‘Yer blind, Ump, Yer blind, Ump, Ya mus’ be out-a yer mind, Ump!’: Umpires on Screen and Stage

 

Most baseball fans would agree that the best umpire is the invisible umpire. Sure, the umps on the field ensure that the rules of the game are followed. They call balls and strikes. They determine if the fielder who dives for the fly ball has trapped the horsehide or made a clean catch. They call the runner out or safe at home. And if those umps are doing their job, the on-field squabbles and controversies will be minimal.

For this reason, umpires almost never are the central characters in fiction. Conflict is one of the essentials of stimulating storytelling; for this reason, a good ump who is unnoticed by the fans simply will not make a compelling character. So when an umpire is featured in a movie or on a TV show, that arbiter will be combative. He will be in conflict with the athletes and managers as well as the fans who are aligned with certain teams or players. It should be no surprise, then, that a documentary about umpires would be titled The Men You Love to Hate. This 1997 film opens with a definition of the word “umpire” followed by footage of umps making calls — and players or managers arguing those calls. (But the film is fair-minded, as it pays homage to arbiters. Soon after the opening, there is footage of Bill Klem, perhaps the most revered of all umps. “Do you honestly believe, Bill, that you never missed one?” Klem is asked. He responds, “Never missed one from here,” and he points to his heart. “I maybe could’ve missed one, but never from here.”)

Not all baseball-themed films or non-sports films with baseball sequences spotlight ballplayers. Occasionally, a scout may be the central character. One example here is Trouble With the Curve (2012), starring Clint Eastwood. So will a front-office type (2011’s Moneyball, featuring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane) or a baseball writer (Spencer Tracy’s Sam Craig in 1942’s Woman of the Year, and Walter Matthau’s Oscar Madison in 1968’s The Odd Couple). Countless baseball films also highlight the antics of fan-atics. But the majority center on players: major leaguers; minor leaguers; Negro Leaguers; Little Leaguers; and even, on occasion, women. As for umpires, well, they may be present whenever there is on-field action, but they merely exist to yell “Strike three” (if the hero is a hurler who rescues his team with a stellar pitching performance) or “Safe” (if the lead character is the batter who has just bashed the horsehide and is sliding into second base).

The one exception— in a feature-length film, at least — dates from the midpoint of the 20th century: the appropriately titled Kill the Umpire, a 1950 farce whose title alone tells us that it does not offer a controversy-free depiction of an umpire. Two years after ingloriously impersonating the Bambino in The Babe Ruth Story — which arguably is the all-time worst baseball film — William Bendix is perfectly cast as Bill Johnson, a boorish ex-ballplayer and steadfast fan-atic. Johnson and his family conveniently live in St. Petersburg, which allows him access to spring training games. His obsession with the sport has prevented him from keeping a job; he spends his days sneaking off to games, where he endlessly quarrels with umpires — and his voice floats above his fellow fans as he unkindly bellows his favored exhortation: “Kill the Umpire.” Upon losing yet one more job, Johnson’s frustrated spouse (Una Merkel) is set to end their marriage. To the rescue comes her father, Jonah Evans (Ray Collins), a retired big-league ump who proposes that he take up the profession. This way, a ball field will be his place of employment and he can be paid for attending endless games.

Johnson initially is aghast at the thought of becoming an arbiter. “Trying to make an umpire out of me, that’s the lowest thing that can happen to a man,” he gripes. However, in order to save his marriage, he enrolls in an umpire school run by Jimmy O’Brien (William Frawley), Jonah’s old pal. Johnson is committed to failure and does all in his power to irritate O’Brien. But upon observing some ball-playing youngsters on a sandlot, he comes to appreciate the importance of the umpire. So he buckles down, graduates from O’Brien’s school, and is hired to umpire in the Texas Interstate League. Here, Johnson must contend with fans who are clones of the loudmouth that he once was; collectively, they are akin to a lynch mob who just might murder an ump if they disagree with his call. So Bill Johnson experiences firsthand what it feels like to be the target of random name-calling — and, at the same time, is transformed into a competent, proud professional.

In so many baseball films, the villains are gamblers who scheme to throw the Big Game. Such is the case in Kill the Umpire. Here, some bettors plot to rope in Johnson, but he refuses to accept their bribe. The film’s finale is a drawn-out chase sequence in which a resolute Johnson dodges a throng of irate fans and gun-toting hooligans before arriving at the ball yard to complete his professional obligations.

Bendix is at his comic best in Kill the Umpire. Indeed, his performance is the film’s centerpiece. As Bill Johnson, baseball devotee, dashes onto the field to go head-to-head with an arbiter, he raises his beer bottle to strike his opponent but only succeeds in spilling the brew on himself. He wrecks the English language, pronouncing “ostracized” as “ostrichized.” One of the comic highlights: Upon arriving at the umpire school, Johnson dons glasses and impersonates a blind man who is incapable of crossing a street, let alone umpiring a ballgame.

Ultimately, Kill the Umpire parodies the no-win plight of the umpire. If he calls a close pitch thrown to a home team batter a ball, the fans will disregard him and compliment the hitter for his sharp eye. If he calls the pitch a strike, he will expose himself to the hisses of the hometown faithful who surely will call him every name from ass to zombie.

On occasion, other shorter films have featured an arbiter as a central character. One, in fact, dates from 1916 and is a one-reel farce featuring Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran, a then-prolific comedy team. It also is titled Kill the Umpire. According to a brief synopsis and review published in the July 22, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World, this Kill the Umpire charts what happens when “Eddie goes to the game to bawl out the umpire. He slugs him with a pop bottle. Later they meet unexpectedly at dinner and trouble results. This will tickle baseball fans and others will enjoy it also.” Another is The Baseball Umpire (1913), a split-reel (or, five-minute-long) comedy starring Fred Mace, a long-forgotten early screen farceur. The Baseball Umpire was one of almost 70 shorts featuring Mace that were released in 1913. The October 4, 1913 issue of Moving Picture World listed the title as The Umpire and noted that, in it, “Fred Mace disports himself as umpire at a Los Angeles ball game. The setting and photography are good, but more plot was needed.”

There was plenty of plot in a second, earlier Fred Mace vehicle, this one produced on the stage, in which he also played an arbiter. Prior to coming to the movies — and, along with John Bunny and Ford Sterling, predating Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin as a top silent screen comedy star — Mace earned kudos in The Umpire, a musical comedy with book and lyrics by Will M. Hough and Frank R. Adams and music by Joseph E. Howard. Here, Mace was an arbiter who incurs the wrath of fans after blowing a pair of calls at home plate because he is momentarily distracted by a pretty face in the stands. He flees the scene and ends up stranded in, of all places, Morocco.

The eternal plight of the arbiter is highlighted in one of the musical numbers. The title is “The Umpire Is A Most Unhappy Man,” and the lyrics include the following:

An umpire is a cross between a bullfrog and a goat.
He has a mouth that’s flannel-lined and brass tubes in his throat.
He needs a cool and level head that isn’t hard to hit.
So when the fans beat up his frame, they’ll have a nice place to sit.
The only job that worse,
Is driver on a hearse …

Mace, however, was not the first to star in The Umpire. The musical debuted at Chicago’s La Salle Theatre on December 2, 1905, with local stage performer Cecil Lean in the title role. A week after its premiere, the New York Dramatic Mirror reported that The Umpire “has drawn crowded houses ever since the opening and at the present time seems destined to be one of the most popular of the recent productions at the theatre. Joseph E. Howard has assembled a catchy, tuneful, effective score. … Press criticism has been generally favorable.” This prediction proved to be spot-on. Theater historian Gerald Bordman noted that The Umpire was “far and away the biggest musical hit the city had ever seen,” adding that “the show established Lean as the leading musical comedy actor in Chicago and confirmed beyond any doubt the supremacy of Hough-Adams-Howard in the pecking order of Chicago’s lyric stage.” According to Theatre Magazine, The Umpire enjoyed “a run of over 300 nights at the La Salle Theatre …” While Lean remained with the original production, Mace took the lead when the show went on tour several months after its debut. He appeared in The Umpire off and on for the next three years, playing cities from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia, Louisville, Des Moines, Winnipeg, and Portland, Oregon, to Muskogee, Oklahoma, Colfax, Washington, and Decatur, Joliet, and Jacksonville, Illinois. Curiously, The Umpire never opened in New York.

Near the start of the tour, Mace and his comically-distorted mug were featured on the cover of Billboard (which then was known as The Billboard), an entertainment industry trade publication. The issue was dated August 18, 1906, and the caption underneath the image read: “Fred Mace; His Comedy Work in The Umpire, Placed Him in the Front Rank of Funny Men.” Almost three years later, when The Umpire played the Princess Theater in San Francisco, it was advertised as “The Famous Baseball Musical Comedy Hit.” Noted an anonymous Los Angeles Herald critic, reviewing the production during its Southern California run, “(The umpire’s) description of his great game wherein he lets the home team lose by calling two ‘safe’ men out because he is entranced by a couple of pretty eyes in the stands, is an epic worthy of place beside that greatest of all baseball classics, ‘Casey at the Bat’ …”

 

The success of The Umpire did not result in a spate of fictional arbiter-heroes, either on stage or screen. But an umpire is likely to appear — albeit fleetingly — whenever a ballgame is depicted on celluloid. A textbook example of the abuse heaped on big-screen umps is found in the opening sequence in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), based on the Joseph Kesselring stage play. The setting is the Brooklyn, New York of old: the Brooklyn of the dearly departed Dodgers. Here, the Bums are battling their New York rivals at Ebbets Field. A Dodger is at bat. The New York hurler, who wears #47, throws his pitch. “STEE-RIKE. Yer OUT!” roars the umpire. The batter — #43 — already has started making his way to first base, but he changes his course, approaches the ump, pulls off the arbiter’s mask, and belts him in the kisser. As the dazed umpire runs his hand across his injured chin, Brooklyn and New York players — joined by the Ebbets Field faithful, who rush onto the field — commence a full-scale rhubarb. A similarly-depicted animated ump briefly materializes in How to Play Baseball (1942), in which Goofy, the beloved Disney character, demonstrates the art of pitching, batting, base running, and fielding. The umpire is introduced as “that impartial pillar of judicial dignity whose word is law,” but a riot ensues when he calls a runner out at home plate.

Hullabaloos involving other screen umpires date from the earliest baseball films. For example, the initial celluloid Casey at the Bat (1899), filmed on the lawn of Thomas Edison’s estate in West Orange, New Jersey, features a batter swinging wildly at a pair of pitches, which the home plate ump correctly calls strikes. The argumentative batter then pushes the arbiter to the ground, with bedlam ensuing as a jumble of bodies pile up at home plate. (The film’s full title is Casey at the Bat, or The Fate of a “Rotten” Umpire. The arbiter is so-described not because he is incompetent but because “Casey” has no one else to blame for his lack of hitting prowess.)

Two other wacky umpire portrayals are found in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) and Dizzy and Daffy (1934). In The Naked Gun, bumbling Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is trying to thwart an assassination attempt on the Queen of England, who is attending a California Angels-Seattle Mariners game. Perhaps the killer is one of the players. Drebin knocks out and replaces the home-plate umpire and begins comically frisking players, as if they are being measured for suits. He over-theatrically calls strikes, at one point breaking into a Michael Jackson-inspired dance routine. He wipes home plate first with a Dustbuster and then with a vacuum cleaner, and examines a bat by “opening” it as if he is removing a cork from a wine bottle. Meanwhile, Dizzy & Daffy, a two-reel comedy featuring Dizzy and Paul Dean, highlights a game between the Farmer White Sox and Shanty Town No Sox as well as some comic repartee between Lefty Howard (Shemp Howard, of Three Stooges fame), a hurler in desperate need of glasses, and Call ‘Em Wrong Jones (Roscoe Ates), a stuttering arbiter. Lefty dubs Call ‘Em Wrong the “world’s worst umpire.” Call ‘Em Wrong responds, “Why, you just pitch ‘em right and I’ll call ‘em …” Before he can complete the sentence with the word “right,” Lefty breaks in with “wrong.” Call ‘Em Wrong stutters when calling a pitch a ball, so he deems it a strike instead — and vise-versa. Later on, Howard comically pokes at the eyes of the ump and tells him, “I’ll get you a cup and some pencils.”

Fictional umpires often go hand-in-hand with sightlessness. Such is the case even if the ump is mentioned but not seen onscreen. In “Six Months Out of Every Year,” one of the musical numbers in Damn Yankees, the hit Broadway musical that was filmed in 1958, a fan’s wife laments her mate’s obsession with baseball. Mentioned in the lyrics are the Washington Senators, the (damn) New York Yankees, Willie Mays — and the fan’s eternal roar of “Yer blind, Ump, Yer blind, Ump, Ya mus’ be out-a yer mind, Ump!” This classic complaint might have been inspired by the umpire in Porky’s Baseball Broadcast (1940), an animated short. Porky Pig is the play-by-play announcer for the “decisive World Series game.” Pitching for the Giants is none other than “Carl Bubble,” while one of the hitters is a pig with a face that is modeled after Babe Ruth. At one point, Porky reports, “Here comes the umpire out on the field.” He is an unsmiling soul wearing dark glasses and clutching a cane who is guided by a seeing-eye dog. You guessed it. The ump is, quite literally, blind.

Not all fictional umpires are played for laughs, however. One of the more bizarre yet revealing onscreen umps is the central character in A Prayer for the Umpire (2009), which runs 16 minutes. Here, a chunky young arbiter named Jeremy faces an endless barrage of abuse while officiating a Little League playoff game. An oversexed mom pressures him to be “fair and unbiased,” but what she really wants is for him to call pitches in favor of her son, who is one of the hurlers. Jeremy is chided and manipulated by the two petty, obnoxious coaches and, throughout, he is not so much an umpire as a receptacle of abuse. Eventually, Jeremy calls the game after the woman’s son hits and bloodies a batter after being told to do so by his coach. The now-irate mom has the audacity to call Jeremy a “bully.” She tells her son that Jeremy is “the definition of a loser,” adding, “He can’t play, so he has to ruin it for (the kids).” At the finale, while Jeremy is standing by his car and removing his chest protector, the woman sneaks up behind him and bashes him in the head with a bat.

A Prayer for the Umpire may be contrasted to the content of a TV series episode that dates from 43 years earlier. In “The Ball Game,” an Andy Griffith Show episode that aired on October 3, 1966, Opie Taylor is about to play in a “big” Little League game pitting the Mayberry Giants against the Mt. Pilot Comets. “If we win, we get to go to Raleigh for the state championship,” Opie explains. Because the regular ump is sick, Sheriff Andy Taylor, Opie’s dad, is recruited as a replacement. “We know you’ll be fair to both sides,” Mayberry resident Goober declares, but trouble comes when the ever-honest Andy calls Opie out at home plate to end the game with Mayberry on the short end of a 6-5 score. So the sheriff incurs the wrath of the Mayberry populace. Goober is angry. So is Floyd the barber. Opie’s pals snub him. An irate Aunt Bee tells him, “You were supposed to help,” while Opie is depressed. “When that play happened, I was right on top of it,” Andy explains to Opie. “And you were sliding, weren’t you? Now all I was doing, I was looking right at the plate. So I was in the best position to see it, and I made my decision based on what I saw.” Was Opie out or safe? That really isn’t the point. The message here is that Andy’s decision, right or wrong, should be accepted “in the spirit of good sportsmanship.”

In vehicles from Kill the Umpire to “The Ball Game,” arbiters are played by actors. On occasion, however, real umpires have appeared onscreen. For after all, why not cast a genuine ump as a celluloid arbiter whose only dialogue might be “Strike Three” or “Ball Four”? (It’s a shame that George Moriarty, who umpired in the majors between 1917-1926 and 1929-1940, never had a role in a Hollywood movie — if only because he is the grandfather of actor Michael Moriarty, who starred as Henry Wiggen in the 1973 screen version of Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly.)

Among real-life umps, John “Beans” Reardon represented his profession in The Kid from Left Field (1953). Joe Rue played an arbiter in The Stratton Story (1949). So did Bill Grieve in The Kid from Cleveland (1949) and Ziggy Sears in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) and The Stratton Story. Al Barlick and Augie Donatelli were respectively the home plate and first base umps in The Odd Couple. Appropriately, Emmett Ashford appeared as one in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976). More recently, Harry Wendelstedt umped at Shea Stadium in Seven Minutes in Heaven (1985). Joe West was the third-base umpire in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! — and Ken Kaiser and Ron Luciano appeared as themselves. Jerry Crawford, Rich Garcia, and Rick Reed respectively were the second-base, first-base, and home-plate umps in For Love of the Game (1999); Reed also was credited as “Sheriff’s Deputy” in Real Bullets (1990) and “Maintenance Man” in Article 99 (1992). Doug Harvey umped in a couple of episodes of the TV series A League of Their Own that date from 1993.

Easily the busiest-in-show-biz ump was Art Passarella. He and Ashford were credited as “1st Umpire” and “2nd Umpire” in a 1969 episode of the TV series Ironside. Passarella also umped in several other shows, from Guestward Ho! (1961) to Nichols (1971) to the John Ford-directed “Flashing Spikes,” a 1962 Alcoa Premiere episode featuring James Stewart as an ex-major leaguer banned from baseball for accepting a bribe. His fellow cast-members included Don Drysdale (playing a character named Gomer), Vin Scully, and Vern Stephens. Passarella’s non-baseball roles included “Prison Guard #2” on Sea Hunt (1959) and “Officer Sekulovich” on four episodes of The Streets of San Francisco that aired between 1975 and 1977; the character was named for series star Karl Malden, whose birth name was Mladen Sekulovich. Passarella also umped on the big screen in Critics Choice (1963), a Bob Hope-Lucille Ball comedy. However, in his most memorable movie appearance, he mixed with a couple of other major stars as well as a trio of famous big leaguers. That Touch of Mink (1962), a romantic comedy, is the tale of Cathy Timberlake (Doris Day), an unemployed “computer machine” operator from Upper Sandusky, Ohio, who is making her way in the Big Apple. To her good fortune, she meets Philip Shayne (Cary Grant), a super-rich mover, shaker, and jet-setter who delivers speeches at the United Nations that even the Russians admire.

Shayne is attempting to charm Cathy, and he asks her: “What is a pretty girl offered in Upper Sandusky when the sun goes down?” After hesitating for a nanosecond, she utters the word “baseball,” adding, “I went to a lot of baseball games. A friend of mine, Marvin Schwab, has a box behind the third base dugout. … Cougars won the pennant in ‘58.” Given his status, Shayne can offer Cathy more than Marvin Schwab’s box. Cut to Yankee Stadium. A game is in progress. Seated in the Yankee dugout are Cathy, Shayne — and Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra.

A Bronx Bomber is at bat, and the home plate ump (played by Passarella) has just called a strike. “STRIKE!” bellows Cathy, who loudly accuses Passarella of having an eyeball-related issue before adding, “It was a ball. It was THAT far from the plate.” Passarella then approaches the dugout. “Little lady,” he asks Cathy, “will you let me umpire this game? You been on my back all night.”

Cathy looks to the Yankee sitting directly to her left. “Mickey,” she says, “you saw that pitch. It was a ball, wasn’t it?” “It looked like it,” #7 responds — and Passarella tells him, “You’re out of the game, Mantle.”

A further-incensed Cathy turns to the player directly on her right. “Roger, how’d that pitch look to you?” “It could’ve missed the corner,” Maris admits — and he too is tossed from the game.

Cathy then turns to Yogi, who needs no cajoling as he declares, “It’s a perfect strike. The ump was right.” But Passarella is not through. “I don’t like sarcasm, Berra. You’re out of the game, too.”

Such is the power and authority of the umpire.

 

SOURCES

Books

Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Edelman, Rob. Great Baseball Films. (New York: Citadel Press, 1994).

Newspapers/Magazines

Anthony, Walter. “‘Umpire’ Is Riot of Fun and Music: Catchy Production Charms Big Audience at the Princess Theater.” San Francisco Call, April 14, 1909.

Cantwell, Robert. “Sport Was Box-office Poison.” Sports Illustrated, September 15, 1969.

Mace, Fred. “Says His ‘Head’ Has Been Reduced.” Motion Picture, March 1915.

Wall, H.C. “On Main Street: Looking Both Ways From Sewickley, Pennsylvania.” The Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1912.

“Fred Mace Won $11,000.” New York Times, March 29, 1907.

“How Cecil Lean Won Fame Over Night.” Cambridge Sentinel, September 4, 1909.

“LaSalle Theatre, Chicago.” The Poultry Tribune, June 1906.

“Ridgeway Theater. ‘The Umpire.” Colfax Gazette, March 8, 1907.

“SAN FRANCISCO. Otis Skinner-Under Two Flags-Peter Pan-The New Orpheum-Classmates-Vaudeville Items,” New York Dramatic Mirror, May 1, 1909.

“Telegraphic News.” New York Dramatic Mirror, March 31, 1906.

“‘Umpire’ Mace on Stage.” The Sunday Oregonian, February 17, 1907.

“‘Umpire’ Wins Close Decision.” Los Angeles Herald, February 5, 1907.

“Universal Film Manufacturing Company.”

Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1907.

Chicago Daily Tribune, August 20, 1906.

Iowa City Daily Press, February 2, 1906.

Moving Picture World, October 4, 1913.

Moving Picture World, July 22, 1916.

Muskogee Times-Democrat, April 6, 1907.

New York Dramatic Mirror, December 9, 1905.

New York Star, November 7, 1908.

Photoplay, December 1912.

The Billboard, August 18, 1906.

The Theatre Magazine, December 1906.

———, February, 1907.

Variety, May 11, 1907.

Films

The Men You Love to Hate, 60 minutes, 1997. Directed by Verne Nobles Sr.

Websites

http://www.imdb.com

http://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.100006523