As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires

CHAPTER ONE

MEN BEHIND A MASK

My favorite umpire is a dead one.

—JOHNNY EVERS

Strike three! and I jump.

I’m in a big slump.

I’m down in the dump,

Can’t get over this hump.

You cross-eyed old ump,

You’re as blind as a stump.

Made me look like a chump,

You horse’s rump!

—CHARLES GHIGNA, AKA FATHER GOOSE

Okay, one more thing about taking off a mask: It’s remarkable to realize that you can be a lifelong baseball fan and not know the first thing about umpiring—literally the first thing. Baseball, after all, is a sport where everything—everything else, anyway—seems to be under scrutiny all the time, with millions of people gleaning it for new info and insight. Every major league game is televised, as well as many in the minor leagues, and highlights are replayed nationally and nightly. Statistics continue to be invented and historical tidbits unearthed, and both are so voluminous and variously interpretable that a whole academic clan—the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR)—is devoted to them. Reporters, broadcasters, and bloggers exhaust daily stores of news, opinion, analysis, and trivia, and of course literary and fauxliterary types have been waxing eloquent, semi-eloquent, and sub-eloquent on the grand subject of baseball for several generations.

All of this has led to a deep pool of common lore and an extraordinary literacy about the game among a wide audience of fans, but for some reason the details of the umpiring craft and the personalities of the men who pursue it remain obscure. Indeed, umpires may conduct their business in public and in plain sight, but most fans can’t tell you anything about them except that, to express it benignly, they occasionally err, or that, a little less benignly, they are performing an easy job incompetently. Actually, ask a fan at the ballpark what he knows about umpires—I’ve done this a lot—and the most frequent response is something like They fucking suck.

Many of these same people could tell you in an instant what the second baseman is supposed to do, say, with two outs and a man on first when the batter laces one down the line between the third baseman and the third-base bag.

He covers second, of course. In case the left fielder throws there.

But what does the second-base umpire do?

The answer is that as soon as the batter touches first—actually, in umpire parlance, he’s known as the batter-runner, a designation he takes on as soon as he hits the ball and leaves the batter’s box—the second-base umpire positions himself on the infield grass between first and second, where he waits for the play to develop. He is, of course, responsible for a play on the batter-runner at second.

The first-base umpire, meanwhile, has gone to cover home plate for a possible play there, because the home plate umpire has rushed up to cover third for a possible play there, because the third-base umpire has chased after the ball into the left-field corner to make sure no spectator leaning over the rail has interfered with play or the ball hasn’t gotten caught under the fence or something else unexpected hasn’t happened. So the second-base umpire is also responsible for a play at first, in the event that the batter-runner makes the turn, retreats, and the throw comes across the diamond; he must also be alert for the possibility of a rundown.

Didn’t know any of that? That isn’t so surprising. Many people who make their living in baseball don’t either. On opening day at Shea Stadium in 2006, for example, on a play identical to the one described above, an umpire’s incorrect call helped the Mets beat the Washington Nationals.

With the Mets ahead by a run in the eighth inning, the Nationals’ Alfonso Soriano tried to score from first on a double to left and was seemingly tagged out by Paul Lo Duca, the Mets catcher. There was no argument or even a discussion. Lo Duca, however, had dropped the ball, a fact that was confirmed on a videotape replay but had eluded just about everyone in the park, including the umpires.

Umpires make mistakes, of course; that’s not the point. (In this case, it was actually understandable. Lo Duca’s body had shielded the drop from just about every pair of human eyes in the stadium, and the video replay from only one of four different cameras revealed it.) But when the game was over and members of the press who had seen the decisive replay went to talk to the home plate umpire, Rick Reed, about his mistake, they had to be told that Reed hadn’t made the call. The umpires had rotated on the play, properly, and the call at the plate had been made by Tim Tschida, the first-base umpire.

About a month later in Milwaukee I spoke with Robin Yount, the Hall of Fame shortstop and outfielder who was then the bench coach for the Brewers. Yount recalled that in the two seasons he spent as a first-base coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, he often disagreed with umpires on close plays at first, but on viewing the replay, it almost always turned out he was wrong. It was funny, Yount acknowledged, how your point of view can affect your vision and your decision-making.

I’d never looked at the game from that angle before, Yount told me, meaning from the vicinity of the first-base bag, and he confessed the perspective threw him off. I’d see the play differently from the umpire, but then I’d go in the clubhouse and watch the tape and I’d be surprised that almost all the time they were right.

I asked Yount if he’d ever spoken to umpires about why that is, about what they do to see the play properly.

No, he said. I never did.

It’s often said that the best umpire is the one you never notice, and though that’s an arguable point, it is certainly true that umpires are baseball’s invisible men. Players are often celebrities, and so are managers, broadcasters, and even some coaches, pointed at on the street, hounded for autographs and pictures. Even lesser lights who play the game can be locally famous in the cities where they play. But umpires are popularly known neither by their names nor their faces, not even by their reputations. I’ve walked the streets of several American cities with major league umpires, eaten with them in dozens of restaurants, and never once has a stranger recognized any of them. Even at the ballpark, I rarely witnessed anyone ask an umpire to sign a ball or a scorecard, and elsewhere I never saw it happen. Eight umpires have earned places in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But who can name them? Can you name one? Not even Bill Klem?

Klem umpired in the National League for thirty-six full seasons, from 1905 to 1941 (a record for longevity that was finally eclipsed in 2007 by Bruce Froemming), and he’s generally recognized as the most influential and accomplished umpire of all time, the Babe Ruth of umpiring, if you will.

Klem instituted arm signals for balls and strikes, so spectators in the bleachers, and not just those in the expensive seats near home plate, would know what the calls were. He was the first umpire to disdain the inflated balloonlike chest protector and to wear instead a modified catcher’s protector under his shirt. He is credited with several of umpiring’s most famous declarations, including Baseball is more than a game to me, it’s a religion and It ain’t nothing until I call it.

That Klem is a relative unknown is the point. He’s alleged to be the first person to aver that a game has been well umpired if you don’t know who the umpires were, a sentiment that has become a truism in the game (even if it isn’t true). But Klem, who was a substantial egotist even by the standards of an occupation that values egotism, would never have agreed that such anonymity should apply to a career.

Whether umpires should remain anonymous or not, they do. It’s weird that they are so little considered in the culture of the game. Nicknames of players, so much a part of baseball’s allure—the Sultan of Swat, the Yankee Clipper, Mr. Cub, the Say Hey Kid, the Splendid Splinter, Big Train, the Georgia Peach, Ol’ Reliable, the Ol’ Perfesser, Peewee, Dizzy, Whitey, Campy, Stan the Man, Yogi, and Yaz, just to name a prominent few—are far more familiar than the real names of Billy Evans, Tom Connolly, Cal Hubbard, Nestor Chylak, Jocko Conlan, Bill McGowan, and Al Barlick, the other seven Hall of Fame umpires. (Klem, by the way, was called Catfish—for his big lips, the slant of his brow, and his penchant for spitting as he made a point to a player—but only behind his back. He hated the name, thought it demeaning and disdainful, and referring to him that way on the field meant an automatic ejection.)

In dubious circumstances, too, umpires have been relegated to the status of footnotes. Fred Merkle, Ralph Branca, and Bill Buckner are famous as the prominent goats of baseball history. But except perhaps in St. Louis, where anguished fans still blame his erroneous sixth-game, ninth-inning call at first base for robbing the Cardinals of the 1985 World Series title, the name Don Denkinger doesn’t raise hackles or even much recognition.

Meanwhile, everyone knows the reputations of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro are clouded by the suspicion they used steroids, and that Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson were banned from the game for gambling. But Richard Higham? Who’s he?

In 1882, Higham became the only umpire ever accused of dishonesty on the field. He was allegedly in league with gamblers, and on flimsy and dubious evidence (his accuser was a team owner angry about a call) he was thrown out of the sport.

This isn’t to say that umpires are morally or ethically pure. Most of them would admit they aren’t, and even if they wouldn’t, their history is dotted with brutish, scheming, or narrow-minded behavior. George Magerkurth, a habitual barroom brawler who worked in the National League from 1929 to 1947, was suspended for ten days in 1939 when he got in a fistfight during a game at the Polo Grounds in New York with the Giants shortstop Billy Jurges.

Bruce Froemming, who retired after the 2007 season, his thirty-seventh, as the longest-serving umpire in major league history, was suspended for ten days in 2003 when a religious slur directed at an umpiring administrator, Cathy Davis—he referred to her as a stupid Jew bitch after an argument over travel arrangements—was caught on her answering machine. And in 2001, Al Clark lost his major league umpiring job after twenty-five years when he was fired for habitually cashing in the first-class airline tickets baseball provides the umpires for coach seats and pocketing the difference. Subsequently, he went to jail for fraud as part of a scheme to profit on phony memorabilia. Clark, who umpired in the 1978 American League playoff game between the Yankees and Red Sox (the game won by Bucky Dent’s home run), Nolan Ryan’s three hundredth career victory, and Dwight Gooden’s no-hitter at Yankee Stadium in 1996, would sign baseballs and authentication documents certifying that the balls were used in those and other games, even though they weren’t, then share in the profits of their sales.

Even so, rarely if ever have the acts of major league umpires threatened the honor of the game, though a couple of incidents have come to light showing them tiptoeing up to the line. In 1989, two umpires, Rich Garcia and Frank Pulli, were put on probation after the commissioner, Fay Vincent, learned through baseball’s security office that they (along with Don Zimmer, then the manager of the Chicago Cubs) had placed bets with an illegal bookmaker (who was also a drug dealer) on sporting events other than baseball games.

Froemming was among a handful of umpires who were chastised in the 1990s for asking ballplayers to sign baseballs they could then turn around and sell; baseball prohibits this as a conflict of interest, especially since the practice generally includes an implied threat.

I’m getting ready to pitch—I was about to go out and warm up—and my catcher is trying to prepare for the game, the former knuckleballer Tom Candiotti recalled in 2003 about a game in 1996 when he was with the Dodgers, whose catcher was Mike Piazza. And Froemming is telling Piazza this story about how one time Johnny Bench wouldn’t sign baseballs for him, and Bench went oh for four that day with three called strikeouts, or something like that. So Piazza stopped stretching and signed the baseballs.*

Anyway, the point is not that umpires are well—or badly—behaved. It’s that even egregious behavior doesn’t do much to raise their profiles. Even sex and death don’t seem to put umpires in the public eye. Everyone knows that Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe, and fans of a certain vintage still remember Leo Durocher’s wife was Laraine Day. Attentive younger fans are aware that Alyssa Milano dates pitchers—she’s been romantically linked with Brad Penny, Barry Zito, and Carl Pavano—and that Kris Benson, a pitcher for the Pirates, Mets, and Orioles, is married to a woman who has posed for Playboy and Maxim and made outrageous and attention-getting statements about the sex life she enjoys with her husband. But it’s mostly a secret that the onetime National League umpire Dick Stello was married to the 1970s porn star Chesty Morgan, a woman often referred to as having the world’s largest naturally occurring bosom, whose measurements were said to be 73–32–36.

Finally, who is John McSherry? Except among umpires, who revered him, he’s forgotten, unless it is as the spur that moved baseball to insist that umpires improve their physical condition. On April 1, 1996, opening day in Cincinnati, McSherry, who weighed well over three hundred pounds, was behind the plate when his heart failed. With the count 1-1 on the third batter of the game, Rondell White, McSherry called time and moved toward the home dugout. He signaled to someone, perhaps the team doctor, then collapsed and died, the only umpire ever to perish on the field.

It was a horrific event, a gruesome tragedy in a public place on an ordinarily celebratory occasion, well within the memory of anyone who can recall the early career of Derek Jeter. Yet far fewer fans remember John McSherry than can tell you about the only player ever killed during a game. That was Ray Chapman, an infielder for the Cleveland Indians who was hit in the head by a pitch from a submarining right-hander, Carl Mays, of the Yankees. The year was 1920.

I find all of this more than a little odd because umpires are anomalous in baseball in so many ways that you’d think this condition alone would draw attention to them. For instance, they’re the only ones on the field who don’t have any stake in the outcome of the game, but they’re also the only ones who are actually on the field for the whole thing. In an environment defined as competitive, they’re the only ones who can’t win. And there is no glory available to umpires; they’re often booed but never cheered, except sardonically, often when one of them is hurt. As Doug Harvey told me, The player can go from being a bum to a hero. An umpire can’t.

Put another way, umpires are the only ones in the park for whom the narrative powers of a ball game are supposed to be irrelevant. For fans, for players, for broadcasters and everyone else, the appeal of a ball game is that it is a story, with characters, a measure of uncertainty and suspense, a beginning, a middle, an end, and in the best of circumstances a climax and a denouement. But for the umpires, the story can be nothing but a distraction. For them the game needs to be a procession of episodes, each only as weighty as the previous one, and it’s imperative for them to combat the very human impulse to be drawn into the drama. Complete success in this endeavor is impossible for them, of course. You don’t have to be partisan, after all, to feel like a part of things, to be conscious of when the stakes are especially high or the pressure especially intense.

Sure, you’re aware of circumstances, one umpire, Tom Hallion, would tell me. You know, when the bases are loaded and it’s a full count, and you’re saying to yourself, ‘Holy shit, this is tight!’ But you have to push that aside, push it out of your mind and focus on the next pitch. The next pitch. The next pitch. It’s always about the next pitch. That’s umpiring.

My theory for the general lack of curiosity about umpires is that fans tend to find all the anomalies distancing rather than appealing. They make umpiring too peculiar, too enigmatic, too difficult to analyze. It’s not that umpires are hidden exactly, or even inconsequential. Rather, it’s as if, both on the field and off, they inhabit a parallel world to that of the rest of baseball. If you watch a game the way you normally do, focusing on the ball and the players who are throwing it, hitting it, or chasing it, the umpires will seem to be absent—it’s a little weird, actually; you just don’t see them, even though they’re often right in the middle of the action. The next time a catcher goes back to the screen for a foul pop, for example, take a moment to look for the plate umpire. You’ll find him surprisingly nearby, just a few feet from the catcher, peering intently at the ball as it descends, to make sure it doesn’t graze the screen before it hits the catcher’s glove.

Conversely, if you look at the photographic negative of your ordinary view of a ball game and focus only on the umpires, you might need an instant replay to figure out what happened on the play. Partly this is because it’s often the case that on a given play all the infielders and base runners will be in motion—a sacrifice bunt with men on first and second, for example—but the umpires will stay put.

Just as often, though—if the batter fouls off the bunt attempt, say, and on the next pitch skies one to deep left center—the infielders and the base runners will stick where they are, but the umpires will be flying around. It’s as though two different games are going on, or maybe more accurately, as though the umpires are playing a game of their own, within a larger, more familiar game. One story that every umpire tells is about being asked, after a game, whether that catch by the center fielder was the greatest he ever saw.

I didn’t see it, the umpire answers. I was making sure the batter-runner touched first base.

It doesn’t help that umpires are also the only ones on the field for whom fans have none of the tools of comparison and judgment that are customarily used in any serious baseball discussion. I’m speaking of statistics.

Baseball is, of course, a statistics-mad sport, and fans love to pore over and parse the numbers to evaluate players’ performances. It’s pretty clear that a second baseman who hits .300 is going to contribute to a team more than a second baseman who hits .220.

But there are no equivalent measures to evaluate the quality of an umpire, whose skills are difficult even to define. Yes, there are numbers out there. Las Vegas gambling consultants keep tabs on certain results associated with major league umpires—such as how often the home team has won when a particular guy is behind the plate, or the average total runs scored in games presided over by a particular umpire. But these after-the-fact tendencies don’t tell you anything about the accuracy of the umpires’ calls. And though it’s possible that a sufficient sample of results might be mathematically significant and indicate that the predilection of one umpire, say, is to give the offense more of a chance to score than does another umpire, that isn’t a judgment of quality or accuracy, either. (Neither, by the way, does it have anything to do with an umpire’s fairness.)

Another array of statistics—similar but more elaborate, available on Internet Web sites such as www.baseballprospectus.com—exists to describe an umpire’s performance: how many walks or strikeouts per game occur during an umpire’s plate game, how many home runs, the total number and percentage of balls and called strikes, etc. The site is a favorite resource for baseball-trivia hunters, obsessive record-ferrets and eccentric theoreticians, as well as more serious researchers (to the degree that baseball research is serious), and the statistics are fodder, just sitting there begging to be interpreted and analyzed freely. But they don’t evaluate anything.

Since 2001, Major League Baseball has employed the QuesTec Umpire Information System, an electronic network of video cameras and computers that was installed in a number of ballparks to monitor umpires’ calls of balls and strikes. To some degree QuesTec does provide evaluative statistics for umpires. It tracks pitches to see if the ball has passed through the strike zone and, game by game, grades the home plate umpire on the basis of the percentage of pitches he called correctly.

By the time the system was put in place, it had become a common perception that umpires in general were calling a strike zone that was both stretched wider and squashed lower than the rulebook defined it. QuesTec was installed expressly as a corrective measure, to coerce umpires in almost a Pavlovian fashion into returning to the rulebook strike, which is a pitch that passes over home plate essentially between the middle of the batter’s torso and the lower border of his knee. (We’ll get to the actual definition later on.)

In that regard, QuesTec has been reasonably successful, with most people—players, coaches, baseball administrators, and even umpires themselves—acknowledging that fewer wide strikes and more strikes above the belt are now being called. And Major League Baseball says that the QuesTec scores of every one of its umpires are regularly above 90 percent, the median score above 94 percent.

It is also acknowledged, however, that the QuesTec technology is imperfect and that the system is susceptible to the human error of its operators. And so as not to seem too much like Big Brother looking over the shoulder of its officials, Major League Baseball gives the umpires some leeway. For one thing, when the QuesTec technology locates a pitch within two inches of the strike zone, Major League Baseball says it’s close enough to reasonably be called a strike. So QuesTec’s usefulness as an evaluative tool is, if not dubious, at least debatable, even in terms of what it purports to measure.

Besides, whether the ability to call a QuesTec strike—or a rulebook strike—is the best measure, or even an appropriate measure, of umpiring skills is another question entirely. Frank Pulli, the baseball official who has most closely been involved with examining QuesTec results, was known, when he was an umpire himself, for calling a strike zone well beyond the rulebook limits.

QuesTec scores are not routinely published; nor are the records that Major League Baseball keeps on each umpire’s close calls on the bases. (A summary is made available to journalists each year, but even baseball acknowledges that the results are incomplete. In 2007, for example, baseball estimated that a miscall occurred once every fourteen games, a laughable bit of public relations, when any fan who watches one game a day for a week will count more than that.) So the casual fan has no basis, really, for comparing the accuracy of umpires’ calls, which I suppose is the equivalent of a player’s batting average or a pitcher’s earned run average. Like those measures, though, an umpire’s accuracy tells only part of the story.

In the major leagues it is more or less presumed that an umpire is going to get the safes and outs and the fairs and fouls right nearly all the time. Ask major leaguers what they look for in an umpire—I must have asked a few dozen, past and present—and no one ever mentions accuracy. The two words you hear most describe unquantifiable qualities: consistency and control. That is, they want an umpire’s boundaries to be clear. What will he tolerate in terms of pugnacious behavior and what won’t he? They want the strike zone to be established early and remain unchanged for the duration of the game. And they want to know that the game will be administered with professionalism, briskness, confidence, and authority. Like children with parents, players and managers will try to hoodwink, intimidate, or wheedle the umpires into seeing things their way, but ultimately they know that if an umpire is malleable, he’s not operating in their best interest.

When I asked Alex Rodriguez, for instance, why Bruce Froemming kept the players’ respect for so long, even though most of them recognized that he couldn’t cover the field the way he once had, Rodriguez said, He’s not the most agile guy out there anymore, but when he walks out on the field, you know you’re going to have a well-run game. He’s like a four-star general out there.

Finally, though, what distinguishes umpires most from the game’s other human elements—and what most cultivates the public’s indifference, if not disdain, toward them—is that once they come to work, they represent no one but themselves. They follow no one and thus have no following. They support no one and thus have no support. This is no small matter. You can’t spend any time around umpires at all without being impressed by their essential isolation from the rest of the game, each crew walking on and off the field together, often to jeers, traveling together, often eating and drinking together in cities far from home. Unlike players, who get to spend half the season in one place, umpires are on the road all season long. It’s literally in their job definition that they remain without fans, without people to identify with or root for them.

I feel bad for them, Jim Leyland, manager of the Detroit Tigers, said to me. They’re the only ones in the park who never play a home game.

The umpire has been around from the birth of baseball. The word comes from the Middle English umpere, which was derived from the Old French word nomper, meaning one who is not equal, an irony many of today’s put-upon umpires would appreciate. The term was applied to the game-by-game overseers of one of baseball’s chief progenitors, cricket, which usually employs two of them on the field (and these days, one or more off), whose duties were laid out in the laws of the game established in 1788 at the Marylebone Cricket Club in London. Cricket emigrated from England to the United States in the first part of the nineteenth century, and the idea of an umpire came with it.

As an on-the-field presence in baseball, the umpire was identified in what are generally considered the game’s establishing fundamentals, a list of twenty guidelines written by Alexander Cartwright and other members of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club of New York City in 1845. Rule 17: All disputes and differences relative to the game, to be decided by the Umpire, from which there is no appeal. (An even earlier reference, a similar rule written into the bylaws of the Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia in 1838, was uncovered by the historian David Block in his 2005 book, Baseball Before We Knew It.)

In 1846, a written account of the first game ever played between organized teams, the Knickerbocker and New York clubs, in Hoboken, New Jersey, referred to an umpire fining a New York player named Davis six cents for swearing. (The account didn’t specify whether the offending oath was aimed at the umpire.)

As this anecdote suggests, the umpire was initially imagined as a gentlemanly figure—baseball drawings from the first half of the nineteenth century frequently show the umpire in his position off to the side of the batter’s box, wearing a top hat and carrying a walking stick—but the job requirements quickly became more rough-and-tumble. The earliest practice was that the home team would choose the umpire—and pay his salary of $5—for which the team, and its fans, generally expected more than a fair shake, which the umpire, for self-preservation if not a simple rooting interest, was often as not inclined to provide.

Major League Baseball gives credit to a Philadelphia man named William McLean as the first big league umpire; he worked the opening game in the nascent National League on April 22, 1876. Three years later, in an effort to combat favoritism, the president of the league, William A. Hulbert, approved the first umpiring staff, twenty men, scattered among the league cities. Only one umpire worked each game back then. Two became the norm during the first decade of the twentieth century (though as many as four were working World Series games by 1909), three by the mid-1930s, and the current practice of four not until 1952. For nearly a century and a half now an umpire has presided over every professional game ever