The Most Exclusive Club On Earth: Women Who Have Umpired At Yankee Stadium

Perry Barber was just the second woman to umpire at Yankee Stadium, in 1985. (Courtesy of Perry Barber)

 

On Sunday, September 9, 1973, Ronnie Bromm became the lone member of the most exclusive club on the planet: Women Who Have Umpired at Yankee Stadium. She held that title all by herself for a long time, and until she called an exhibition game there as part of a Yankees Old Timers vs. author George Plimpton’s All-Stars contest, in the entire history of the half-century-old ballpark, no woman had ever umpired a game on that hallowed ground. Ronnie Bromm was the first, and for more than a decade afterward, the only.1

She was a housewife living in the Bronx with her daughter and husband, who had been her softball coach during her playing days, when she sweet-talked her way into the Stadium on a spur-of-the-moment impulse that had been 30 years in the making and dreaming and regretting. She found herself sitting behind home plate amid a group of men, women, and children who’d been selected from applications they’d mailed in, all of them there to try out for Plimpton’s team of regular people pitted against a Yankees lineup featuring some of the greatest stars of recent decades, including Mickey Mantle, Joe Garagiola, Elston Howard, Moose Skowron, and Whitey Ford. Basically, it was an early iteration of Fantasy Camp, an absolute dream assignment for a woman who had given up all hope that her cruelly dashed childhood aspirations of playing for Joe McCarthy’s Yankees would ever be given a second chance at coming true. Remarkably, after putting on a display of her catching talents for an hour while Plimpton and newly anointed Yankees PR director Marty Appel watched and assessed the varying degrees of skill among the 30 or so contestants, she was asked to umpire instead of catch, a role she happily embraced since she and her husband had been calling youth baseball games for the Bronx-Manhattan Sports Officials Association for the past 15 years – another extremely rare accomplishment for a housewife and mother in the 1960s and ’70s. When Appel and Plimpton asked her to umpire at the plate for the three-inning exhibition scheduled before the Brewers-Yankees game the next day, Ronnie’s decades-long dream deferred became her new reality.

She wrote a brief account of that memorable experience, from which I’ve extracted most of the biographical information about her included in this story, and she also authored a book titled There’s No Pink in Baseball: A Memoir For Every Girl Told “Girls Can’t Do That.”2 Beyond her athletic exploits as a star softball player and then an umpire, Ronnie also added “actor” to her résumé after her triumph at the Stadium, and as far as I’ve been able to determine, lived in or near the Bronx all her life right up until the end, which arrived only this past April of 2022 when she died at age 93.

I think about Ronnie Bromm often, and wonder how a woman could have done what she did, something so unique, even epic in an obscure footnote-to-history kind of way, yet she never made a big deal out of it, didn’t capitalize on it for any financial gain until very late in her life; There’s No Pink In Baseball wasn’t published until 2019, when she was 90 years old. I wish now more than anything that I’d met her before she died, as once I learned about her via an article in the Newark Star-Ledger of October 2004, I became mildly obsessed with getting to know as much about her as I could – for a very specific reason.3

Remember I said Ronnie Bromm was the first and only woman to umpire a game at Yankee Stadium? She retained that distinction for 12 years until another woman was tapped to umpire a 1985 high school intra-city championship there. Neither woman knew of the other back then, but I wish with all my heart they had, because I was that umpire: the second, one of only two, and now, sadly, the last woman to call a game at old Yankee Stadium. It was only my fifth season umpiring baseball, and my résumé at the time, as the result of having to beg for assignments from skeptical assignors, was what could charitably be described as “unimpressive” and “full of holes.”

A Daily News article about the event identifies me as the plate umpire for the first of two games.4 Some angel of a supervisor somewhere believed in me enough to entrust that daunting task to me, a green, 30-something former debutante and Jeopardy! champion who had just completed her fourth trip through the Wendelstedt Umpire School in Florida without ranking high enough in her class to secure a job as a professional umpire. Like Ronnie’s, my dreams of big-league glory had been dashed, but the broken shards of my longing somehow became a mystical trail of bread crumbs leading me to 161st Street and River Avenue in the Bronx. I don’t remember many details about that day or the game itself, but I do recall marveling at the sight of mushrooms peeking out among the blades of emerald green outfield grass, and afterward making my way to Monument Park with my friend Dan Berliner, where we cheerfully desecrated the memorial plaques by climbing all over them as if they were the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park instead of dignified tributes to some of the greatest baseball players ever to wear the uniform. It was a heady experience for a young umpire, and just as Ronnie did, I’ll cherish the memory of all of it until the last inning is played and I’m finally called safe at home, maybe by her or a mildly miffed Miller Huggins.

For four decades and counting, umpire PERRY BARBER has been establishing a lot of “firsts” and “onlys” in baseball. She’s the only woman so far to umpire major-league exhibitions in both the United States and Japan, and one of very few women to umpire major-league spring-training games in the United States. She’s the first winner of the SABR Women in Baseball Lifetime Achievement Award, nicknamed “The Dorothy” after Dorothy Seymour Mills, and is also a Jeopardy! champion, a Mensa member, a lone identical twin, a published author in her own right as well as the subject of numerous magazine articles, newspaper profiles, and books, and in her former life as a singer/songwriter/guitarist, she was the opening act for Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Hall and Oates, and other music luminaries. In 2008 Perry assembled the first and (so far) only four-woman crew to umpire a major-league spring-training game. She was selected as an alternate umpire for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, taught umpiring to public-school students in New York City while securing paying assignments for them with local associations, and is the only woman so far to umpire in the Cape Cod League. She’s a New York State Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and her photograph is displayed at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown with her name on a plaque on the wall next to it, but rather than resting on her laurels, she’s still working tirelessly to recruit and train other women as umpires in order to render the phrase “woman umpire” as redundant as “female president” or “woman astrophysicist.” After more than 40 years, Perry is still fighting not to be in a league of her own.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, please see Veronica Bromm obituary page: https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/24592114/veronica-elizabeth-bromm/wall

Special thanks to former Yankees P.R. director Marty Appel and to Tara Krieger.

 

NOTES

1 Ronnie Bromm’s memories of the day are available at “The Lady Ump,” Ronnie’s Memoirs https://sites.google.com/site/ronniebromm/ladyump. Accessed December 2, 2022.

2 The book was published independently in November 2019. It is available from online book retailers.

3 Jennifer Golson, “Her Big Day in the Bronx,” Newark Star Ledger, October 18, 2004: 15, 20.

4 Bill Travers, “Suburbia blanks city ballplayers, 13-0,” Daily News (New York) July 25, 1985: W10. The event was the Daily News’ Metropolitan High School Classic.