Watch highlights from the Umpires Panel at 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference
At the sixth annual SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference on September 21, 2024, the Umpires Panel included Greta Langhenry, Tiesh Diaz, and moderator Perry Barber.
Langhenry is a two-time honors graduate of the Wendelstedt Umpire School and the MiLB Advanced Course. In 2019, she became the first female umpire to work in the Coastal Plain League and the Florida Collegiate Summer League. She is a co-founder of Level Ump, which provides equipment, education, and scholarships to aspiring professional umpires. She also currently serves as an instructor with the Wounded Warrior Umpire Academy.
Diaz, who played on the Puerto Rican national women’s baseball team, recently umpired the 2024 Little League Softball World Series in Greenville, North Carolina. She attended the RO40 Umpire Camp and the Wendelstedt Umpire School.
Barber is a longtime professional umpire, author, and promoter of women in baseball. She was the inaugural winner of the SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018 and was recently inducted into the New York State Baseball Hall of Fame. She has umpired at all levels of the game, including Major League Baseball’s spring training and around the world to places such as Japan, Guam, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean. She is also a Jeopardy! champion, accomplished musician, and author. She also conducts umpire clinics, speaks about umpiring and women’s baseball, and serves as a board member for the International Women’s Baseball Center and an advisor for Baseball for All.
- Video: Click here to watch a replay of the 2024 Umpires Panel (YouTube)
Here are some highlights:
On what inspired her to become an umpire
- Langhenry: “In 2018, I read a story online about the two women who were, at that time, minor league umpires. It had a picture of Jen Pawol and a picture of Emma Charlesworth-Seiler. They were both in uniform and looked so cool. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never seen that before! You mean a woman can do that job?’ It wasn’t that I didn’t believe women couldn’t do that job; I just never thought about it. If I had thought about it when I was a kid, I would have said, ‘Well, if I can’t play, then I’m going to be an umpire.’ I just never saw a woman umpire until 2018, and the minute I did, I went, ‘I want to be her. How do I be her?’”
On her experience at the Wendelstedt Umpire School
- Langhenry: “I think there were about 175 people in my first camp, and only three of us were women. One of the other women there was Isabella Robb, who’s currently a minor league umpire, so we were two of the women there. I just got in the back of the line, there were 20 people in front of me, and I would watch them mess up 20 times. Then I’d say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that thing.’ I’m still going to mess up because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m not going to do these three things that everyone else seems to be doing. I’ll do something else wrong.”
On her pathway to become a professional umpire
- Barber: “My pathway took a lot longer. It went through many sorts of gullies and interesting places along the way because I started in Little League, and I was older — I was 28 years old. I did strictly youth league, and right away, I went to umpire school. So by my second year of umpiring, I was moving up the ranks. I started doing adult league baseball because there’s a lot of that around New York, where I was living, where I grew up. I just kept working and started doing high school baseball around New York. I didn’t even work my first college game until I had been umpiring for about eight years.”
On the Automatic Ball-Strike System (ABS) in baseball
- Langhenry: “The thing about the computer is that it’s dialed into a set definition. So somebody like Greg Maddux or Max Scherzer, if one tiny bit of the baseball clips what the computer thinks is the edge of the strike zone, it may look like a ball to me as an umpire. I’m saying, ‘I’m not getting that.’ But if it clips the edge — think of a laser system, like spy lasers that you’ve got to crawl under, you know, Mission Impossible-style — imagine the strike zone is a Mission Impossible-style laser grid, and the ball just clips the edge of one of those that doesn’t look like a strike to an umpire because the ball is all the way out, but the computer’s going to call it. So that’s something I think is interesting about the system as they dial it in. It’s certainly not the same feel as it always has been.”
On her path from playing baseball to umpiring
- Diaz: “Two years ago, I just retired from the [Puerto Rican] national team. I’m just talking with one of the presidents of the league, and I said, ‘Maybe I can umpire. I retired from the field, but I can umpire now.’ He told me, ‘Do you want to? You can.’ I said, ‘Yes, why not?’ Then they gave me the opportunity, and I went to Roberto Ortiz’s RO40 umpire camp, and I knew [MLB umpire] Malachi Moore. Malachi Moore gave me the link for Level Ump, and I did all the stuff for Level Ump. Greta (Langhenry) sent me the next steps, and now I’m here.”
On the importance of female mentorship in umpiring
- Barber: “We are out there, and we are not invisible, but we are not the focus of everybody’s eyes or attention. Unless we do something wrong, then everybody’s looking at us. But the goal is to blend into the background and just keep the game flowing smoothly over the little blips and bumps. Having a mentor to help you get over those blips and bumps, and to teach you how to navigate them, is so very important.”
On the mission of Level Ump
- Langhenry: “Our mission is to support women and other underrepresented groups of people in umpiring. If you turn on your television and think of an umpire in your mind, there’s one way umpires have looked for almost all of history: it’s a white man. Level Ump was founded to help support people who don’t necessarily fit that mold.”
On providing equal opportunities to become an umpire
- Langhenry: “At the end of the day, an umpire’s job is to protect the integrity of baseball. So anyone who loves baseball and wants to work this job can do it and is capable of doing it. It’s a fantastic job; it takes a certain kind of person to get yelled at all day, but that doesn’t have anything to do with gender, race, class, age, or anything.”
Transcription assistance by Everett Williams.
For more coverage of the 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference, visit SABR.org/women-in-baseball-conference/2024.
Originally published: September 25, 2024. Last Updated: September 25, 2024.