What Do Umpires Do Exactly?

With the advent of limited instant replay in MLB in 2008, its subsequent expansion in 2014,1 and technological innovations like strike-zone automation on the horizon across baseball,2 it makes sense for us to ask in a serious vein what has been asked before mostly tongue-in-cheek: What do umpires do exactly? Angry musing after a blown or controversial call, blown or controversial at least to the “experts” sitting in the dugouts, the stands, the press boxes, and/or behind their TV sets, laptops, and phones, has prompted and will continue to prompt the knee-jerk rhetorical question concerning what umpires do, e.g., “What do those bums do exactly?!”

But ask the question seriously and not rhetorically, as we will here, and what becomes clear is that the frequent anger directed toward umpires, as well as the introduction of technology into umpiring, is based on the assumption that we all know precisely what umpires do, should do, and sometimes fail to do, and how technology can help.3 What also becomes clear is that this conventional wisdom about umpiring, like so much conventional wisdom, is at best only partially correct; a view that its failings show the need for a better, more fully developed picture of what umpires do, but also a view that points us in the direction of that picture, one suggesting we may want to alter our too often negative view of umpiring and umpires and that can provide us with a sense of the role technology can (and cannot) play in umpiring.

The Assumed View

In his late-seventeenth-century Second Treatise of Government, John Locke, the godfather of what might be called today “classical liberalism” — as opposed to liberalism’s twentieth-century counterpart championed by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt — speaks of sovereign authority in society as a form of authority where “all private judgement of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.”4 A view with roots deeper into history than even Locke, Locke nonetheless sums up in one fell swoop what he and most of us take to be the role of an umpire, whether that umpire is one responsible for officiating over society in general, or officiating over something as humble as a game of baseball: umpires must be, at base, neutral or impartial in applying the rules. They must manifest that ideal of blindfolded justice captured in the statues and paintings found in courtrooms the world over, an ideal that appears odd considering that one of the common insults hurled at umpires (in baseball at least) is the yet again rhetorical question “What are you ump, blind?” Umpires in baseball (and out) must manifest blindness.

But this long-standing view of umpires, now the conventional wisdom assumed true by most of us to the point that we can call it the Assumed View (AV), understands blindness in a peculiar way. Umpires in and out of baseball must keep their eyes wide shut when applying the rules to a particular situation, but they must keep their eyes wide open when ascertaining the facts of a particular situation, the facts in whose terms their judgment is rendered. Indeed, it is here that we find the source of the insult questioning a baseball umpire’s ability to see, because unlike the umpires who happen to sit under or around those statues and paintings in courtrooms, umpires we otherwise know today mostly as “judges” — who stand in for the community according to Locke — umpires on the baseball diamond are expected not just to rule based on the facts, they are expected to gather the facts, gather them by way of being in a unique eyewitness position to the events in question.5 Unlike judges, whom, on the AV, umpires might seem to mirror so closely and do mirror so closely at certain points, baseball umpires play the role of judges but also the roles of eyewitnesses and at time detectives (e.g., the appeal by the home-plate umpire to the third- or first-base umpire to determine if a batter checked their swing). Umpires are even required, according to the AV, to play the role of executive/punisher when their judgments are questioned too forcefully (e.g., throwing a player or manager out of a game), making umpires in baseball the embodiment of nothing more nor less than of the entire criminal justice system.

Baseball umpires, to be good umpires, therefore should and must, on the AV, manifest both blindness and not, in exactly the right measure at exactly the right time, with any act of umpiring involving at least the following: 1] accurately witnessing the event; 2] applying the relevant standing rule covering the event in an impartial fashion; 3] rendering judgment of the event accordingly; 4] preparing to execute 1, 2, and 3 again if and when necessary. And our anger, as well as the increasing reach for technology, is built around the fact that we often believe umpires fail at 1, 2, 3, or 4. We are angry because we believe the umpire either was blind when they shouldn’t have been, or wasn’t blind when they should have been, a failing in either case that an appropriately tuned bit of technology would seem to be able to avoid (the attention of a camera never wanders, and computer algorithms do not care at all what uniform you are wearing or how much money you might be willing to pay).

Problems for the AV

On the AV, umpires in baseball are like judges only more so, a point that might seem to settle exactly what umpires do and in fact should do, when our anger is appropriate and when it is not, and how we can keep umpires from falling short of what they should do (with technology and otherwise).6 It might, until we notice a few problem cases.

Problem Case 1: Ruling when there is no rule

Wes Curry, while umpiring an 1887 American Association game between Louisville and Brooklyn, calls a Louisville player who crossed home plate out even though there was no force at home nor did the catcher make a tag with the ball. Curry does so because a Louisville player who had crossed home plate immediately before had turned around and “interfered with” the Brooklyn catcher, impeding the catcher’s ability to make a tag.7 A reasonable enough call we might think, the problem is that at the time there was only a rule that prevented “baserunners” from interfering with play on the field and once the previous Louisville player had crossed home plate he was no longer, technically speaking, a baserunner. Not a baserunner at the point of interference; again technically speaking, no rule thus existed in terms of which that interference by a nonbaserunner could be viewed as an infraction allowing Wes Curry to call the next baserunner out. As such, if we accept the AV, which requires every act of umpiring to involve the above 1, 2, 3, and 4, Curry’s call must be invalidated because 2 never occurred. There was no application of a rule based on the facts of the situation because there was no rule at all. Hence, either we invalidate Curry’s call, or we admit that the AV is wrong because 2 is not a necessary condition for every act of umpiring.

Problem Case 2: Sticking too closely to a rule

In 1983, nearly 100 years after the call of Wes Curry, George Brett of the Kansas City Royals was called out after hitting a home run in a game against the New York Yankees. He was called out because Yankees manager Billy Martin, having noticed that Brett had used a bat with pine tar too high up on the handle, maintained that the use of that bat, which was an illegal bat as it was clearly altered contrary to the rules (the umpires actually measured how high the pine tar went), not only invalidated Brett’s home run, but necessitated Brett’s being called out because that is what the rules stipulate when an illegal bat is used. Though loath to do so, given that the infraction seemed irrelevant to the play in question, the umpires nonetheless agreed with Martin, including the lead umpire for the game Joe Brinkman. After all, Brett had contravened a standing rule against the use of an illegal bat, a rule that was clearly in place (it was rule 1.10 [b] at the time), and as Brinkman famously later commented in his handbook for umpires, “(R)ules are all an umpire has to work with.” Operating under the AV’s 2, the umpires thus called Brett out, the home run was voided, and the game was in turn lost by the Royals as Brett was the third out in the Royals’ last at-bat. Until American League President Lee MacPhail intervened and overturned the umpires’ decision, that is.

Arguing that “games should be won and lost on the playing field — not through technicalities of the rules,”8 MacPhail thought the overuse of pine tar, while technically in violation of the rules governing bats, nonetheless did not rise to the level of subterfuge or cheating, especially given that pine tar too high up on a bat more likely impedes rather than aids batters. In other words, unlike the Wes Curry case, the umpires had been operating exactly as the AV would suggest they should, with each 1, 2, 3, and 4 taking place. But their decision did not, in fact, stick (apologies for the pine-tar pun). And it did not stick because according to MacPhail and ultimately to history, the umpires were overly strict when performing 2, possibly to the point of being martinets and committing the logical Fallacy of Accident.9 Thus we are presented with the same choice as above only now arrived at from the opposite direction: Do we abandon MacPhail’s reversal and side with the umpires on the field, or do we abandon the AV?

Problem Case 3: Not sticking to a rule closely enough

The calling of balls and strikes has a rather notorious history in baseball. Not only has the strike zone been redefined 12 times in baseball since 1876 (i.e., 1887, 1894, 1899, 1901, 1907, 1910, 1950, 1957, 1963, 1969, 1988, 1996),10 but what counts as a strike in actual play is famously (infamously?) subject to the home-plate umpire’s discretion and to this day rarely adheres to the strict definition of a strike — which stands at present as that space over home plate between a batter’s armpits and the bottom of their knees.11 Arguably the greatest area of discretion in umpiring, as well as the most active in terms of baseball’s attempting to “refine” a rule — the rule has been changed on average nearly once every 12 years — what is odd is that through all the exercises of discretion and changes of the rule, batting averages have hovered in the mid- to high .200s during this roughly 130-140 year period,12 with averages around .260 remaining the most constant.13 Such constancy and consistency in batting averages across so much time, through so many umpires exercising discretion and so many changes of the rule defining the strike zone would make it seem that when calling balls and strikes umpires have been and are operating according to some “rule” other than the rule defining balls and strikes as stated in the rulebook. Unlike the prior two cases, one where a call was made without there being an antecedent rule and one where there was an antecedent rule that was deemed to be followed too closely, here we have a case where a rule would seem not to be followed closely enough. No matter that a euphemism may be applied, namely “discretion,” once again we seem to find ourselves in a dilemma where the actual world of umpiring must be abandoned, or the AV, and 2 in particular, must be called into question if not outright jettisoned.

The Good-of-the-Game View

Confronted in each case with the choice of either calling into question the legitimacy of actual umpiring and rules application in baseball or abandoning the long-standing AV, many of us might be willing to bite the bullet and opt for the former. (Though imagine the number of asterisks this means we would have to enter in to the record books!) But J.S. Russell, who first joined together these three cases in his widely read essay “Taking Umpiring Seriously,” argues that it is the latter course we should follow. The AV, not umpiring history, must give way because contrary to conventional wisdom, the AV’s account of umpiring as appropriate blindness and appropriate sightedness falls short of capturing the essence of umpiring. Actual umpiring shows that at times any one of the AV’s 1, 2, 3, or 4 may be missing, or they may all be present, yet this does not tell us definitely about the legitimacy of the umpiring in question.

Citing the work of the late legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who saw exactly the same difficulties confronting those nonbaseball umpires we met while discussing Locke, i.e., judges, Russell argues that in baseball “rules should be interpreted according to principles of fair play and sportsmanship, and so that the good conduct of games is maintained.”14 Simply put, sound umpiring, like sound judicial reasoning, requires at times what Russell calls, following Dworkin, “hard cases”; that umpires, like judges, appeal to a broader set of rules than those actually present in the rule books of the game (or law books of society); a broader set in the case of baseball that Russell calls the principles of fair play and sportsmanship. The basic idea being that when the rules in the rulebook contradict in some way the principles of fair play and sportsmanship and hence the good conduct of games, umpires, or even a league president, have, do, must, and should rule according to the broader principles of fair play and sportsmanship. To put this in terms of the AV’s four-part analysis of good umpiring, 2 is not always the straightforward act of rules application it seems to be. Rules themselves, at times (in hard cases), butt up against a set of “meta-rules” that are the principles of fair play and sportsmanship, and when they do, the meta-rules should prevail. In other words 2, rather than being a one-step process of rules application, is (again in hard cases at least) a two-step process: 2a) interpret the rule (according to the principles of fair play and sportsmanship); 2b) apply the rule.

Using this “Good-of-the-Game View” (GGV) as we can call it, Russell attempts to absorb the AV, seeing the AV as the appropriate way to view umpiring when cases are not hard — as they mostly are not — yet with the GGV Russell can go beyond the AV to explain why Curry, MacPhail, a century or more of umpires exercising discretion from behind home plate, and a host of other moments from the history of umpiring (we have hardly exhausted the sound decisions made in hard cases from the history of baseball) have all acted appropriately. That is, it becomes possible to account for many of the most controversial moments from the history of baseball umpiring by showing how those moments are, in point of fact, not that controversial when the AV is transcended in favor of the GGV. Returning to the three cases in front of us, through the GGV Wes Curry is vindicated when he calls the second Louisville player out in the absence of a rule because otherwise baseball would become “a nine-inning-long wrestling match.”15 Lee MacPhail is made clearly right in overturning the technically correct decision of Brinkman and his crew because had he not, the minutiae of the rules would have worked counter to Brett’s superior play and athleticism. And home-plate umpires’ use of discretion in calling balls and strikes is upheld because discretion (along with frequent rule changes) helps keep play between offense and defense in relative equilibrium across time.

But the GGV does more than just set the historical umpiring record straight. The GGV can, according to Russell, provide a fully general theory of umpiring through which it becomes possible to improve umpiring now and in the future — hence Russell’s subtitle “How Philosophy Can Help Umpires Make the Right Calls.” For instance, the GGV allows us to address present controversies such as those surrounding performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) or the one with which we started this essay about ever-increasing amounts of technology entering umpiring. Clearly, on the GGV, umpires and leagues should act in every way to keep PEDs out of baseball, otherwise baseball is slated to become a contest between competing pharmaceutical companies, not competing athletes (hardly the point of athletic competition). And just as clearly, the GGV shows technology has a positive role to play in aiding baseball umpires to be appropriately blind and sighted in non-hard cases (which is what umpires confront 99.9 percent of the time), but has no role in determining hard cases, as algorithms are quite poor at figuring out what is sportsmanlike, or at giving meaning to the first G in GGV. Technology has had and can continue to have a role in umpiring for the GGV, but the flesh-and-blood umpires we know and love to hate (and sometimes love, respect, and admire) nonetheless should have, and must continue to have, job security.

Problems for the GGV

By combining the AV’s emphasis on good umpiring as appropriate blindness and sightedness with a more nuanced understanding of the nature of appropriate blindness in hard cases (turning the AV’s 2 into 2a and 2b), the GGV gives us an alternative view of baseball umpiring with impact both rearward and forward-looking. Understanding blindness to mean in part what it does to the AV, namely impartial application of the rules (2b), nuance enters in that the rules in the rulebooks are themselves to be measured against the rules of a broader sporting ethic (2a), an ethic that must be in the “mind’s eye” of those applying the rules (mostly umpires), especially when the rules in the rulebook contradict (at least in a particular instance) that ethic (creating a hard case). Giving us not only an alternative to the AV, the GGV allows us a way to see much actual umpiring as in line with umpiring’s “best practices,” relieving us of what the AV seemed to require, which was overturning what has happened in history, and continues to happen now, at many points. It also gives us a way of defining our anger as appropriate or not, and it gives us insight into how umpiring might need to change now and in the future, especially in regard to technology.

So, problem cases solved and our title question answered? Do we now know what umpires do exactly? Well, not so fast.

The GGV understands appropriate blindness and sightedness in umpiring as the AV’s 2, but it breaks up the one-step 2 into the two-step 2a and 2b in hard cases. The GGV then requires that in such hard cases not only that 2a be performed but that it be performed in what we can call a “loose” manner, whereby the rule in question gets interpreted in light of the broader principles of fair play and sportsmanship and not by the “strict” definition of the rule (what might be called the “technical” definition following MacPhail in the Brett case). But this raises the question: how loose is too loose?

Take the example of arguably the most exciting time in recent baseball history — at least from the perspective of fans — when from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s benchmark records in hitting, especially home-run hitting, were set.116As we know now, this same period happened to coincide with the heyday of PEDs in baseball, and, in fact, we now know that many of those who set the records were “juiced.” According to the AV and its one-step 2, where rules are strictly understood and no separate act of interpretation takes place (there is only 2b not 2a, so to speak), it would seem that umpiring and rules application in baseball more generally would demand that no matter the excitement of those times, rules against PEDs were broken and therefore the records in question should not count, and had umpires known players on the field had broken the rules in relation to PEDs, they should have ejected them from play. A point with which the GGV would seem, on the surface, to agree because of the line of reasoning expressed above about competing pharmaceutical companies. PEDs do not constitute for the GGV a hard case and hence 2 alone is sufficient.

However, is 2 alone sufficient here for the GGV? If we define the “good of the game” not primarily in terms of the pursuit of some sort of “pure” athletic competition where PEDs and the “unfair” advantage they bring offend “sportsmanship,” but instead as athletic activity focused upon the excellence produced in play, it appears clear the GGV can and should yield a very different result from the AV. Focus on that part of sportsmanship concerned with excellent performance and not purity of competition (as MacPhail did in the George Brett case), and the GGV apparently tells us that the batting records of the 1990s/2000s should stand and that umpires, leagues, and frankly all of us should be more “loose” in our interpretation of the injunction against using PEDs. We should, because now we confront a “hard case” where there is a contradiction between the rules and the principles of fair play and sportsmanship (remember we are understanding sportsmanship primarily in terms of the pursuit of athletic excellence) and thus there is a need for 2a and 2b, no longer just 2, with, according to the GGV, the fair play and sportsmanship “meta-rule” winning out in 2a. The point is that given that one of the central aspects of sportsmanship is the production of athletic excellence, one as important as and maybe more important than some longed-for purity in competition, there is no necessity to siding with purity. Indeed, “purity” itself seems subject to a “loose” interpretation as it isn’t clear why cortisone injections and Tommy John surgery are qualitatively different than PEDs. Because one heals injury while the other just boosts performance? But why is that definitive?

The GGV, it seems, is caught in an infinite regress of interpretation, one we have just seen in operation as a matter of fact. Returning to our above case, when the rule against PEDs is to be understood against the meta-rule of fair play and sportsmanship, we confront the question of how best to interpret “sportsmanship” and “fair play”? Do we interpret that rule in a strict or loose fashion? Do they even have a strict and loose fashion of interpretation? We are now in need of a rule for interpreting the meta-rule, some now meta-meta-rule which tells us about how to understand fair play and sportsmanship, about just how loose is too loose. But this meta-meta-rule will in turn require its own interpretation, putting us in need of a meta-meta-meta-rule, and so on ad infinitum. The GGV, rather than addressing the problems confronting the AV, especially the all-important 2 of the AV’s four-part analysis of good umpiring when it confronts actual umpiring history, instead just re-creates the problem at a higher level of analysis. 2 must ultimately yield to 2a and 2b in hard cases according to the GGV, but this means 2a must in turn yield to 2aa, which in turn must yield to 2aaa, etc. The GGV, for all its nuance, simply re-creates the same problem confronted by the AV only now at the meta-level, and thus, in the end of it all, we must wonder just how different are the AV and GGV?

The Common Law View

What all this tells us is two-fold. First, that the conventional wisdom of the AV has never been available to us. (There goes that possibility for those who a while back, in the face of the three cases raised by Russell, were ready to become bullet biters.) It has not, because the 2 in the AV’s 1, 2, 3, and 4 is at base always what the GGV understands it to be in hard cases, namely 2a and 2b; hence, in answer to the question with which we ended the previous section, the AV and GGV are not different but only appear that way because the AV assumes too much. Second, the GGV’s attempt to restrict the need to perform 2a only to “hard cases” fails because what constitutes a hard case is subject to the interpretation of the meta-rule. 2a thus enters the picture in every instance of umpiring and rules application and not just in so-called hard cases. Alternatively put, there is no such thing as a “strict” or “technical” interpretation of a rule, one that is literal or “uninterpreted.” There is not because even the strict or technical interpretation is an interpretation. And when “strict” or “technical” go, so too goes “loose” (i.e., non-strict). We are thus left simply with interpretation all the way down!

Taken together, these two confront us with the fact that there is no act of umpiring where a rule is applied but not interpreted. There is no act of umpiring where the rule is applied “blindly.” That is, the AV’s 2 does not exist. Indeed, just the opposite. Each time an umpire performs 2 they are really performing both 2a and 2b. Each act of umpiring thus depends upon how the umpire “sees” the rule. An analysis that leads us, it would seem, to answer our title question “What do umpires do exactly?” with “Whatever they like!” because umpires appear constrained only by their own perspective on the rule — the sneaking suspicion of every fan in the stands at one moment or another and hence one reason for our anger! But this radical, even heretical, view of umpiring, where umpires are always ruling based on their “bias,” turns out to be neither if we are willing to adopt a yet third view of umpiring which still sees umpires like judges, only judges as understood differently than Locke or Dworkin/Russell understand them.

Building on a line at the end of Russell’s own “Taking Umpiring Seriously,” where he says, “Umpires, like judges everywhere, are by nature conservative and will generally act with restraint,”17 according to what we can call the Common Law View (CLV), umpires, like judges, show restraint and are constrained in the interpretation and then application of rules not by the meaning of rules, meta-rules, or what have you, but by the practice of other umpires that have come before. Rather than umpires applying rules through an act of deductive reasoning, moving from the rule to the specific case — which draws out the above infinite regress — instead the CLV tells us that umpires do and should compare specific cases in the present with similar cases in the past and make their call as closely as they can to that made in the past. (They make present umpiring practice conform with past umpiring practice.) In other words, umpires are and should be conservative in that they attempt to conserve the practice of the past, relying on an analogical form of reasoning that maintains a connection with previous umpiring not a deductive form of reasoning that attempts to maintain a connection with an abstract rule, meta-rule, etc. And while this conservatism leaves it always possible that a novel interpretation may present itself, in fact often does when prior umpiring is unclear in regard to some present case (the CLV’s account of a hard case is one without obvious precedent, not the GGV’s rules/meta-rules contradiction), it is also a conservatism that keeps umpiring remarkably consistent across umpires and time (witness the history of batting averages and the calling of balls and strikes).18

Simply put, tradition is what keeps umpires “in line” because without tradition, the very act of umpiring itself makes no sense. Umpires are not calculating machines that blindly apply the general to the specific, umpires are part of what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a “form of life,”19 in this case a form of baseball life we call umpiring, where umpiring is a matter of doing what “we” do, with the “we” being all those men and women who have ever umpired. Therefore, what makes umpiring umpiring, and baseball baseball, for that matter, is its history, not its rules. Or better yet, it is the history of its rules viewed as actions, where the play and umpiring define the rules, the rules do not define the play and umpiring; a history that constrains umpires lest the very practice of umpiring itself disappear. And this is to say, in one very important way Locke is right about umpires. Not that they need to be blind because at base the CLV is telling us umpires do and should adopt a historical “sight,” not strive after some oxymoronic “blind perspective” that strives to be no perspective at all. He is right in that the community is the ultimate umpire, and when a particular umpire stands in for that umpire, they also stand in that umpire, not above or outside it.

Conclusion

So, what do umpires do exactly? On the surface and day to day, it is clear that they do exactly what the conventional wisdom about umpiring, as captured by the AV and its four-part analysis of umpiring, tells us they do. Even the umps themselves would agree that they “call them as they see them,” and they do so according to the rules. We can and should expect nothing less of umpires when we enter the stands or turn on our TVs.

But scratch that surface and a world of nuance and subtlety appears, one that throws us back on the simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable truth that umpires in baseball are like the game itself: not just steeped in tradition but defined by it. Rather than reaching outside of umpiring to understand umpiring — in particular as per the GGV where umpires do and should step “outside” the rules and appeal to the baseball equivalent of Lincoln’s “better angles of our nature” — instead we should see that it is further into umpiring and baseball itself that umpires always need to go. A trip which may, or may not, address every situation confronted by every particular umpire at every particular time, yet it is one that at least will show when an umpire, and in fact the game itself, needs to ask not so much what the rules require, but what baseball has been and wants to be.

Returning to where we started, with the AV and GGV each capturing something important about umpiring while in the end falling short of giving a full, sustainable account, they nonetheless helped point us toward the CLV, a view that puts tradition and practice at the heart of umpiring and hence quite clearly shows that the much debated and ballyhooed technology may be able to refine umpiring and the techniques of umpires, but technology will certainly not be able to become part of umpiring’s essential “form of life” (any more than home-run hitting machines or cyborg players could be a part of baseball). Indeed, the only reason technology might seem to hold out the promise of doing more is that those holding out the promise are operating under views of umpiring, especially that of the AV, which do not see the complexity at work. And as to our anger at umpires, if what I have argued here is correct, umpiring is a good deal more sophisticated than it might have ever seemed, with appropriate blindness and sight only having meaning, as much as they have a meaning at all, against the backdrop of something that deserves far greater respect: insight. So, given the unbelievable difficulty of the job, let me end on a question that I ask entirely rhetorically: Why not cut umpires some slack?!

ALBERT PIACENTE has taught philosophy at several colleges and universities in New York and is presently at NYU. He has authored and co-authored several books, on political philosophy and the philosophy of education, but is at present focused on the philosophy of sport (especially baseball). A lifelong fan of baseball, ever since attending his first Yankees game in the original Yankees Stadium (pre-1970’s renovations), he is in the process of completing several projects related to baseball, and sport generally.