Once Upon a Blue Moon: A Love Affair with Umpiring

Foreword

Please do not tell my umpire assignor this: I conceived of the format of this memoir while I was doing the bases at a somewhat boring freshman high-school game last fall in California.

Actually, it was something called a “showcase.” Parents of aspiring high schoolers who feel they can make college teams will know what this is. Anyway, my assignor would definitely not like the idea that I was thinking about anything but what might happen at the precise next moment in my game, and was I prepared for all the various possibilities? I probably wouldn’t have done this while doing the plate. While doing the plate, I would never have another thought in my head. I would be single-focused, concentrating, ready for anything. Sounds like war!

No, baseball umpiring is not really that. There is a lot more to umpiring than being ready for the call on the next play. That’s what I want to write about.

I have been a sports official in other sports, but baseball feels unique because of the way the game moves. It’s like a wave. It moves slowly, slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden something happens. What you DO, and how you PERFORM when the play happens is how you are judged as an umpire (by yourself, by others).

But what about all those in-between moments as you wait for the play? In fact, what about all the in-between moments elsewhere? Driving to the games? Getting ready? In fact, life in general is made up of those in-between moments. As I get older, I am learning to appreciate those in-between moments.

You won’t hear much about this at umpire clinics. No one teaches what one is supposed to think about or feel about in those in-between moments. Umpire clinics train us to act correctly at the moment something happens and prepare us to be ready for those moments. But all those other mixed-up feelings are up to each of us to sort out.

That’s what this memoir is all about. It will start out with my earliest feelings, but it is definitely not in chronological order.

 

 

Fear

I have three sons and a daughter. My oldest son oldest didn’t play baseball at all; he wasn’t interested, and I had myself temporarily lost my love for the game, so I didn’t encourage him. My second oldest son was interested, and did play a bit; he only played Little League for two years, but his team managed to win his league’s championship one year. I may have had some influence on this, as the Little League’s registration process enforced its deadlines ultra-strictly; I was more attracted to the more friendly local soccer league, and probably encouraged my two older sons to play soccer more than baseball. I find this pretty ironic now. I was a “joiner,” so I became a soccer official and joined the board of the Rockridge Soccer League as its treasurer.

By the time my daughter was born, I had fallen back in love with baseball, head over heels. I was playing on two softball teams (managing one); I was the organizer for a season-ticket-holder group for the Oakland A’s. My daughter tried to play softball for one year, but it didn’t suit her. She became a very good soccer player, and then a star All-American rugby player.

So this left one more child, my youngest child, and my third son. He was going to play baseball!! We all know how influential dads can be. And I made sure that his registration was on time! I guess I was ready to accept their rules.

As all parents of youth athletes know, the first thing that happens when teams are formed is the infamous “parent meeting.” At this meeting, parents volunteer for various chores (uniforms, snack coordinator, “phone tree coordinator” — that was before emails — and lastly, umpires). The official Little League structure in this country has been built on volunteer umpires: adults and even youth umpires who receive a lot of training and are expected to umpire all the games. The league provides uniforms, equipment, anything needed. The youth umpires get paid a small stipend, the adults do not get paid. It is a credo of the Little League organization that adult umpires are unpaid volunteers.

Little League is unlike other youth baseball organizations, like the Pony and Cal Ripken leagues. Those organizations, at least in the Bay Area, make no attempt to train and use their parents to umpire games; they contract with umpire associations, who provide paid umpires. So you can see where this is about to take me, but more about that later.

Back to the parent meeting: So, still being a soccer referee, I readily volunteered to be one of the team’s volunteer umpires. No problem, I thought. No problem, they said. I simply had to attend two clinics being put on by the league (one for rules, one for field mechanic training), and I would be good to go. I have been watching and playing baseball and softball most of my life. Baseball is inside of me. I know the rules, I know how to do this. This will be easy.

No way.

No fan or even player or (dare I say) even coach or manager of any sport can appreciate the difficulty of what a sport official has to learn. An official has to learn the rules of the game; an official has to learn how to be in the right position to make a call; an official has to learn how to look good, how to “sell a call” if the play is close; an official has to develop the confidence that he or she can make the call in front of fans and parents who have no appreciation for the first three things.

There are some sports where the play is continuous, like basketball, soccer, rugby, hockey. Some attention is put on the referee/official, but it is somewhat muted by the pace of play. Baseball, on the other hand, is a sport where the play ends and everyone looks at the umpire. Tennis comes to mind as the most similar, because the calls are very binary (the ball is either “in” or “out”); football is similar, but it has as many noncalls as it does actual calls.

But in baseball, when the play is over, the attention on the umpire is riveting. There are umpires who like this attention. For me, when I started out, it was nerve-racking.

So after my two clinics, I did one game. It didn’t go well. I didn’t know where to stand. I didn’t think I made good calls. The parents were screaming at me. I felt as though I deserved it. I felt terrible.

So what did I do? Did I seek out a mentor? Did I get back on that field? Did I take more training clinics?

NO!

I didn’t answer the telephone when the league called for me to umpire. I became an umpire coward. I told my wife to tell the league I wasn’t home when she answered the phone. I was completely scared to try umpiring again. A colonoscopy was better than umpiring. I avoided umpiring the rest of that year.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this memoir if I hadn’t done something about my fear.

But fear does return, and now I have come to accept it, even enjoy it a little. And I invite it. It returns for “big” games like playoff games or games between rival teams. It also returns when I move to a higher level of baseball. In the summer of 2016 I worked my connections and pushed myself to umpire for a semipro league based in Eureka, California. Not so much my first game, umpiring at third base, but the following night, when I was the home-plate umpire, the butterflies were certainly alive and well. My plate job that night went superbly, and overcoming that fear with pride for myself was so pleasurable that putting myself in fearful situations almost became an addicting drug. I think this is something that performing artists may feel.

Also, I had to rebound from the previous evening, when truly disastrous things occurred: two umpires making the opposite call on the same play! I think that actually helped overcome the fear. I was either going to be great or die in a blazing fire of hell!!

The night before, when I was in the third-base umpire position, a batted ball was coming toward third base. I was about 15 feet from the ball, and I felt I had a good view of it as it just veered foul as it got to third base, so I yelled “Foul!” and put up my hands to designate the ball was foul. Then I looked up at the home-plate umpire, whom I had never worked with, who was coming up the line, but much farther from the play, who was pointing Fair. (When a ball is fair, an umpire only points, nothing is verbalized.) Well a foul-ball call trumps a fair-ball call, so the call I made was the one that stood. But we had two unhappy managers, not to mention a very, very angry plate umpire. When an umpire feels that the call is his, he pats his chest. Well, I think you would say he was patting his chest very heavily at me after that play. And then in the postgame meeting, he told me a “bounding ball” up the line is always the home-plate umpire’s call.

Umpires are trained to have both pregame and postgame meetings. At what’s called the “pregames,” umpires are supposed to go over basic, even advanced mechanics, imagine difficult situations, and discuss who will make the calls and how. What is interesting for us professional/amateur umpires is that the number of umpires may change for any particular level of baseball and for the importance of the particular game. All major-league fans know that every game has four umpires for regular-season games and six for playoff games. But for us there can be anywhere between one and six. In general, all youth games have two umpires; high-school varsity and community colleges have two umpires; minor leagues below the level of Triple A have two umpires. However, often the younger kids, high-school freshmen, and junior varsity will only have one umpire. In high-school playoffs, the early rounds have three umpires, but then jump to either four or six for the championship games. College Division I games have three umpires, and lately Division II have had three umpires.

So part of the pregame is to review the mechanics for the number of umpires doing that particular game. Who will cover catches in the outfield when the center fielder is moving toward his/her right? Who will make the call at second base when there is one out and runners at first and third and the ball is hit to shallow right field? So there are endless possibilities to discuss.

Unfortunately, that night we didn’t discuss who would make the call on a batted ball going up the third-base line!

An umpire crew is itself a team (umpires say it’s the third and best team on the field), but like any team, it needs practice. Baseball umpiring is like a language that can be learned. Not just the rules, but also the mechanics. But unless the team practices, it may make mistakes. Unlike major-league umpire crews, we pro/am umpires usually work with different partners every game we do. In my debut with the semipro team, I was working with two complete strangers.

In every game I often have a range of emotions about my partners, from deep respect and affection to complete dislike. I recall at one high-school game, as my partner and I walked off the field and attempted to do a postgame critique, as my (field) partner began criticizing me for not calling “ball four” loud enough so that he wouldn’t look foolish when making a call on a steal of a runner from first base, I began shouting at him that it was his responsibility for knowing the count and watching my call. I recall another game when, as my partner and I started walking off the field at the completion of the game, he began yelling at me because he thought I was laughing at him with a coach for blowing a call. (He did blow the call, but I would never have laughed at him with a coach or even admitted to a coach that my partner had blown a call.)

Actually, umpires have to have solidarity with each other. Even if we think our partners have made a bad call, we can never express that to anyone other than the umpire in a postgame meeting. This is a sacred time when you are supposed to say to your partner(s), “Do you have anything you want to tell me anything that you feel I could do better?” and assure them that no criticism they may give you will hurt your feelings.

Right.

In theory, this is a wonderful practice. It was the basis of Mao Tse-tung’s “criticism/self-criticism” practice for his Communist Party members, but I doubt that many umpires understand they are practicing communism every game! Where else in anyone’s lives is this truly practiced? Does anyone even ever say this to his/her spouse? (“Darling, please tell me how I can improve so that I can truly be a better husband?” My wife would love that, but let’s face it, only a bad fight brings out this type of question.)

The postgame meetings don’t actually happen after every game, but they are supposed to. Most of the time umpires are rushing off to beat the traffic; sometimes, the games go so smoothly and there are no close calls, so we get lazy and don’t do it. But sometimes we are nervous about being really honest with our partner. It takes a lot of courage.

And a real thick skin. Developing a thick skin (also known as a hard shell) is something all umpires need to do. What a thick skin does is to allow an umpire to move on from a call that either was really blown or that the crowd thinks was blown. It allows an umpire to continue to gain confidence and to improve.

And it helps with the fear.

 

Gary Bonetti, South County Umpires Association, North Coast Conference playoff between Fremont Christian High School (red uniforms) and Redwood Christian High School (white uniforms). May 27, 2015.

 

Luck

Many umpires, as well as others in my life, will deny that luck is ever a factor in performance. They will say that only preparation helps with performance.

But I think this is ridiculous. Even for an experienced umpire, if a close play occurs right at the beginning of a game before the umpire gets in the rhythm of the game, it can throw him off.

I had bad luck in that first Little League game, which caused me to hide out for a season. In the fall of that year, I decided that I was going to get some serious training. I had heard that our son’s Little League would pay for any umpire who would really commit to games (now I had to choose!) to attend training in the Little League Western Regional San Bernardino facility. So I started planning to go; eventually five of us from the North/South Oakland Little League attended for one week in January.

I have never served in the military, but a week’s training at the hands of the Little League trainer gave me a taste of what true boot camp is like. He was worse than the stereotype sadistic Army sergeants that you might see in the movies. He made fun of the two women who were there, for being female; he ridiculed one of my friends, a lawyer; he made jokes at the Canadians who were there. Luckily, I escaped this. Luck?

One of the most sadistic things happened on the field one day early in the week: It had to do with how an umpire makes an “out” call. It is a common mistake and misconception than an umpire makes an “out” call by moving his fist in a backward direction towards his shoulder with his thumb extended.

NO!!

The correct way to make an out call for most plays is to move the arm forward with a fist, like hammering on a wall. (On close plays, an umpire can move the arm forward with a closed fist more like a punch.) So a friend of mine from our Little League made an out call in the way an umpire is not supposed to do it. I don’t know how the trainer saw him among 60 umpires on the field that day, but he did. He made him tape his thumb to his fist, and made him keep it taped all week.

The trainer, I later learned, was a dentist. I won’t say anything about the stereotype of the sadistic dentist, but I have thought about him a lot for the past 15 years.

Although two of my colleagues chose to stay at nearby hotels and eat out at restaurants, three of us braved it out in the bunks (where 12-year-old ballplayers stay) and ate cafeteria food. We started our day around 6:30 A.M. and ended around 10 P.M. Classroom training would start right after breakfast, then on-field training, then lunch, and then start all over again. We would take rule quizzes each night. We were videotaped. We were thrown a million different directions at once to see if our various body parts could figure out the right thing to do. The Mad Dentist used every opportunity he could to belittle you, trying to replicate what a coach/manager might do on the field to help begin to develop the thick skin we needed.

It was horrible, but it worked.

I came back from the training camp full of new confidence for the coming season. But I did one more important thing. Before I actually did a game that next season, I went to a game that was being umpired by one of the senior umpires in the league (whom I knew a little, because he had actually been one of the San Bernardino crew). I sat in the stands and simply watched him; (He was doing the plate.) I was completely focused on him, from his strike and ball calls to the way he moved around the field to the way he interacted with the players, coaches, and even the fans. I chose things to emulate (copy!) and things I decided I would do differently.

So my first game came (well, maybe it was my second game after that first horrible one from the prior year). And no one can tell me that luck didn’t factor into it. The game went without a hitch. But there were no close plays, so there were no arguments. Sure, some of my ball and strike calls were questioned, but I don’t recall that bothering me. I came home mostly thinking about how lucky I was, and although I knew I wouldn’t always be this lucky, I could tackle more difficult situations as they came up. Some might say the camp gave me skills, and I am sure that was true. But I still like to think luck was a big part of it.

Every umpire develops his/her own style for dealing with conflict. The old style from a bygone era, that whatever the umpire thinks and says is right, is dead. No more. Now, it’s about listening and showing that you as the umpire are “open” to hearing them. But briefly. And not for everything, including balls and strikes. Some umpires are more honest about their mistakes, and in many situations are allowed to ask their partner for “help.” Partners are also taught how to silently communicate to the umpire who made the call that they have information which may explain why the coach is upset and why their partner may want to reconsider changing his/her call. Think about how difficult it is reading subtle eye and body signals, especially for two umpires who have never worked together, and who may or may not have discussed it in their pregame meeting.

And how about dealing with parents and other fans? This can be very tricky. Umpires are trained not to talk to fans, but depending on the situation, talking to fans can be satisfying, or even fun. I enjoy talking to fans, and I will even do it when the fans are arguing with me. Again, luckily, I usually don’t get into trouble or make things worse. Mostly I will talk to fans and explain the rules, which I love to do, especially when I am sure I am right.

We all know the stereotype of the “too-invested” parent. My personal favorite story is actually one that was somewhat horrifying. It took place while I was doing a one-man junior-varsity high-school game in Moraga, in Contra Costa County, which is a very un-diverse, mostly white suburb in the Bay Area. I was doing the plate, and a pitcher for the home team threw a pitch a bit too close to the batter, which caused the batter’s father (how could I tell??) to yell something insulting about the pitcher. A few innings later, the same thing happened. I didn’t think the pitch was close enough to have been done on purpose, but again the batter’s father began yelling at the pitcher and suggest to me that I should eject him. I could tell the batter was embarrassed. Now, here is the key: The batter was not Caucasian (he appeared to be of Middle Eastern background) and his father’s accent was clearly not that of a native-born person. I could hear the batter’s father behind me, to the right, where the visiting team fans and parents were sitting. Then, from my left, I heard a father yell: “You don’t know the rules, and you should go back to where you came from.” At that point, I stopped the game. First, I went over to the dad on my left, who was of course white and I soon figured out was the pitcher’s father, and told him, “The great thing about America is that people have the right to argue about the rules without being racially insulted.” I am not sure he completely understood what I meant, but that seemed to stop him from further insults. (Of course, I then went over to the Middle Eastern dad and told him that he had the rule wrong.)

My wife thinks that I love umpiring because I can bring my own sense of justice to the field while I am in charge. Maybe that is true.

I have umpired games at locations that serve alcohol, which or course is taken for granted at professional and semipro games but seems wrong at youth-oriented fields. In Manteca, California, there is a field called Big League Dreams, where five fields surround a restaurant that serves beer. It is about 10 steps from the restaurant to the stands, so it is easy to get food and drink before, during, and after a game in which one’s child is playing. These are often used for tournaments, so both the umpires and the parents are there all day long, from 7 A.M. until 8 P.M. One day when I was umpiring there, by the afternoon a number of parents were completely rude and completely drunk. I stopped the game until security came and escorted them away. Yes, my sense of justice!

I have had to use all my instincts to learn how to interact with coaches, players, and fans. As much as I would like them all to be reasonable, respectful, and rational, this isn’t going to happen all the time. That’s when I use my power.

I cannot remember when I have ever gotten into serious trouble; I know that some coaches don’t like me, but that is part of the game. I have learned to avoid situations that could inflame tempers.

Some say that is the skills I have learned, not luck. But I like my story, and I am sticking to it.

Ambition and Lance Armstrong

You might think I am referring to what became of Lance Armstrong’s downfall, that he was too ambitious. Nope. As far as I know, Lance Armstrong has nothing to do with baseball and I am talking about my own ambition. Where Lance Armstrong comes into it is those silly rubber yellow wrist-bands that his foundation, Livestrong, were selling and giving to hundreds of thousands of people across the county.

At about the time I was now feeling more confident in my umpiring skills, and feeling I could possibly do high-school and even college ball, my wife had a recurrence of her cancer. Her cancer was a life-threatening cancer; she had read Armstrong’s book, and had gotten courage out of it. I was terrified. Well, that damn little yellow rubber thing on my wrist really helped me through some dark times. It made me remember what was important in life (it wasn’t whether that pitch really had been a strike or not), and it connected me to her as I did my umpiring.

Believe it or not, umpiring can be therapeutic in and of itself. I can’t express how satisfying it feels to umpire a baseball game in a competent manner, where I felt I haven’t missed a call, in a game that went really well. The highest compliment is when a losing player or coach congratulates you for a job well done. And, yes, whether you call it luck or skill, doing a good job is very gratifying.

But the game of baseball can help center you on the details of life. The tiniest things. And this exercise makes you appreciate the small things. It did it for me.

After a few years of umpiring at the Little League level, I moved up the levels of Little League as my son grew older and continued to play baseball (the levels in Little League are called Minors, Majors, Juniors and Seniors; the other youth organizations — Cal Ripken and Pony — have different terms for the same idea, as the kids get older). One of my Little League umpire buddies (in fact, the one who had had his hand taped up by the Mad Dentist) had joined a high-school baseball and softball association and urged me to join.

These umpire associations are private (or nonprofit) organizations that contract with high schools to provide umpires for all the games. These associations also may provide umpires to other leagues as well. Because high schools may change their league configuration from time to time, this may cause an association to lose schools to another one, or gain them. This has happened to me now a few times in my high-school career.

I have risen and then fallen back and risen again. I umpired community-college games for a few years. The commitment to do these games is much greater than high school: These are nine-inning games (high school is seven); the assignors want the umpires at the games one hour before game time (for high school, the standard is 30 minutes). Also, community colleges can often be farther away, and take longer to get to. So umpiring a college game can easily be a five-hour commitment.

Also, while the baseball quality is usually very high, community-college baseball is more about careers than playing a game. This gets very serious. Many of the players are trying to “move up” to four-year colleges, where they are hoping to get noticed by major-league scouts. Even the managers and coaches may want to move up. So community-college baseball, even though it is the next level after high school, is actually much closer to making a living, more professional.

Umpires at the community level and above are terrific. That’s what I witnessed, and was often the main motivation for me to stick with it. They all take those pre- and postgame meetings very seriously. My guess is that a large number of college umpires worked in the minor leagues but didn’t make it to the major-league level, and are well-trained and extremely professional and skilled. However, I wasn’t getting enough games to get the confidence I needed, so I gave up on that.

All associations begin to become activated in January for the coming season. I would often find myself thinking how much drive and ambition I had, and whether or not I really wanted to push myself to climb higher. After two seasons doing community-college ball, I decided that I wasn’t getting what I wanted enough. Between my wife’s cancer, the time it was taking to do the games, the fanatic coaches, and my assignors not being completely wowed by my performance, I decided not to keep pushing myself to higher and more difficult limits.

Then came the summer of 2016, when I had an opportunity to umpire in the semipro league in Eureka. On one hand it was daunting: a real stadium with paying (not much, only $5) customers who expected to see a good performance from the players/umpires/coaches, etc. But on the other hand, it was summer ball, where no championships really counted. I loved it.

Will I do it again? Probably. But baseball, like the seasons, allows its participants to re-evaluate every year. My wife’s cancer is back, I am starting new business ventures, so we’ll see. It means long weekends away from home.

I have learned about ambition, and what I have learned is that I am in control of it. I can move forward or back, and it will always be my decision.

Sport for Old Men

When I first started umpiring high school, I was in my early 50s, and I umpired with someone who was 74 years old and who had survived cancer. He moved really slowly, and probably was not in shape to perform at a high level anymore. But as I move closer to that age, I often think about him. I know a number of umpires who span from their late 60s into their 70s. I don’t know anyone who is over 80 and still umpires, but maybe that will be me. Because being a baseball umpire doesn’t involve so much athleticism, umpires can continue to work until they are fairly old. Their bodies may prevent them from getting super-close to plays; but their experience allows them to anticipate what may happen in any given situation.

I often umpire for older players. In the Bay Area there are different leagues for senior men, and often I am umpiring men who are my age and older. Older players have many limitations, and I am sad to admit that some younger umpires can be very judgmental about their skills. I am no saint, and I like better ball just like anyone; but when I umpire these older ballplayers, I have so much respect for someone in their 60s or 70s playing hardball that it almost makes me cry. I feel I am there with them, trying to figure out how to grow old together, and connecting around this wonderful sport we love so much.

A few years ago I was doing the plate for one of the older-aged teams, and a relief pitcher came to the mound. When I told him he had only eight warm-ups, he politely told me that he really needed at least 14 before his old arm would start working. I let him have as many warm-ups as he wanted, and no one complained.

Some of my fellow umpires, who have been doing umpiring longer than I have, are umpiring for the children of the players they umpired for 20 to 30 years ago. I haven’t been umpiring that long, so that hasn’t happened to me. But while umpiring, I often see old friends of my son’s, or other people he played baseball with. Connecting to my son’s friends is a connection with him, which I love. He is still playing ball in the Vintage League, but he has moved back east for a while, so it will be sad not to umpire his games.

Time Travel

Umpiring has taken me to prison and to the nineteenth century as well as other interesting places.

I have umpired many times at San Quentin prison in the Bay Area, with an outside men’s team playing against prisoners. (There used to be two teams, but more recently there is only one; it is considered a privilege for a prisoner to be on the team.) In order to get into San Quentin, a visitor must be preapproved; the prison checked me through my Social Security number and my driver’s-license number. San Quentin opened in 1852, and the way one enters feels as if you have gone back in time. They have their own umpires, but are happy to have an outside umpire. The fans, of course, are all prisoners, but the sportsmanship is outstanding. In one game, the team that brought me was arguing a lot more than the prisoner team. I think that they are told to be on their absolute best behavior; when you think about it, if a prisoner is disciplined by the prison authorities for bad behavior, it’s likely a whole lot worse than whatever I could do.

I have very rarely ejected a player or a coach. I used to be more of a softie than I am now. But I do have a few stories. When I first started umpiring, I was so proud that I wanted my family to come watch me; that weekend my in-laws were visiting, so I had a big cheering section. It was a high-school freshman scrimmage; something was very strange about the coaches of one of the teams, and during the game, he came behind the backstop (which was very close to where I was standing) and began to criticize my calling of strikes and balls. After a very short warning, not only did I eject him, but I really got angry at him for violating my space. After the game, parents from his team came up and congratulated me, and told me he was an alcoholic and often got ejected. It is important when you eject someone to do it “strategically,” to make it look like they and not you are the bad person in the situation.

I do warn coaches and players often, and that is usually enough. I love all the ways that we are taught to give “warnings,” from the glance to the dugout, to the casual taking off of the mask, to the more deliberate taking off the mask, to the making of a note while looking at the bench, to the step toward the bench, to the actual verbal warning.

I umpire in a league called Vintage Baseball. This is an adult baseball league played by 1886 rules, with a slightly softer ball, heavier wooden bats, and the old-style “mitts.” In this league an umpire is called “Sir” and a player or a coach is always supposed to be super-polite. (I am still trying to find out when the negative attitude toward umpires began.) Every single player on every single team was polite to me.

Except for the Oakland team.

One game, their first baseman was giving me a hard time for what he thought was a bad call. When the inning was over, I told him that not only was he out of line based on modern baseball etiquette, but considering the culture of being super-polite to the “Sir,” he should correct his behavior very quickly. But the trouble was that the whole team was led by a captain who either didn’t communicate the proper cultural mood or at least didn’t practice it himself. Almost every game I “sirred” the Oakland team, they were a problem. And in the championship game (which they won), I almost ejected their captain.

Aside from San Quentin prison and traveling back to the nineteenth century, I have also umpired in upstate New York at the Cooperstown Dreams Park, which is an extraordinary place with 22 fields for 1,000 kids and 100 umpires coming every week during the summer. And I almost went to Cuba to umpire. I know umpires who have umpired in Europe, Australia, and many other places around the world.

The Call

When umpires make a decision on a play, like “strike” or “ball” or “safe” or “out” or “fair” or “foul” or “catch” or “no-catch,” that is called “THE CALL.” On many of these, the umpire may make a combination of gestures and/or verbal sounds. Probably the most important thing I learned about being a good umpire was to not rush THE CALL. I learned how to take my time, to let my brain understand what my eyes had seen, and then to make THE CALL. Also, in some situations I learned how to wait to see if some subsequent event happened, say the ball falling out of a player’s mitt before the play was completely finished.

An umpire can make a call too soon, either by rushing it or by not waiting to see if something else happens. It is actually pretty rare for an umpire to make a call too late. There are some umpires in the major leagues who get complaints from the sports announcers because they wait too long to make THE CALL, but at my level, this is rare.

While the training schools do not say calls have to be made in a certain prescribed way, I think one has to be brave to do things differently. Most of the umpires I know, including me, make calls in generally the same way, with the same pauses, cadences, voice style, etc. While I don’t normally see or hear many umpires veer from the norm, I do think that in my high-school association the African-American umpires will often have a more distinct style than the white umpires. I appreciate that, and I often root for them.

There are other “calls” I remember that had nothing to do with what was happening on the playing field. I am not supposed to bring my cell phone onto the field. There have been a few times when my games went into extra innings and I know my wife would be looking for me, and I needed to tell her I would be late. I have actually been successful a number of times when I have asked an understanding fan (usually a mom) to call my wife and explain the situation.

Finally, I have to say that becoming an umpire was a Great Call on my part. I can’t say I have loved every minute of it. I remember feeling terrible when after a game in which I had missed a call, I would feel absolutely terrible. Remember the story of Jim Joyce, the major-league umpire who blew a call to cause a pitcher to lose a perfect game. He cried. There were many games when I almost cried. Some of my worst calls were against my own son.

But umpiring has taught me to pick myself up and get back on my feet. It has helped me deal with the ups and downs of my wife’s cancer. It has helped me in my professional career.

My day job is as a certified public accountant. I often appear in court as an expert witness. One day I was standing outside a courtroom in Marin County, and an angry lawyer who didn’t appreciate the conclusions I had reached regarding her client began yelling at me and pointing her finger the exact same way that managers do it on the baseball field. For a brief moment, when I looked up at her, the hallway had disappeared behind her, and we were standing on a baseball field. I knew just how to act! The Mad Dentist had taught me.

I am very thankful that I have become part of what some people would call the best team in baseball, and others would call a “cult.” It has filled up my life with memories, with stories and life lessons that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

 

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank his wife, Marcia Goodman, and his dear friend Larry Hendel, for editing and giving comments on this personal essay.