, but he was a very, very good pitcher. Dad was an accountant for Yankee Atomic Electric. And my mom was a schoolteacher, a fourth-grade teacher. And that’s where I met my wife. My wife had my mother as a fourth-grade teacher, and my wife and I met in sixth grade.

BN: Did you do any umpiring work in Little League?

O’Connor: Yeah. When I was in Little League, I umpired minor league. $2.50 a game. It was one of the years that they first allowed girls to play in Little League. There was a rule that you had to have a female on the coaching staff. The head coach’s wife was on the staff, and she was relentless. This was in minor league, 9-year-old league. I ended up throwing her out. She’s like, “You can’t do that” and the husband was so embarrassed. He just looked at her and said, “Yes, he can. Just leave.” That was my first ejection.

A later ejection occurred in A ball, when O’Connor was working the June 26, 1985 Florida State League game in Clearwater, Florida between the Clearwater Phillies and the Osceola Astros. When a Clearwater coach got into an argument with first-base umpire John Golden over a double-play call, the 64-year-old organist, Wilbur Snapp, started playing the tune, “Three Blind Mice.” Snapp was immediately ejected, not so much because any of the umpires had particularly thin skin but because Snapp had specifically asked whether it would be OK to play it, and was instructed not to.1

Another memorable ejection was on Opening Day in Pawtucket in 1992, when a reporter wouldn’t shut off their Klieg light and it was interfering with play.

Asked about his professional development, O’Connor said:

I went to Joe Brinkman in 1983. It was the first year he owned it and I got in. There were 13 of us who went to the next school out of Brinkman’s, and then we met the other guys from Harry Wendelstedt at the advanced school. Of like 450 kids between the schools, 33 of us went to the advanced school and 16 of us got spring training jobs. Those that passed muster went to the advanced school. That was run by Minor League Baseball. It was just a week-long evaluation. When we were told we made it, we literally got in a car and drove to Bradenton and the next day we started.

Then I had a couple of weeks off and I got to go home, and then I went right back down for spring training. Tommy Hallion and Charlie Reliford, I was in their first spring training camp. I had some good teachers.

That year, I worked in the New York/Penn League. I went to Instructional ball in Florida that fall. The next year, I was promoted to the Florida State League. I was there for two years. Then I went to the Eastern League — Double A — for three years. Then to Triple A, the International League, for four years.

In 1992, prior to the season, Marty Springstead, the head of the American League umpires told him, “I had planned on bringing you to spring training, but you know the situation. There’s nowhere to go.” There was no turnover, no major-league positions opening up, and Kevin’s wife was pregnant. O’Connor worked the 1992 but then was released because there was indeed nowhere to advance. He had been in industrial sales during the offseasons, and now went full-time while also working as a substitute teacher in Oxford. In the late 1990s, he began to work in real estate and currently owns the ReMax franchise in Oxford.

How did he become an umpire observer?

O’Connor: It was in 2001. I had kept in touch with Jerry [Meals] and Jeff [Kellogg] and all those guys. Phil Cuzzi, all those guys I kept in touch with. And Jerry sent me an email. It was, “Hey, they’re starting this new job. I don’t know what it’s about but I was just sent something.”

O’Connor sent in his baseball resume and after some time was offered the position he still holds in 2015, 14 years later. It’s officially a part-time job, for which he is paid on a per game basis. The only thing that’s changed for him was around 2008 when Jim McKean had a heart attack and O’Connor was asked to go to Pawtucket to look at some umpire crews working in the International League who needed to be seen. He filled in mid-year, and has covered both Triple-A games in Pawtucket and major-league games in Boston ever since. He’s the only one in his position who covers both major-league and minor-league games. Between the Umpire Supervisors and the Umpire Observers, they cover virtually every major-league game.

Who does he report to?

O’Connor: In the big picture, it’s Joe Torre. But my immediate guys…I consider any of the fulltime supervisors my boss. And then the head of the supervisors are Rich Rieker and Randy Marsh. But if Steve Palermo, Cris Jones, any of those — Charlie Reliford calls me — I consider them my bosses. For sure.

He arrives about an hour and a half before each game, and keeps himself busy with work until first pitch. He stays until the umpires have left the field and are out of his sight. What sort of reports does he provide? The actual reports, of course, are confidential and proprietary information.

O’Connor: They’re reported on a daily basis. Each game has its own separate report. I have to have them in within 48 hours of the series’ ending. I really don’t have to have Friday night’s game in on Saturday. I really have until Tuesday, but I normally have mine done and in the next day.

It’s a combination of a form, checking things off, rating them, and using examples of plays and things that happened in the game. It’s not a numeric rating.

BN: A couple of sentences on each umpire’s work during the game?

O’Connor: It depends on what happened in the game. There are a lot of nights where the third-base umpire will have absolutely nothing. Just one of those nights where he might have a fair/foul by 10 feet and that’s his only call, so it’s very difficult to try to come up with stuff to talk about.

It’s also hustle, though. We can comment on other things even if they don’t have plays per se.

[Regarding communication with New York]

They’ll send a number of plays after every game, to evaluate. Did they get plays right or wrong? And even review plays. We can say we disagree with the umpires in New York. If they uphold something and my angles show that they got it wrong, then I would say they got it wrong.

There is no contact or communication with the umpires themselves.

O’Connor: I’m not allowed to. Not allowed to. And it makes it tough, because I’ve worked with a number of the guys. And even in time between when I was off this field and I got this job, I’d come in and I’d see those guys. I’d stayed overnight with a few of them, and we’d go to dinner and the wives would come out and the whole thing, and now I can’t talk to them. Impartiality.

Before submitting his report, how does he review plays on which he needs to comment?

O’Connor: I would come up after the ninth inning and I would get a tape from the Red Sox. I would make notes of anything close, and then I would check the tape later. Fair/foul call. It looked like one thing from 10 rows off the field, but when you would get the tape, it wasn’t even close. I still DVR all the games at home. If I have a question, I go back to it.

Do the umpire observers get together once a year to talk over how to best do their job?

O’Connor: We used to go to spring training every year and have meetings with films and slide show presentations and all, but now it’s all done online. We’ll have a presentation where we all log in. We’ll talk about everything in the upcoming season — rules, new rules, interpretation, the whole shooting match. The whole staff, including all the big-league supervisors, will be on that. The evaluators, supervisors, and some of the office personnel.

This is our 14th year. I think the newest guy is probably three or four years in now. There’s been a little bit of turnover, but over 14 years very little turnover. We all know what we’re doing, so we’re more just reviewing things. When we went to spring training, it was “this is how you do it.” We just try to get the evaluators on the same page so one guy’s not saying “that play is this rating and this play in your mind is this rating — to try and have some uniformity. Which makes sense.

We have a monthly conference call on the Triple-A part of my job. There’s, I think, six of us on that call, and it’s strictly about the Triple-A guys that we’ve seen.

Does he meet with the supervisors when one is in Boston?

O’Connor: If a supervisor’s here, then I won’t be here. They bump me. It used to be, the first few years, when it was Garcia, McKean, and those guys, they used to come to Boston a lot. We would both evaluate the game. A few years in, they said, “No, there’s no need to have two there” so if someone would come in to Boston, I would get a call saying don’t come in.

Come the postseason, the supervisors will work the games. Other work comes up from time to time, but O’Connor does not work games other than major-league or Triple-A teams.

O’Connor: We only do Triple A. Double A down has their own staff. They have sent me over the years just to a few different…They would send me out to the PCL and there was a guy from the PCL they would send out to the East Coast, to surprise the guys. There were times when crews didn’t come to Pawtucket, so they would send me to a different International League city to see them. For the most part, the only traveling I will do now is that I will do a couple of the umpire camps that MLB puts on. I was out in Las Vegas earlier this year. Chicago.

We did it in Boston a few years ago. It’s a free, one-day camp for local umpires. You work on positioning on the bases, on the plate. Bruce Froemming, when he’s there, he and Eddie Rapuano, they’ll do cage work for guys’ stances and strike calls and things like that. In the two that I did this year, I was with Dusty Dellinger, who is a Triple-A umpire who was up and down but did not get a full-time job. He’s now the head of the minor-league supervisors. We did how to take plays behind the plate and then we went down on how to take plays at first base for different situations.

I get calls from the media — even local associations — on rulings, my opinion on how something was handled.

Anyone observing umpire observer Kevin O’Connor at work or having the opportunity to talk with him has a deeper appreciation of the seriousness with which he approaches the work of officiating and the evaluations that are intended to help the umpires on the field improve their work.

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 UPI wrote up the story, which ran in the Washington Post under the headline “Umpire Hears All, Sees Red.” Washington Post, June 28, 1985: E3.