Larry Young and International Umpiring

Major League Baseball’s point man for international umpiring is Larry Young. A veteran who umpired for 25 years at the big-league level highlighted by two World Series and All-Star games in addition to several Division and League Championships, Young has worked as a supervisor since the latter half of 2007 and represented MLB at each of the World Baseball Classics, enjoying a good working relationship with the International Baseball Federation (IBAF), and has worked in 17 countries hosting clinics and giving advice, and also conducted clinics for the U.S. Marine Corps and United States Air Force.1 His titles are: Umpire Supervisor, Major League Baseball; Umpire Advisor, International Baseball Federation; and he is the Umpire Coordinator for the World Baseball Classic. His first experience umpiring began at the age of 13. It’s been something of a lifelong calling.

“I started when I was really young,” he said in a 2015 interview. “I was 13 years old. I lived in a small town in Illinois. It was one of those Mayberry-like towns. I could ride my bike anywhere. I rode my bike to a Little League field one day and it was a day game and there was a father doing the umpire; that’s how they used to do it — volunteers. So I volunteered to umpire and I caught the bug. I’ve been doing it ever since.”2

In 2014 alone, travel took him to Australia, Europe twice – to Prague and Amsterdam, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. He’s both an ambassador for umpiring and helping bring about consistency in the profession.

His first professional work came about three years later. “When I turned 16 and was able to get a driver’s license, then I was in business. I was doing baseball and softball in Oregon, riding my bike everywhere. As soon as I got my own wheels, then I was in business. I did football, basketball, and baseball, year-round, for years and years and years.”

Oregon, Illinois was the small town. Young was born in nearby Dixon on February 6, 1954. His father worked as a police officer in Oregon, retired, began work with the Post Office, and then retired from that. Larry himself worked in the Big Ten and the Alaskan Baseball League even before joining MLB, giving him an early taste of something different in baseball. He was a graduate of the Bill Kinnamon Umpire School in 1978; one of his classmates was Jim Joyce.

His first work after graduation was in winter ball in Puerto Rico for three years, 1980-82, and in the minor leagues. He says, “I was always interested in seeing different cultures in different parts of the world.” In Puerto Rico, he even got introduced to another sport and wound up refereeing a little with World Wrestling. “That was kind of a lark. I didn’t do a lot of it. I started doing that when I was in winter baseball in Puerto Rico. The umpires and the wrestlers were living in the same complex, so I got to be friends with them. I got a little bit of it in Puerto Rico and then I did a little bit of it here in the States. I just did a very little bit of that.”

Young’s first work in the majors was as an American League umpire, when the leagues hired separately, and the first game he worked was June 23, 1983, a Thursday afternoon game at Comiskey Park which saw the White Sox beat the Twins, 8-6. John Hirschbeck was the home-plate umpire, Young worked first base, George Maloney was at second, and Bill Kunkel at third. Young only worked seven games in 1983, upping that to 52 in 1984 and 86 in 1985. From 1986 through 2006, he worked more than 100 games each season. When the two leagues combined in 1999, he was promoted to crew chief and worked as a Major League umpire until injury forced his retirement.

Young worked the All-Star Game in 1991 and 2003, in six Division Series, in three League Championship Series, and the World Series in both 1996 and 2003. In all, he worked 2,848 big-league games, plus 49 postseason games.

The day came in mid-July 2007 when he couldn’t work on the field any longer. “After 24 years on the field, my knees gave out and I had to leave the field. I had been battling bad knees for a long time but I got hurt on the field in Chicago and that was just the last straw. The doctor said, ‘No more,’ so I had to move on. But you know, one door closes and another one opens. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.

 

Larry Young instructing in San Antonio.

 

“I became a supervisor almost immediately — about a month afterwards — and the World Baseball Classic was coming up. I told my boss at the time that I had an interest in working with umpires from the international aspect. That’s how I got started with the World Baseball Classic.”

It wasn’t an easy transition, field umpire to supervisor. “It’s difficult to go from being one of the guys to the boss. It’s like going from being a teacher to being the principal. These are people you’ve worked with for a lot of years and all of a sudden you’re their boss. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t an umpire any more — because I’d been an umpire all my life. To this day, I still think like an umpire, which sometimes doesn’t sit well with my bosses. They keep reminding me that I’m administration and I keep reminding them that I’m an umpire. But I think that there is kind of a wall now, after so many years. You have to relate to what they’re doing, but you have to recognize that now you’re in a position of authority. They don’t think of me as an umpire anymore; they think of me as a supervisor. The last thing I want to do is forget that I umpired.”

There was a bit of an eye-opening experience at the first WBC and it involved Miguel Cabrera. Young had experience working winter ball in Puerto Rico and working in the Caribbean World Series. He knew that ballplayers have a natural degree of nationalism, but some of the players he talked to at the WBC talked of their pride in playing for their national team. Cabrera told him that he was more excited to be playing for the Venezuelan national team in 2006 than he had been playing for the Florida Marlins in the 2003 World Series. Perhaps there was a little hyperbole involved, but there was also genuine patriotism as well.

After the WBC, the powers that were in baseball wanted to work to expand baseball’s reach. “There was an interest in international baseball that came through the WBC and through some of the other programs like the Envoy program. The umpires just weren’t developing like the coaches and the players. They got interested in sending people over in the Envoy program as coaches but in a lot of places — specifically, Europe — the umpires just weren’t catching up. So they needed to have that dimension and that’s where I came in.”

There really aren’t variations in rules from country to country, but — for instance — the IBAF has some rules for younger players that are safety-related. “Sliding, you have to slide; you can’t barrel into anyone. There are some differences, but for the most part they use our rulebook.” All the umpire schools reach the same techniques and the same rules — balls and strikes, safe and out. Rich Garcia, who was in charge of winter ball for many years, and Gus Rodriguez, the supervisor of umpires for the IBAF, deserve credit for getting all international umpires to use the same system, in terms of rotation on balls in play and the like.

Regarding Rodriguez, Young says, “He and I have participated together in several clinics and several joint ventures. He went to WBC and I went to some of his tournaments. We work with umpires on a joint basis. We have a real good working relationship. In fact, we’re going to Italy next month [March 2015] and doing a joint clinic together.” A clinic in, say, Amsterdam, will draw umpires from several European countries. The Dutch city is where Young met the supervisor of umpires of the Israel Baseball Federation. “There’s interest there [Israel] in doing a clinic. I probably will do something in the near future.”

The real differences, Young says, come in handling situations. It’s an old adage that no two games are alike and you never know when a game starts whether you’re going to see something that has never happened before. That’s one of the reasons they sent recent umpire school graduates to the Caribbean: “There’s no shortage of situations. You get something virtually every day.”

There can be language barriers as well. “We try to get the umpires that are bilingual. That’s a big plus, but it’s not a deal-breaker if they don’t speak English or they don’t speak several languages. In that case, we’ll have interpreters and if there’s an argument we’ll have the interpreter come right on the field. They’ll say exactly what the manager’s saying and say exactly what the umpire’s saying. Which has made for some interesting conversations. Some of our interpreters aren’t real excited about using the language but…’You tell me exactly what he said.’ Sometimes things get lost in translation.

“We try to get interpreters with a baseball background but sometimes we have to take who we can get. In Germany, we tried to find an interpreter from Germany who spoke English and Korean. That was a difficult task but we finally found one. That was hard to do.”

Football — soccer — is, of course, a far more popular sport in Europe than baseball. “Cricket is huge in a number of places,” Young adds. “I’ve run into a few umpires in Australia who do both cricket and baseball. One of the examples I was really surprised was South Africa. South Africa has virtually no baseball, yet they fielded a team for the World Baseball Classic. The baseball in South Africa is much like cricket is in the United States. We have some, but it’s very, very little and it’s a club sport. That’s the same way that baseball is in South Africa.”

There are minor variations here and there, but not as many as there used to be. “In the international tournaments, they stop the game after the fifth inning and take a break. It’s kind of like a halftime, where everybody leaves the field and they drag the infield. The teams leave the field, the umpires leave the field. They take a little five-minute break and then they come back on. The first time I saw it, I wondered what was going on. I thought it was a rain situation. It’s done in a lot of foreign countries.

“I go to the Dominican and Venezuela every year. Some of the most rabid fans around. It’s interesting. Japan is probably the closest to us, in the form of an organized umpire system. They have professional umpires for whom that’s their only job, and they have a minor-league system. Japan’s very close to us.

“Korea has a professional staff and Taiwan has a professional staff. But for the most part every other country, they have to rely on some other occupation. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are the only other countries with a fulltime professional staff. They have some very, very good umpires there. Their training is close to ours. In fact, a lot of the Japanese umpires come to our umpire schools. We’ve worked closely with them over the years to develop the same system as far as rotations go.

“There is very, very little difference between Japan and the U.S. I did notice a little bit of a difference with Korea. Those umpires — 95% of those umpires are former players. The difference in pay between a player and an umpire is not that great in Korea, so it’s kind of a logical progression to go from player to umpire in that country.

“I’ve seen a big change in Japan over the last 10 years. At one point, the umpires were treated horribly there. They were physically pushed. The money – their pay — was horrible. The conditions were horrible. They expected them to take the bus to the games. For a country that respected authority, that didn’t translate into umpiring. Over the last 10 years, I’ve seen a real big difference. The pay has become better. The backing of the umpire has become better. The whole situation now is much better than it used to be.

“At one point several years ago, if an umpire missed a call, he was expected to get on the P.A. system in front of all of the fans and apologize. That was the custom, but that’s gone. If he just missed it, and there was no way to look at it, he would have to apologize.

“I’d have been apologizing a lot over my career.”

Umpires being pushed? “It was common. Normally, it was by the manager. We had a young umpire who was in the minor leagues and was sent over there to work for an entire year. Mike DiMuro, who’s now a major-league umpire. He was part of that. The manager came out and instead of getting nose to nose, which is common here, he was pushed. It was very common for the managers to push the umpires. It’s a huge difference between 10 or 20 years ago and how it is today, how they’re respected and how much their profession has come, not only in terms of salary but in terms of training and their respect level.”

There have been no umpires from Japan to work in the U.S. majors, but there have been some from other places. Armando Rodriguez was a Cuban native who worked 318 games in 1974 and 1975. Puerto Rico’s Delfin Colon worked 46 big-league games in 2008 and 2009. Manny Gonzalez began working in 2010. Through the 2014 season, he’s worked 408 games.

“He had to go through the same system. He umpired in Venezuela for several years and then went to umpire school and worked his way through the minors like everyone. That’s the only way to get to the big leagues.

“He was a young man. He was 18 years old when he first started. I think he umpired four or five years exclusively in Venezuela and then came to the United States, still a young man. [Gonzalez was born in 1979.] There are eight or nine Venezuelan umpires now in the minor leagues. Dominican has, I think, two. And Puerto Rico has two. No one from the Dominican and no one from Puerto Rico has gotten to the big leagues yet.

“We had no one from Asia yet or from Europe. We have one Australian who worked his first major-league game this year. Jon Byrne. He has yet to make it on our staff, but he’s on our call-up list. He worked a few games. [Byrne worked seven MLB games in 2014.] That was big news in Australia. Australia’s baseball is probably Double-A level. They have a very organized league, but the umpires are part-time. They get paid $250 a game and have other jobs.

There may be a female umpire before there is one from Europe. Asked about Yanet Moreno in Cuba, Young said, “I’m interesting in seeing her work. It’s time for us to bring a female umpire into the WBC this year. She’s one of the candidates. I have one from Venezuela, one from Cuba, and one from Canada, and I’m thinking that after I’ve seen them work, I’m hoping that one of them can step up.”

What does his schedule portend for 2015, going into 2016?

“I do about 80 games in the major leagues [as a supervisor] and I’m in replay once a month, in addition to my international duties. This year, I’ve already gone to Puerto Rico for the Caribbean Series. My next international trip will be to Toronto for the Pan Am Games in July. We have the Premier 21 tournament coming up in Japan in November. And I’ll do another clinic for ISG sometime in the winter. Next year will be crazy again, because the qualifying rounds will begin. We’ll probably have three qualifying rounds in March and then in September.”

Young is a proud recipient of the National Association of Sports Officials Gold Whistle award, presented for community service.

Larry Young has been married to his wife Joan for 40 years. They have two daughters, Jessica and Darcy, and a grandson, Bo. Though Young has done clinics in 17 countries, and counting, he says, “There are a lot of countries on my list that I’d like to get to and conduct clinics. There’s a lot of places that had never had an MLB presence.” That’s for sure, one of his daughters is quick to chime in, “You haven’t done one in Antarctica yet.”

 

Notes

1 Other than the United States, Young has also instructed in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, South Africa, Panama, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Australia, Canada, Korea, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, and Czech Republic.

2 Author interview with Larry Young on February 10, 2015. All quotations from Young come from this interview or a follow-up interview on February 18, 2015.