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.

Walking into the old-school-like surroundings of Estadio Changa Mederos in Havana’s Ciudad Deportiva and running into umpire Yanet Moreno Mendinueta is an interesting experience in itself.1 Off the field, the short and smiling umpire lacks the serious and stern look that she displays while wearing the black-and-blue outfit and calling the shots either behind the plate or at third base. At 43 (born on November 9, 1973, in Luyanó, Havana), she has 17 years of experience and 14 National Series seasons (13 of them as a regular umpire and one as a substitute) under her belt.

Everyone seems to know Yanet and love her, whether players, managers, or her peers, and they all greet her with respect and affection. With three siblings (two brothers and a sister), she is without question the most sui generis member of her family and perhaps one of the most appealing people in all of baseball.

Her resolve on the field, which turns into a constant smile off the field, has made her feel admired by everyone, including the overdemanding Víctor Mesa (manager of Matanzas), who, she says, has asked for her to be the home-plate umpire because “I like the way she handles the strike zone.” Even with the microphone in front of her and an arsenal of questions in store, she still keeps her poise and humor, and answers with the same care and calmness with which she calls a runner safe or out at third base.

---

When and how did you get interested in baseball?

I would say basically since I was born. My father used to live just behind right field in Estadio del Cerro and when I was in the first two years of my life it was very difficult for me to fall asleep, so my father used to take me there, with a feeding bottle of milk, and I would fall asleep in the game, in the middle of the crowd. Afterwards, you know, he didn’t want me to be in the ballfield, but it was he who first got me into baseball, and then there was no way to take me out of the ballpark.

Did you play baseball at any stage during your childhood?

I started as a child, playing with the boys from the neighborhood. My father would lecture me, and even ground me when he caught me red-handed, because he didn’t want people to say that I was a tomboy. I would tell the boys, “Guys, if you see that my father is coming, let me know so I can hide. Don’t narc on me!” But they were just kids, and it happened that when my father was coming, driving the car, they would tell me:“Yanet! Your father’s coming!” and I would run and hide (chuckles). But then there was always someone who would say: “Yanet, come on you’re up!” and then my father would know that I was playing (chuckles).

When did you decide to become an umpire?

For several years, up to around 1997, I was a member of the Havana softball team, because we didn’t yet have women’s baseball. I was included in three pre-rosters of the Cuban National Softball Team, until I decided not to play softball anymore, because I didn’t see myself as fully accomplished. When women’s baseball started in 1998, I switched to baseball. I was the number three hitter of the Havana team, playing second base. But as a “new” sport, there were limitations. You could not be above 25 years old, and I was approaching that age. They told me that since I was that close, when the game fully developed in Cuba I was going to be well above the age limit.

However, since I had already become a national softball umpire, commissioner Margarita Malleta told me that since I liked baseball and being in the ballfield so much, it was a good idea for me to become a baseball umpire. That way, I would be able to stay on the field. I agreed and took a provincial course, which enabled me to go to the zonal [regional] course, due to my good grades. I placed in the top five in the Western Zone, and made the grade among the 20 students that were going to attend the national school.

I spent three years at Villa Clara, the regular venue for the national school. During those three years we got qualified to be umpires at any level or category, working with the youngest kids or in the National Series, the top league. I ranked second at school and made it to the National Series as a substitute.

Were there umpires whose example you followed?

Before I started with the idea of umpiring, I looked at umpires as an athlete did, not as role models. But when I started umpiring, I had an inspiring guide in the late Felipe Casañas; he took me under his wing when I was basically a child in umpiring terms, and it was near him that I took my first steps. When I started observing umpires during the National Series, I took special notice of César Valdés, and I owe a lot to him: he didn’t see the fact that I was a woman as a shortcoming; instead, he saw that I was a capable umpire who could work in the Cuban National Series.

How was the level of acceptance?

At first, they saw me as a freak. They would say, “This woman is crazy!” “What is she doing on the field surrounded by men?” “She won’t be able to handle it!” But when they saw me work and they saw how serious I was about my job, they said, “Okay, this girl does have a chance! She can make it!” and then everyone started helping me and encouraging me to be better each day, and that worked out pretty well for me. When they saw that I had no fear of taking the field, whether the stands were packed or empty, they gave me a lot of support. They saw that as courageous, because sometimes they felt pressure themselves in such situations. My mindset was: If I can work in the Provincial Series, why can’t I work in the Zonal Championships? And if I can work in the Zonal Championship, why can’t I work in the National Games in all categories? And so on, until I took the challenge. It was like climbing a ladder, from the youngest kids to the Junior Championships, Development Leagues, and then the National Series.

Do you remember your first game in the National Series?

My first game in the National Series was in Villa Clara, as a third-base umpire. Villa Clara vs. the defunct Havana Metropolitanos. When I took the field, it was the first game of the season, and the stands were crowded … and everyone stood up and gave me a standing ovation. That was the province where I went to umpiring school, many fans knew me from that time. My second game was in that very ballpark … behind the plate (chuckles).

What were the first challenges you had to face as an umpire and as a female umpire?

The first challenge was to be accepted by my peers, then by the players and managers. At first, when I took the field, they looked at me in disbelief and said: “A woman on the field? What the hell is this? This is a man’s game!” but when I started working and they saw how confident I was, they used to say: “Okay, she’s a woman, but she works pretty well! At least she is strong-willed.” I made mistakes, like every umpire and every human being, and at first those mistakes were more frequent, but I stood by my calls. After that, everyone began to accept me and when they didn’t see me they asked, “Where’s the girl?”

So you established respect simply based on the seriousness of your work …

Umpiring is a very difficult job. First you have to learn the rulebook which is one of the biggest of any sport and which every year includes a lot of modifications. Then, you have to make athletes, managers, and fans believe in your calls. In order to do that, I had to work perhaps harder than any man. But working in the small categories, mainly in the 12U, you get to make calls on plays you probably won’t see in years of National Series experience. I worked a lot in those categories, and it was there that I honed my skills, so when I took on older categories, the range of mistakes narrowed, and it was then that I made people believe in me.

Tell us about the time when a US media crew came to interview you … when you found out that you were the first female umpire in a high-level league in the world.

I had no clue I was the first. I was stunned and didn’t even know how to react or what to say. When they got to the hotel where I was staying, they told me, “We had been trying to contact you because you are the only woman working in her country’s major league. Do you know you’re famous?” I had no clue. As a matter of fact, I thought there were other women working in other major leagues in the world. I had to ask them to give me a few minutes for the idea to sink in because I couldn’t believe it myself.

What has been the most difficult call you have had to make?

Well, about three National Series ago, I had a very difficult call to make. It was on National Television, Matanzas playing against Las Tunas, and Yosvani Alarcón went off to try to steal home plate. I called him safe. That year replay had come into force, and Matanzas challenged the call on the field, which was confirmed by the replay. I was sure of what I had seen, but nobody thought I had made the right call. When the replay proved me right, I got even more confident behind the plate (chuckles), and it enabled me to finish the game with a lot more confidence.

How do you feel when you make a wrong call?

Just as I am proud and confident when I make a difficult call right, the world collapses around me when I’m wrong. We umpires don’t ever want to blow a call, but sometimes poor positioning, or rushing too much, can make us blow the call. I always try to give it a little time before I decide, in order to have a smaller percentage chance of being wrong. But that’s true: When I blow the call, I don’t even want to be looked at and if I am at home, even my mom cannot talk to me.

What has been your best moment as an umpire?

My best moment was when I worked the playoffs for the first time, in the semifinals. It was the first of many postseason jobs. Also, when I went to the Women’s World Championship, and in 2015, that I went to the Pan Am Games in Toronto. I have been to three World Championships and a Pan Am Games tournament, and in all three events I have been chosen the top umpire. They don’t say so explicitly, but normally the one they choose is the one who officiates home plate in the Gold Medal Game, and that was my assignment in all three events.

What do you consider to be today’s top difficulties in Cuban umpiring?

If you had asked me two or three years ago, I would have answered differently, but today we are pleased in the sense that umpires come from abroad (mainly the World Baseball Softball Confederation) to give lectures and courses mainly on how to work in a way that we are similar to the Major League Baseball. These clinics take place twice a year, and that has helped us overcome certain doubts, mainly in terms of the strike zone. We have tried to unify the strike zone and have everyone call the low strike (which we had normally called balls), and to help us get rid of the trend of calling strikes horizontally and not vertically. We have learned that from them. Normally we would call a strike a ball going two or three inches from the plate, and that is not a strike. We have better awareness now that what we have to narrow the sides and widen in the height. Work remains to be done, though.

Are there others like you in Cuba?

There are three other girls who took the course, but they’re working exclusively on women’s baseball; they don’t work with men. I am trying to encourage them to work in the provincial leagues among males, and make them start in the low categories. I would love to see another woman as my peer in the National Series.

So, you see a future for female umpiring in Cuba?

Yes, I do. I am working very hard with female umpires in Cuba. My biggest accomplishment would be to help these three girls (who are the most advanced) get to the National Series and obtain the international level as I have.

At some point, you must have had terrible moments as an umpire. What has been your worst experience so far?

As an umpire, you suffer a lot when you blow a call, when you make a mistake. You suffer a lot when you work a ballgame and perform below the level you know you have. I believe that is what hurts an umpire the most. We also don’t like it when we have to eject someone because we have to; you can’t allow a batter to throw a bat or a helmet in contempt, and you know that you’re tossing a player needed by the team, but that it’s something you have to do because it’s in the rules.

How do you see the future of women in baseball, alongside men?

Things are very difficult in that aspect. Even though we have seen here in Cuba that women have been given many opportunities to exercise any profession, we can’t take back the fact that this is a macho country. And I think that having, for instance, four female umpires in a National Series is a little close to fiction. It could be accomplished, but it’s far from happening. Here in Havana we have female scorekeepers, but I think that getting to a point where four women got to be National Series umpires would be very difficult.

But you would love to see that?

Of course, and I’d love to be the crew chief there (chuckles).

 

Notes

1 This interview was conducted by Reynaldo Cruz on January 11, 2017, in Changa Mederos Stadium, within the Ciudad Deportiva in Havana.

 

 

 

Introduction

Somewhere in America on an April afternoon, there is a father being pelted by sideways drizzle, enduring brisk winds, and sitting on a set of cold metal bleachers. He is watching his son play high-school baseball. With runners on first and third, the pitcher lifts his foot, fakes to third base, and whirls back to first base.

The father screeches “BALK” as loud as his cold body allows. Umpires and coaches say nothing. Talking loudly so other fans can hear, the father tells of how this rule was recently changed. He continues making snarky comments about how the quality of high-school umpires is lacking.

The key question — is the umpire or the fan right? No surprise: The umpires are right, but the fan is not 100 percent wrong. This rule did change — in the major leagues. The fake-to-third-throw-to-first move is still perfectly legal in high school. To add more confusion, if this same dad has a child playing Babe Ruth/Cal Ripken baseball, it would be a balk.

Umpiring is a tough gig. In addition to having perfect judgment and stellar interpersonal skills, the umpire must memorize and master a dense, heavy rule book. Mastery of the rules brings about a couple of other interesting challenges — namely switching between levels where rules are different and knowing when to properly apply the rules.

Rule Differences

The first challenge might come as a surprise to many people. Aren’t the rules of baseball the same everywhere? The answer to that question is tricky.

Yes, the core rules are the same everywhere. Three strikes is an out. Three outs is a half-inning, and four balls is a walk in any league. After that there are numerous differences. How many? There are enough differences between the three major rule sets (professional, college, and high school) that longtime umpire and prodigious author Carl Childress publishes a book every year focused only on these differences. The 32nd edition of Baseball Rule Differences, 400-plus pages of 200 official interpretations, is, according to Referee Magazine, “essential” for umpires.1 Childress has also written numerous other books on umpiring and articles for leading officiating publications.

This book does not even cover the differences between the standard “big boy” ball and the various youth leagues. Youth leagues generally use professional rules as a baseline and make modifications.

Some of the differences are very basic. Youth baseball has shorter distances for bases and the pitching mound. This makes sense. A 12-year-old can hardly throw strikes from 45 feet, let alone 60. Some youth baseball does not allow leads off bases — again smart, as few people enjoy seeing a walk turn into a “triple.”

The more nuanced differences fall into two buckets — those that make sense in the context of the league and those that appear to be different for the sake of being different.

All of these differences add complexity for not only umpires who work multiple levels, but the fans, coaches, and players participating. Conversations happen nightly in which a coach questions a ruling due to its difference from what was seen watching a major-league game.

The biggest difference in the core rules has to do with participation. As the players get older, making sure everyone plays becomes less important. Youth leagues have mandatory participation rules. Teams that don’t fulfill them are subject to games being forfeited. Also, youth and high-school baseball leverage starting player re-entry and courtesy runners to boost participation. These rules certainly make sense for these levels.

The difference in the designated-hitter rules also helps spur participation. In college, the DH and pitcher can be the same player. This means that when the pitcher leaves the mound he can still bat. In high school the DH can bat for anyone and not only the pitcher. Oddly, youth baseball does not have a DH. Meaning the strange answer to the riddle “what two leagues don’t use a DH?” is the National League and Little League.

Safety is a major concern for young players as well. This makes its way into rule differences. Youth and high-school baseball allow no malicious collisions at home plate. Even if the catcher is where he is not supposed to be, a player at this level cannot crash into him. The penalty is severe — an out and an ejection.

High-school baseball also dictates that a runner approaching second base on potential double plays has to slide directly into the base. In professional baseball, a slide is legal if the runner can reach the base with any part of his body. The penalty in high school is an out not only for the runner but for the batter as well.

Youth baseball has started to institute pitching maximums. Pitchers can pitch only so many pitches or innings at a time. Some state associations are also putting innings caps on high school pitchers. The intent of these rules revolves around player safety.

Participation and safety are good reasons for rule differences. Other differences make less sense. Here is a sampling of some of the major rule differences. Codifying these to one standard would make baseball less confusing for fans and make umpiring between levels much easier.

The strike zone in professional baseball is defined as the batter’s position when he is prepared to hit. A batter is not ready to hit until he has taken his stride. Often taking a stride lowers the top part of the strike zone. In high-school baseball the zone is judged by his position while he is in his stance.

The strike zone also has the particular distinction of being different not only between leagues but within games. For simplification purposes, the strike zone is roughly from the letters to the knees. There is variation in the location of the knees and letters from batter to batter. This can make judging the strike zone more difficult. Proper mechanics and training aid in mastery of calling the zone.

College and professional baseball have two types of player obstruction. The penalty and procedure are different based upon whether a play is being made on the runner when the obstruction occurs. High-school baseball has only one type of obstruction. High school also has a minimum base award while the other leagues do not.

When a pitcher commits a balk in college or professional baseball, the play is not over. If the pitcher balks on a pitch but the batter hits a home run, the home run stands. If this happens in high-school baseball, the pitch is treated as if it never happened. The batter hit no home run. Most other balk rules are the same between codes — except, of course, for the example that started this article

In high-school baseball, the ball does not have to be in play for a coach or player to make an appeal. He can just call time and ask an umpire if a player missed a base. In professional baseball, the ball has to be put back in play with the ball thrown to the missed base for an appeal.

A ball that hits a sprinkler head in the grass in front of second base and bounces back into foul territory would be a foul ball in professional and college. But it would be a fair ball in high-school baseball.

The rule on whether a batter is out or the ball is foul if the ball strikes him after it is hit is different in all three rule sets. In professional ball, the batter is out if any part of a foot is not in the box. In college ball, the batter is out if a foot is on the ground completely outside the box. In high-school ball, the batter is out only if no foot is left in the batter’s box.

Rules about managers visiting the mound are also different. In professional baseball, the second trip in an inning means the pitcher has to come out of the game. In high school, the manager gets three visits per game. He can use all three for the same pitcher in the same inning. Violation of the rule means the pitcher has to come off the mound but can stay in the game.

This is just a sampling of the differences. There are many, many more. There are more than 150 rule differences between high-school and professional baseball. Granted, some of them are minor and may rarely occur. But when the difference between a good umpire and a great umpire is complete mastery of the rules, these differences makes working different levels challenging.

 

 

Game Management

These differences do highlight one thing. Sometimes the rules just aren’t the rules. This can happen because a rule in one league is completely different in another. There are other instances when the rules aren’t really the rules. Examples are due to game management. Much like a policeman who does not stop the driver going 57 mph in a 55-mph zone, there are instances where rules are broken, but it is in the best interest of all not to bring attention to them. The umpire has to choose between being right or being right.

Like the example of rule differences, many of these are dependent on the age of the participants. A major-league pitcher is held to a higher standard when it comes to procedural matters. A pitcher who starts to come set with a slight flinch will be called for a balk. Umpires of 12-year-olds will often and correctly let this slide unless the pitcher gained an advantage. If every small flinch was called at a youth level, the game would take a very long time.

Former major-league umpire Tim McClelland answered a question in this vein during an online chat posted on mlb.com. A man named Al Arellano wrote: “I’m an old catcher (78 years of age). Many years ago I was called for committing a ‘Catcher’s Balk.’ I happened to move to the right of the plate just before the delivery of the pitch. Is this still in the rule book?”

McClelland replied: “It is a balk if the catcher doesn’t stay in the catcher’s box until the pitcher delivers the ball. If he were to step out of the catcher’s box — the little box behind home plate — before the pitcher delivers the ball it would be called a catcher’s balk. The runners would advance.

“As a matter of fact, I have never seen it called, it’s one of those things you just kind of let slide. But it is in the rule book, we haven’t updated the rule book in a long time. If it was called recently, it would be by an umpire taking the rule book to the letter of the law and sometimes we have to kind of overlook some things to make the game run smoother.”2

This is a great example of game management trumping the exact wording of the book. Often umpires will subtly remind the catcher to stay in the box when a pitch is coming. This solves the issue.

Interestingly, McClelland was the umpire who famously called George Brett out for having too much pine tar on his bat. His ruling was ultimately overturned. The rule book now contains language that an out is never to be granted for this issue. Rather, the bat is to be taken out of play.

The “neighborhood” play at second used to be another instance where game play trumps the rule book. The book states that a player with possession of the ball must touch a base in order for an out to be recorded. Often on double plays, the pivot man would steal a step or two before making the return throw. Although he was in the “neighborhood” of the base, he actually never contacted it when having the ball. This play died before the 2016 season as Major League Baseball made this play subject to review.

Why did umpires grant this cheat step? It was again about player safety. When the pivot man is forced to stay on the base, he is more exposed to a chance of injury. The little cheat step on a clean double play eliminated the chance. Many amateur umpires will still grant a high school pivot man a little latitude in the name of safety.

The last example of umpires not interjecting themselves into games deals with foreign substances. Rarely, if ever, will an umpire go on his own accord to check a pitcher for the presence of a foreign substance. Instead, he will wait until the other team complains before checking. In early 2015, there were several occurrences of pitchers being ejected for having sticky substances on their arm.

Many opposing managers will not ask an umpire to search an opposing pitcher because they know their pitcher does the same thing. Not looking for issues, but ruling on them as they occur insulates umpires from unwanted confrontation. A basic tenet of good umpiring: “Use the rules to solve problems, not make them.”

Umpires who never learn these lessons are nicely accused of being an “overly officiate official.” In more sophomoric terms, they pick too many “boogers.” The point is that often when an umpire does not call something, the context should be examined before rushing to judgment. What looks like a bad umpire might actually be a brilliant umpire due to the respect he garners from participants.

In fact, with enough time and hard work, anyone can learn the rule book. Anyone with enough training can learn the correct mechanics and timing. The thing that truly separates the greatest officials is the ability to manage the game. Knowing when to apply a rule and when to let the game breathe is paramount to excellent game management.

Final Thoughts

Baseball rules are a tricky subject essential to learn to be a good umpire. Numerous differences between rule sets add to the challenge. Most amateur umpires work multiple leagues making this a very real concern. After learning the rules, umpires must learn the right way to manage the game through the application of the rules. Regardless, whether watching a game on television or at the local high school, sometimes the rules just aren’t the rules.

 

Notes

1 See Carl Childress, Baseball Rule Differences, 32nd Edition (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014). The 436-page book has 578 “off interps” from recognized authorities in professional, college, and high-school rules.

2 mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/umpires/feature.jsp?feature=mcclellandqa.

 

 

After interviewing so many umpires, and hearing about their experiences in umpire school, and reading Shaun McCready’s wonderful blog, I figured the final thing I needed to do to try to bring this SABR Book on Umpires and Umpiring to completion was to see where modern professional umpiring all begins.

Hunter Wendelstedt invited me to visit after his umpire school began in January 2017, and I took him up on it, flying to Daytona Beach, Florida, and visiting the school for parts of three days from January 12-14. It was an enlightening experience.

The school has turned out umpires for all levels — some make it all the way to the big leagues, but of course there simply aren’t that many openings. Others find slots in the minor leagues. Many go on to work in college or high-school ranks, some working in multiple sports. It was evident to me within just a couple of hours that a certificate of graduation from the school really meant something and would be an asset valued in many walks of life.

A quick count of today’s 76 current major-league umpires shows that 39 of them are graduates of the Wendelstedt School or its predecessor Al Somers School.

This session had 139 students enrolled, 132 of them for the full course. (Two of them, including the only woman in the course, had signed up for two weeks.) There were three students from the Korean professional league. Six or seven were returning students, coming back for a second year. The students ranged in age from 16 to their early 60s. In the past, the school has had students as old as their early 70s. Almost every one of them — realistically or otherwise — declared they were seeking a position in professional baseball. There has been at least one student in recent years who was as old as 45, and ultimately hired by professional baseball.

The days are not easy. Classroom work on the 13th started at 9:00 A.M. and ran until nearly 1:00, with just over 30 minutes for lunch, and then fieldwork that ran until close to 6:00 P.M. Dinner is 7 to 8 and then most students join in study groups in the evenings. There is one day off, Sundays.

The cost to attend is $3,200 and you get a lot for your money. Even leaving aside the most important part — instruction and training by a dedicated, hardworking group of around 25 or 26 instructors — each student receives room and board, and umpire school gear — four shirts, a rule book, a tote bag. The school provides 20 meals a week for students (only Sunday lunch is not included in tuition) and 32 nights at the hotel. We stayed at the Best Western Castillo del Sol at Ormond Beach. You can look it up on the internet — this is indeed a beachfront hotel. Sometimes students hit the beach in the evenings, working on stances and the like.

It’s about a 20-minute ride to the sports complex where the school is based. A classroom building and four baseball fields are utilized. The fields are for demonstrations and drills, and part of me was surprised to see the level of detail. Nearly an hour was spent on demonstrating the way an umpire should properly handle a discarded bat near the plate when runners are on the bases, and might come home to score — without taking your eye off the ball.

For 2016 the school added a doctor to the staff, Steven Dorsey. He took the course with his son, Harley Acosta, in 2016, and enjoyed the experience so much that he returned on staff in 2017. Harley was hired by Minor League Baseball. Steven wanted to come back. He’d seen a need — for students to improve their stretching and conditioning and for the occasional problem. Someone had collapsed on the field in 2016 and it took 20 minutes for EMS personnel to arrive. Steve told Wendelstedt, “If you will allow me to come here and lead a Bible study — that’s the reason I got into medicine, to open that door for me — I will come here and help you with your medical needs.” It’s a win-win. He’s a volunteer, the school covering his expenses. “I don’t want a salary,” he added, “This is just an extension of my missionary work.”1 Every day there are one or two things. The day I arrived, student Jeff Diosi suffered strained ligaments that put him on crutches. Another had very low blood pressure, with “complaints that were consistent with a neurologic deficit.” Fortunately, he tested OK after being transported to the emergency room.

This is a school with a long tradition. Before it was the Wendelstedt School, it was the Al Somers School, and before that Bill McGowan’s — started in 1938/39. Reverence for history was one thing that struck me right away. Students were told that their first test was going to be at the end of the classwork on Friday the 13th. During the course, they were taught about the two-man system with a runner on second base. They were taught about the infield-fly rule, taught the discretion involved in how many pitches to allow a pitcher brought in unexpectedly (perhaps to replace an injured pitcher), taught about the 12-second rule, what constitutes a quick pitch, about the rosin bag, why an umpire’s judgment call cannot be wrong (it’s his judgment), and more. So what was the quiz about?

The students had all been assigned to 15 working groups for the course as a whole — the Chylak Group, the Froemming Group, Hubbard, Klem, etc. — each named after a noted past umpire. The quiz was, unexpectedly, for each group to get together and then identify images projected onto the screen at the front of the room. Each image was of a former umpire. There were five multiple-choice questions, and each group needed to come up with an answer and key it into an app on their phones. There were 10 images. The winning group was the McGowan Group, with a perfect 10-for-10. I didn’t fare as well myself; I was only 8-for-10 (but plead interference in one of the two I got wrong — I couldn’t see the fifth name at the bottom of the screen and that’s who it was.)

Was there any reason that students planning to umpire contemporary ballgames in the twenty-first century should be able to pick out a face of an umpire who worked 80 or 100 years earlier? The reason I was given made perfect sense to me. Umpires need to stick together. They need first of all to respect the profession and each other, and a respect for those who came before and excelled is an important part of building on a tradition.

The chief of instruction at the school is Brent Rice, a former student at the school and someone who Hunter Wendelstedt said was “a real asset to the program, one of the best teachers of baseball I’ve ever seen.”2

Brent Rice comes from Michigan and had been instructing at the Wendelstedt School for 17 years, the last eight of them as chief of instruction. He first attended the school at age 18, graduated, and put in his time in the minor leagues, getting as high as Double A. Much of his work is administrative and it’s year-round work, though he does some forensic work for an accounting firm and a private investigation firm. He oversees the staff of 25 or so, several of whom are returnees. Junior Valentine was there, instructing for his sixth year. Brian Carnahan would be working Triple-A ball this year, in the International League; he’s got a degree in environmental economics in case somehow umpiring doesn’t work out.

Rice is, I observed, an exceptional teacher with a sense of perspective and good humor, and yet displays the clarity, certitude, and forcefulness it takes to command the attention of nearly 150 students for a couple of hours at a time, in the classroom or during demonstrations and drills on the fields, without allowing “drill-itis” to creep in. The demonstrative gestures we see umpires make are no accident; the students are taught to make calls loudly and aggressively — and to “sell the call.” As he explained, “We’re definitely a different group. A lot of Type-A personalities — and we’re dealing with other Type-A personalities” in baseball’s highly competitive ballplayers and managers.

Umpires are taught, though, to always keep their chest to the ball, and never to rush their mechanics.

I told him that most of the games I see are big-league games, and that it was an eye-opener to see the instruction for two-man crews, to see how much more work there seemed to be for umpires working (as all students initially will) in two-man crews.

Rice said, “Way more! Now, in some aspects, it’s easier, though. You don’t have a lot of gray areas. One umpire does this, and there’s only one other umpire so that umpire does that. There are a lot of good things in the two-umpire system. We say that in the two-umpire system, a lot of it is just black and white. You do this; I do that. In the three-umpire system, it becomes a lot more about verbal communication. You’re rotating, and you’re covering up for another umpire, and so a lot of it’s verbal communication. Yelling on the field and communicating with each other. With the four-umpire system, when they get there, there’s obviously verbal communication involved, but it’s a lot more visual communication.”3

There are a lot more people in the stands in major-league ballparks. It’s much louder.

“That’s right. It’s more of a looking at each other. Pre-pitch signals to determine what’s going to happen. Four-man is more difficult in some ways, because you have a lot more things that you could end up doing. Your responsibilities change simply on where the ball is hit. In the two-umpire system, OK, it’s hit there. This is where I go. But you’re definitely covering a lot more of the field when you’re in the two-umpire system.”

The basics are the basics, though, and the class was building from the two-man system, on up. Major-league umpires Dana DeMuth and Ed Hickox were at school for the duration. Dana, who had first attended the school in 1976, the year before Al Somers sold it to Harry Wendelstedt, told me that what I was seeing was more or less akin to observing students finish elementary school. Were I to come back in three weeks, he said, I’d be impressed at the tremendous progress the students had made.4

Hunter Wendelstedt expressed his feelings that the Class of 2017 was one of the best he’s seen, “a class like I’ve never seen in terms of their work ethic.” That will just make it more difficult for the staff in the end. “Our evaluation day is the hardest day for us. You have to look somebody in the eye and say, ‘Your highest level is going to be high school. You can work high school and you’re going to do good but don’t try and do college.’ And that’s really hard to do.” And when it comes right down to it, there may be far more people truly qualified to start working in professional baseball — but only so many openings.

There’s good news for some, though. In fact, just a day or so before I arrived, Wendelstedt explained, “We have a couple of kids — instructors — who just found out they’re getting big-league spring training. Rich Rieker and Ed Rapuano came and they told the kids they were going to big-league spring. They worked in the Fall League. They’re going to get the opportunity to work spring-training games and then if they’re successful, they might get the opportunity to fill in at the major-league level this year. So it’s a pretty exciting time for them. Their dream started here, coming through these doors, and now there are big-league supervisors on these fields saying. ‘You know what? We’re going to give you a shot.’ I find that pretty cool.”

 

Notes

1 Author interview with Dr. Steven Dorsey, January 13, 2017.

2 Author interview with Hunter Wendelstedt, January 12, 2017.

3 Author interview with Brent Rice, January 12, 2017.

4 Author interview with Dana DeMuth, January 13, 2017.

 

 

Coldwater, Michigan had a population of 10,945 at the time of the 2010 United States census. Founded in 1861, the city is the county seat of Branch County and sits more or less 65 miles due north of Fort Wayne, Indiana on I-69. It is also the home of three major-league baseball umpires: Tim Welke, Bill Welke, and Jeff Kellogg.

Of the 76 big-league umpires, three came from the state of California, and three came from Coldwater.1

As it happens, so did Jim Curtiss who played center field in 27 games for the Cincinnati Reds back in 1891 and Alice Haylett who pitched for the Grand Rapids Chicks in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1946-49. Her 25-5 record in 1948 with an ERA of 0.77 earned her All-Star and Pitcher of the Year honors.

Tim Welke was born in Pontiac in 1957, but the family moved to Coldwater and he graduated from Coldwater High. Tim umpired his first major-league games in 1983 for the American League and worked 4,213 games through 2015. After having knee surgery in January 2016, and with surgery for the other knee scheduled for June, Tim was on the disabled list for all of 2016.

Tim’s younger brother Bill was born in Coldwater itself, in 1967. His first of more than 2,000 games in the big leagues also came with the A.L., in 1999.

Jeff Kellogg is also a Coldwater native, born in 1961. Jeff was a National League umpire before the leagues merged, working his first four games in 1991. He’s now worked over 3,000 games.

When Bill Welke married Jeff’s younger sister Teri (Teresa), the families became united through marriage. ‘But for the record,” Bill points out, “I was dating her before Jeff went to umpire school. Small town. The Kellogg family and the Welke family, they had eight kids and we had seven kids.”2

The three knew each other to some extent while growing up. Jeff and Teri’s father Wayne Kellogg coached for many years and for the last 20 years or so has been athletic director at Coldwater High School. Jeff says, “I actually graduated with one of the Welke sisters and then I wrestled with one of the other brothers.”3

All three went to Coldwater High. Tim, the eldest, played sports all through high school and went to umpire school at age 19. Following his retirement at the end of the 2016 season, one of his goals in life is to go back and finish getting a college degree. Tim said that his and Bill’s father worked for the State Highway Department of Michigan. “He built roads and bridges and at the end of his career he was in charge of the entire department and worked out of Lansing. I got my work ethic from him.”4 Tim was the oldest of seven Welke children and Bill was the youngest. Coming up in baseball, with a brother who’d started umpiring in the majors 16 years earlier, a player might ask Bill if they were related. “I’d say, ‘Distantly.’ He’d say, ‘Distantly?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, there’s five kids between us.’”

With the age difference, Tim had left home to go to umpire school when Bill was only 8 years old. Bill said, “From the age of 8, I was more interested in following the umpires than following the teams. I’ve really been an umpire fan since I was 8 or 9 years old.” But Bill didn’t automatically follow in his brother’s footsteps, and Tim certainly didn’t encourage him. “I went to Western Michigan and got a business degree. I was thinking about quitting college to go to umpire school and give it a try. I had done some umpiring around home and I really enjoyed it, so I said something to Tim about it and he said, ‘If you quit college, I’m not going to help you.’” That came about in time, after graduation. “He gave me a lot of good advice and some used uniforms, and I went off to umpire school.”

When Bill joined Tim as fellow A.L. umpires, they were on the same crew for some time under crew chief Jim Evans. Bill knew he wanted to be seen as his own man, and shared that with Evans from the start. Evans told him, “I’d love to have you come and be one of us,” but acknowledged, “It’ll probably put you under more scrutiny.”5 There was remarkably little backlash. Bill recalls one story: “I was in Tampa and I had a chopper in front of the plate, the catcher came out to field it, and the batter ran into him and I called interference. Lou Piniella’s managing Tampa. He came out and put on this little show. Tim’s the chief and Tim walks out. I said, “There’s a time for Lou to either get ejected if he wants to get ejected, or leave.” So Tim comes down and talks to Lou and tried to get Lou going, and Lou starts and then stops and he says, “Oh, this is bullshit.” He starts walking back and then he stops and turns and looks at Tim and I and goes, “I think I’m getting brothered here.” And then just walked away.”

Tim recalled, “We had a few years when we worked together as partners, which was good. We worked together for a few years and then I just kinda felt that maybe it would be better for his career if he worked with different people also, not just see it from his big brother’s standpoint…Working with different people helps you become a better umpire because you see different ways to do things.” It probably made the powers that be a little happier, Bill suggested: “I don’t think baseball was crazy about it [being together on the same crew.]”

He added, “The first couple of years, I got called ‘Tim’ all the time. After about four or five years, someone would call Tim ‘Bill’ and I knew I’d arrived when they started calling Tim ‘Bill.’ I really enjoyed working with him, but I think it was time to move on. You don’t want to be in anybody’s shadow.”

All in all, Bill said, “This is the best way to sum it up: when we’re on the field, we’re two umpires who happen to be brothers, and off the field we’re two brothers who just happen to be umpires.”

Jeff had known that Tim was umpiring, of course, but Tim was significantly older. “I knew him, but I didn’t know him,” he says. Jeff had gone to college at Central Michigan, then transferred into a Criminal Justice program at Ferris State. One day, he remembers, “I was watching the Saturday Game of the Week and the home plate umpire walked out to the mound to break up a conversation, and it was Tim. I was like, ‘Holy cow! He’s in the big leagues.’”

Jeff graduated and worked for about a year for the Sheriff’s Department in Coldwater, but then decided he wanted to check out umpire school himself.

“I’ve worked postseason with Jeff a couple of times,” says Tim. “We had a World Series together and a couple of other events, but we’ve never been on the same [regular-season] crew.” Both are crew chiefs now.

Jeff says, regarding the three of them. “We all together over the holidays. We might talk a little shop, but otherwise we’re talking about anything but baseball. Especially football season. We all enjoy football so we’ll talk football. It depends on the time of year.”

As it happens, there’s a fourth major-league umpire in the area. Scott Barry was born in 1976 in Battle Creek, about 40 miles from Coldwater, but grew up in Quincy, which is, Jeff says, “right next door. It’s right off Route 12, which runs right through Coldwater. It’s 5-10 minutes away. It’s right up the road.” Scott umpired his first big-league games as a fill-in umpire in 2006 and joined the major-league staff in 2011. So three major-league umpires come from all of California, but four grew up within a short bicycle ride of each other in Branch County, Michigan.

Note: Midland isn’t next door, but it’s where Paul Emmel was born. He graduated from Central Michigan University. D. J. Reyburn was born in Grand Rapids and graduated from Olivet College.

BILL NOWLIN, known to none as “The Old Arbiter” since he has never worked a game behind the plate, still favors the balloon chest protector for its nostalgic aesthetics. Aside from a dozen years as a college professor, his primary life’s work was as a co-founder of Rounder Records (it got him inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame). He’s written or edited more than 50 books, mostly on baseball, and has been on the Board of Directors of SABR since the magic Red Sox year of 2004.

 

Notes

1 The California natives are Bill Miller, Mark Ripperger, and Mike Winters.

2 Author interview with Bill Welke, September 22, 2015. All quotations from Bill come from this interview.

3 Author interview with Jeff Kellogg, September 21, 2016. All quotations come from this interview.

4 Author interview with Tim Welke, July 30, 2015. All quotations come from this interview.

5 Author interview with Bill Welke.

 

UMPS CARE Charities, founded through the compassion of Major League Baseball Umpires, provides financial, in-kind, and emotional support for America’s youth and families in need. The 501(c)(3) charity focuses on three main efforts:

1) Major League Baseball experiences for children awaiting adoption and at-risk young in mentoring programs.

2) Build-a-Bear Workshop experiences for children with cancer and other serious illnesses.

3) College scholarships for young adults who were adopted later in life.

The UMPS CARE mission puts into action its established creed, “Helping People Is an Easy Call.” Through the youth-based programs, professional umpires enrich the lives of at-risk youth and children coping with serious illness by providing memorable baseball experiences. Through the scholarship initiatives, they offer financial support to children adopted later in life as well as current and former members of the military.

The Beginning: Helping Hands

UMPS CARE Charities started off, in part, as the Helping Hands Fund in 1999. A number of umpires lost their jobs in a negotiation strategy that year, and the fund was created to help out colleagues in financial distress. It was a way for umpires to give back to one of their own in a time of need.

In 2005, however, the group — led by Ted Barrett, Jim Reynolds, Larry Young, and Gary Darling — started looking at expanding its outreach. A conversation with former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent convinced the umpires to investigate other avenues for giving back. That year also saw the first of the now-annual fundraiser, the Golf Classic, which raised $5,000.

At the same time, Young was in the process of completing the onerous paperwork involved with becoming an official 501(c)(3) charity. During the 2006 umpires union meeting, the charity, now called UMPSCARE, was voted as the official charity of MLB umpires. Young focused on the detail work: Articles of Incorporation, Letter of Exemption, Arizona Charitable Registration, By-Laws, Arizona Foreign Corporation Disclosure, etc.

The search for a new focal point continued as well, and soon attention centered on a charity called BLUE for Kids.

BLUE for Kids

BLUE for Kids got its genesis in 2004 with MLB umpire Marvin Hudson. Samuel Dearth, a former minor-league umpire with Hudson, asked Hudson if he could provide tickets to a game for him and his “little” in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BBBS) program. Hudson happily complied and his entire crew greeted the pair for a game and provided a VIP experience.

The following year, each of the umpires in Hudson’s crew had moved to a different crew and wanted to recreate the same experience. So Hudson and Dearth reached out to BBBS programs in various MLB cities. “We weren’t really doing it a lot, just occasional weekends,” explained Dearth. But Hudson and his fellow umps, including Ted Barrett, Mark Wegner, and Mike DiMuro, pushed forward.

In 2006, the group incorporated BLUE for Kids. Around three or four different crews were involved by that time, and the tentacles kept spreading as umpires moved on to new crews. The organization reached out to the Dave Thomas Foundation that year and started the ticket program’s focus that remains to this day: kids waiting for adoption.

The group also introduced a new charitable event in 2006, hospital visits with Build-a-Bear Workshops. An umpire crew and the local team’s mascot would descend upon a hospital with a full Build-a-Bear Workshop for kids with cancer and other serious illnesses. The group’s first hospital visit was at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and they did another five that year, nine the following year, and it continued to grow from there.

Coming Together

With UMPSCARE now an official 501(c)(3) charity and the official charity of MLB umpires — and with Fay Vincent’s recommendation urging them forward — these two groups started talks about merging and combining resources. And in 2009, UMPSCARE (formerly Helping Hands) and BLUE for Kids merged to form UMPS CARE Charities, with the BLUE Crew ticket program and BLUE for Kids hospital program. Samuel Dearth was installed as the combined charity’s first executive director.

Darling was excited about the opportunity. “The merger got us all pulling in the same direction,” he said, “and it automatically gave us our programs to get behind.” Darling, Young, Hudson, Reynolds, and DiMuro formed the backbone of the organization and soon focused everyone on moving forward.

Today, said Darling, “About 99 percent of the umpires are involved in some fashion, from providing tickets and the meet and greet, to participating in the hospital visits, to playing in or sponsoring the golf tournaments. It’s really amazing how much everyone’s come together.” And with the charity well established, new umpires coming to the big leagues are jumping in with both feet, making for an even stronger charity every single year.

UMPS CARE Programs

As outlined at the start, UMPS CARE Charities focuses on three main programs; two were already in full force at the merger, with the third to come into existence shortly after.

BLUE Crew Ticket Program

The program that started the original BLUE for Kids charity, the ticket program provides a special day for kids waiting for adoption — a reminder that special days are still possible and an opportunity for bonding between the youth and mentors. Depending on demand, the program provides experiences for kids in multiple stadiums each weekend throughout the entire MLB season.

Each BLUE Crew Ticket VIP experience includes great seats to the ballgame, a goody bag of “all things baseball,” and the unique opportunity to step onto the field for a souvenir baseball and photo. The baseball experience is designed to strengthen relationships of at-risk youth and adult caregivers.

Since the program started in 2006, MLB umpires have welcomed more than 6,000 guests to games across the country, with great results. “This was the highlight of our activities together,” said one Big Brother in Seattle, while a Big Sister in Colorado reported, “It’s so cool that you are able to provide special opportunities like this. We had a really great time!”

BLUE for Kids Hospital Program

The BLUE for Kids Hospital Program remains one of the main programs for UMPS CARE Charities and a favorite of many of the umps. Begun in 2006, the charity held events at 13 children’s hospitals during the 2016 regular season and then hosted a final event during the World Series.

The BLUE for Kids hospital program brings a crew of major-league umpires to the bedside of children with life-threatening illnesses, and they don’t come empty-handed. Each crew brings a Build-a-Bear Workshop experience right to the hospital room!

While a hospital stay can be a frightening time for children and their families, the BLUE for Kids program lifts the spirits of all involved. Children outfit stuffed teddy bears, puppies, or monkeys while sharing high-fives and words of encouragement with the BLUE for Kids crew. When available, the home-team mascot tags along, making it a fun and memorable day.

Through this program UMPS CARE has delivered 1,200 to 1,400 bears annually, and during the 2015 season UMPS CARE put its 100,000th bear into a child’s hands since the program’s inception.

“Being able to possibly make a contribution and a difference for a day, or just a few moments, by putting a smile on someone’s face … it’s an honor and a privilege,” said Jim Wolf after an event in 2015. “The kids are so great, and courageous.”

“This gives us a moment to step back, put everything in perspective and see what’s really important,” Chad Fairchild told MLB.com after a 2016 event. “It’s a great day. Sometimes you feel helpless, but being here, you give back a little bit.” The patients and their families, no doubt, would argue it’s more than just “a little bit.”

UMPS CARE All-Star Scholarship

The UMPS CARE All-Star Scholarship, which debuted in 2010, was the brainchild of Jim Reynolds. “It was definitely something he was passionate about,” recalled Darling. For most parents, they start saving for their child’s college education at birth. For those generous souls who adopt a child later in life — say, 15 or 16 — the cost of college can be an even greater burden. That’s why UMPS CARE Charities partnered with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption for the scholarship program.

All-Star Scholarships are open to children adopted at the age of 10 or older to provide increased opportunities for advanced education. Each year one student will be selected to receive the All-Star Scholarship. This student will be eligible to receive up to $7,500 annually to go toward tuition, books, and other college-related expenses. In 2016 a total of $30,000 in scholarship funding was awarded to the multiple recipients still in school.

The year 2016 also saw a major milestone in the program: the first two graduates! Both reflected on the scholarship after their graduation. “This scholarship has been absolutely invaluable to me,” said 2011 recipient Josh Perrin. “The financial support from the All-Star scholarship gave me the opportunity to fully focus on my academics. The community support from UMPS CARE Charities was just as valuable. … I have felt nothing but genuine support from my umpires family.”

2012 recipient Candace “Zoe” Cottom commented on the importance of the scholarship to her journey. “Attending Butler had been my dream since I was about 12 years old,” she said. “Unfortunately, it is a very expensive school so my chances of being able to afford it were slim. But once I found out I got the scholarship, I knew I could make my dream happen.” The umpires continued to support her throughout her college years as well. She related how umpire Ted Barrett and his wife, Tina, sent her multiple care packages at college and how excited she was to go to a game and meet them. “They are two of the most gracious, generous, and caring people I’ve met. And it is because of people like them that I’ve had the opportunities I’ve had. I feel that it is both my duty and my privilege to give back to others so that they may succeed as well.”

Family Care Program

Beyond those three main programs, UMPS CARE Charities also remains true to its original mission and core values, providing a “helping hand” to colleagues in need, including retired and minor-league umpires and the clubhouse attendants who cared for the umpire rooms.

Fund Raising

None of these programs are free, and UMPS CARE Charities continues thanks to its caring corporate sponsors and legion of supporters and volunteers. The charity also runs a number of fundraisers throughout the year, including:

• UMPS CARE Golf Classic, which includes a pre-event social, live auction, awards dinner, and the chance to golf with MLB and MiLB umpires.
• 100-Hole Golf Marathon, an endurance event where MLB and MiLB umpires and supporters golf 100 holes in one day to raise money.
• UMPS CARE Online Auction, with autographed memorabilia from some of baseball’s top players, premium MLB and UMPS CARE apparel, and one-of-a-kind “Experience Packages” at many of the minor- and major-league ballparks across the country.
• And other events throughout the country, including a bowling tournament, a “run for bears” race to raise funds to purchase Build-a-Bears, a spring-training golf outing, and more.

Today and Tomorrow

Today, UMPS CARE Charities employs two full-time workers (an executive director and program director) while being led by a Board of Directors of umpires and supported by a volunteer wives’ committee. Together the group pushes forward to improve the charity each and every year. “[Executive Director] Jenn Skolochenko-Platt and [Program Director] Jenn Jopling do a really great job,” said Darling. “There’s no way we could do this without their organization and structure, and they’re making us better all the time.”

If you’d like to get donate to UMPS CARE Charities, learn more, get involved, or participate in one of the charity’s fundraisers, visit UmpsCare.com. You can also sign up for their quarterly newsletter or purchase UMPS CARE gear from the online store while you’re there.

Helping people is an easy call. UMPS CARE Charities has been proving that for over a decade, and looks forward to living that phrase for many more years.

 

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

 

 

In 2016 there were 46 umpires at the highest professional level in the Korean baseball league.

Most umpires in Korea have either played some type of baseball, in youth leagues, high school, college, or even in amateur ranks, but not many have played professional baseball in Korea with any of the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) teams.

If you want to become a professional umpire in Korea, playing experience is not a requirement, but it does help. One can join the Korean Baseball Association (KBA), an umpire school run by the KBO. The school lasts about 45 days and anyone can attend — even this author. Those who earn the highest scores can get an opportunity to umpire in the Futures League (low minor-league baseball). If you make the cut, before you can call in the Korean professional league you will have to work at least five years in the Futures League. One umpire, Um Jae-gook, had no prior baseball-playing experience; he passed and joined the KBA/KBO umpires but retired after three years of Futures League ball. As of 2017 he worked as a freelance amateur-league umpire.

Some Korean umpires have attended the two professional umpire schools in the United States, run by former umpires Jim Evans and Hunter Wendelstedt. There are some female umpires in Korea in the amateur ranks and some are very good; one with whom I have worked in umpiring amateur ball is Munsook Jeon. Some have attended the school; some have passed all the requirements but were not eager enough to accept a position.

While the rules of game are the same, umpiring in Korea is unique. One difference is that in the Korean Baseball Organization, umpires work in a five-man crew instead of the standard four-man crew used in the US major leagues. So the rotation is a bit different. The home-plate umpire doesn’t move to third base the next game as in the United States; that umpire sits out the next game and is part of the instant-replay team. Only one umpire from the crew reviews the questioned call while the other three remain on the field. In the United States, of course, the umpire who made the call and the crew chief go to the headphones and are in contact with the umpires making the actual replay calls.

In Korea there is a fifth-inning stretch and the umpires leave the field, returning in about two minutes while the grounds crew drags the field and re-marks the home-plate area. The grounds crew also drags the infield after the third inning.

There is no pregame meeting at home plate. The batting orders of both teams are received by the plate umpire during batting practice. Five minutes before the game, the umpires enter the playing field together and jog straight to their positions on the field, and then the Korean National Anthem is played.

Umpires in the KBO have neither a union nor a retirement system. The retirement age is 57. They are independent contractors, hired from year to year. They are evaluated in listed categories. Plate umpires, for instance are rated on Body Head Positioning, Timing, Judgment/Consistency of Strike Zone, Use of Voice, and Positioning of Plays. All umpires are graded on Communication with Partner(s), and Knowledge of Four-umpire Mechanics system.

Pay for umpires in Korea is very low. Umpires almost went on strike one season for that reason. The starting pay for a rookie umpire is about 20 million won for a season, equal to about $17,590. A 20-year-veteran umpire gets up to 100 million won ($87,950), plus hotel and travel expenses. Because they have no union, if an umpire makes a serious mistake, he may be paid less. After a third serious mistake, he will be demoted to the Futures League. One umpire named Park was demoted in 2015 for making some serious mistakes such as in signaling safe and out and was sent down for six months to the Futures League.

 

The unusual “gorilla” stance favored by many Korean umpires. (Author’s collection)

 

Do players give the umpires a hard time in the Korean League? It is probably no different than in the US professional leagues. But sometimes the players can be punished for their actions. In one example from 2014, pitcher Charlie Shirek of the NC Dinos, a team that plays in the city of Changwon on South Korea’s southeast coast, was fined 2 million won and had to perform 40 hours of community service as punishment for swearing at an umpire. He showered abuse on umpire Kim Jun-hee in the first inning of a game against the SK Wyverns. Shirek strongly complained about Kim’s calls on his pitches. Despite repeated warnings from the plate umpire, Shirek continued to swear in both Korean and English and was soon ejected — or, as they say, ordered to leave the pitcher’s mound.

Another odd practice: The pitcher can wear foreign objects attached to his body unless the opposing team appeals to the umpires. If they determine that it neither confuses the hitters nor affects the movement of his pitches, it will be allowed. An example would be the wearing of “health necklaces.” If it doesn’t affect the game and there is no intention to cheat, then it is permissible. The rules also allow taping, jewelry, and so on, quite different from US major-league standards.

Umpires are human, and that is part of the human element of the game. The statement that the best umpires in baseball are the ones the fans don’t know is not necessarily true. Some of us do know their names.

Fans naturally hope for fewer missed calls from umpires. Complaints arose over a series of controversial calls by umpires, many of which were obviously incorrect. The KBO, which had long turned a deaf ear to outcries from fans, players, and coaches, finally decided to expand its replay system, which was not as accurate as that in the US major leagues.

At first, the system was only for home-run calls. The KBO had to amend its rules, which banned challenges to ball/strike, fair/foul, and safe/out calls. Managers can only challenge fair/foul and safe/out calls, or a questionable home-run call. Even this was a drastic change in the stance of the league, which had merely stressed that the umpire’s authority should be respected. During replays, the stadium scoreboards do not show the play, but spectators can see them on their smartphones, even watching frame-by-frame. While the playing rules are universal, Korea illustrates that umpiring varies from country to country in terms of training, compensation, and on-field procedures.

 

 

Perhaps one of the most difficult umpiring jobs in the world is the one carried out in Cuba, where verbal abuse can come from the stands when a call is blown, or when a close play that has been called right negatively affects the home team. When taking on umpires, Cuban fans can be really virulent.

With a very modest salary and no union, umpires are prone to be constantly put under the microscope by the fans, the players, the managers, and the media. Since they do not have leadership separate from the Cuban Baseball Federation, they have exactly the same boss as the players, an almighty commissioner who makes decisions within games, stripping all authority from everyone, and creating a bad climate among the men in dark blue.

Cuban umpires have in Amado Maestri their most celebrated colleague, acknowledged more for his action in 1952 preventing a slaughter of university students protesting at Estadio del Cerro during the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista. A group of students from the University of Havana, led by student leader José Antonio Hecheverría, jumped into the field on Estadio del Cerro (now Estadio Latinoamericano) during a game, protesting the Batista regime, just a few months after he had led a coup d’état on March 10. The police stormed onto the field with the clear intention of clubbing the students to death. Maestri stood in the middle, stating that he was in charge of whatever happened on the field, and even though the police took the students away, no fatal incident took place at the ballpark. That day transcended so much politically, that even today November 23 is celebrated in Cuban baseball as the day of Cuban umpiring.

Maestri was indeed known for his authority on the field. He even went as far as ejecting Mexican League President Jorge Pasquel (the guy who once intended to challenge the American major leagues) from a game in the Mexican League on June 5, 1945, despite knowing that this could possibly come back to hurt him.

Another umpire embraced in Cuba for nonbaseball-related events during games was César Valdés. During the “friendship series” between Cuba and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards in 1999, Valdés physically threw down a man who entered the field making noise and carrying a sign offensive to the Cuban Revolution

But more than those moments of praise, it has been the infamous moments surrounding umpires due to the lack of comprehension and the inborn hostility toward them that has marked them in Cuba.

There was a time in the mid-1960s when, after arguing a call, catcher Ramón Primelles punched umpire Alfredo Paz. This led to a one-year suspension for all-time great Manuel Alarcón (who retired at 27 holding almost every major pitching record in the National Series). And there were the recent unfortunate incidents of the 2012-2013 season, which may well stick in the fans’ memory and haunt umpires for years to come.

The recent incidents started on Sunday, December 22, 2013, when Ciego de Avila’s Vladimir García plunked Villa Clara’s Ramón Lunar, who had been tormenting Ciego de Avila’s pitching. Instantly after the beanball, home-plate umpire Lorién Lobaina ejected the hurler; he believed García had thrown at Lunar. Claiming that no warning notice had been issued, Ciego de Avila’s manager, Roger Machado, withdrew his team from the field and refused to play. Rules state that when that happens, the umpires have a given time (not to exceed five minutes) to forfeit the game to the other team. Yet, an unprecedented occurrence took place, altering forever not only the outcome of that game, but also the way umpires would work for the rest of the season.

Cuban Baseball Federation President Higinio Vélez, then commissioner of Cuban baseball,1 made a phone call and persuaded Machado to take the field again, even though the time for forfeit had been long reached (28 minutes had passed since Machado had withdrawn his team). At the same time, he had umpire Lobaina removed from the game in one of the most disrespectful things ever to happen to a Cuban umpire in the long history of the game on the island.

The next time Lunar and García met was in the second round of that season. Machado’s team had not made it to the Top Eight, and García was acting as a reinforcement for Pinar del Río,2 The first pitch he threw to Lunar was a second straight plunking. This time the hitter jumped at the pitcher. Only Lunar was ejected, despite the earlier history, and Villa Clara’s manager, Ramón Moré, then defending champion, didn’t cause as much of a commotion as Machado had.

Cuban umpires felt caught in the middle of a very bad situation: ejecting a key pitcher of the national team (García had been a member of the World Baseball Classic team) would probably lead to a scene by the manager, and then to a phone call that would end the umpire’s night.

It all reached a low in the night of February 17, 2014, when an unusually wild Freddy Asiel Álvarez (from Villa Clara, coincidentally) got a piece of Matanzas’s Yasiel Santoya, who had previously homered off him. In the heated environment, Álvarez delivered a brushback pitch against Víctor Mesa Jr., son of Víctor Mesa, manager of Matanzas and the Cuban team. Out of the dugout, bat in hand, came Demis Valdés, looking for Álvarez with the clear idea of murdering him. A melee ensued, and when the dust had settled, Ramón Lunar was lying face down with a serious blow to his mouth with the bat.

Umpire Osvaldo de Paula should have ejected the pitcher after the Santoya plunking. Yet, he was walking on thin ice given the fact that the previous similar incident had been costly for Lobaina. With no umpires’ union, and with the obvious need the commission had to punish someone (one might have thought Vélez would present his resignation), de Paula could not find defense, and was given a treatment similar to that of the players: a suspension for not having proven his authority.

Such an event definitely threw light on the biggest complaint Cuban umpires have, aside from wages: There is no union for the umpires to respond to and to be represented by. The fact that someone with power but little umpiring knowledge makes a phone call and disposes of an umpire at will is a dangerous situation, one that can only lead to other unfortunate events.

Even though Cuban umpires are accorded the respectful treatment of being provided a glass of water and a cup of coffee on a tray by a very beautiful attendant during the fifth-inning stretch, the reality of their work is very rough, and most of the times they are the weakest link of the chain, depending on who the transgressor is. Make it Roger Machado or Víctor Mesa, and we’ll have the umpire paying the price for it, since both are commission favorites.

Umpires are trained first in their province and later on in the national umpiring school, and they need to officiate many games at lower-level tournaments (Provincial and National School Games, Provincial Series, and so on) before making it to the National Series. Many of them begin as substitutes before getting a so-called full-time umpiring job, for 32.00 national pesos per game (the equivalent of $1.42 US). Even though many things in Cuba are subsidized, that is still a very low income. (On September 27, 2013, the Cuban government announced a new system to pay athletes better, but did little for umpires.)

Umpires are closely evaluated. Every game is monitored and assessed by a technical commission, making sure that the umpires work properly and call the game the way it should be. That commission gives a game evaluation to every umpire, based on the accuracy of his calls and the control he kept of the game, and all that is kept in a file for the whole season.

The aggressiveness of players can also be a problem; there is often a tendency to protest every decision an umpire makes. We have even seen a hurler protesting a call and a hitter doing exactly the same thing on two different pitches during the same at-bat. Nevertheless, all these events could be prevented or stopped with an umpires’ union that looked after their rights and protected their authority. Maestri’s ejection of Pasquel some 70 years ago is not something that could happen in Cuba today.

 

Notes

1 Right now, Cuban Baseball is divided into two: the Cuban Baseball Federation, which handles mainly issues regarding the Cuban National Team, contract signings, and relations with foreign bodies; and the Baseball National Direction, which handles the Cuban National Series and the rest of the domestic baseball activities.

2 After the 2012-2013 season, the Cuban Baseball National Series changed its format into a two-round tournament in which the top eight teams advance to the second round, each drafting five players from the remaining eight teams.