Recently retired, Bruce Weber was a New York Times reporter who thought it would be fun to write a story about schools that train umpires for professional baseball. He was not a sports writer – his background is in theatre and the arts – but he had some personal interest in the game and a willingness to explore, so he spent a few days at Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring observing, and thereafter published his first writing on baseball (“The Inner Ump”). His curiosity piqued, he researched and wrote two more articles, one in which he travelled with a Double A umpiring crew as they worked small ball parks across the US midwest (“Minor League Umpires Wait for the Big Call”), and the other in which he visited big league stadiums to observe and interview Bruce Froemming, then the senior umpire in the major leagues (“Umpire Revels in the Calls, and in Getting Them Right”).
I came away from these three stories convinced that a land of umpires exists, that it has citizens, laws, and a culture, and that it is exotic enough—both in the context of baseball and the context of, well, the known world—to warrant further exploring. Indeed, the presumption of this book is that professional umpires are an unusually isolated and circumscribed group, sort of like the inhabitants of a remote country that few people have ever visited, and that I am the sociologist who was dispatched to send back word of what life is like there.
I spent just about all of 2006 and 2007 and part of 2008 in the land of umpires, beginning when I went back to the Evans academy and enrolled as a student in the five-week program. From then on I went where the tales of professional umpires took me, sort of like a ball bouncing erratically across a pebble-strewn infield. It wasn’t a comprehensive investigation, but for the most part it was a lot of fun.
The last sentence fairly well summarizes Weber’s book. The author has an eye for detail and writes well, but he is clearly not interested in advancing a research agenda or educating his audience on the dynamics of subcultures. His book is written for baseball fans. It’s a rather breezy read, like an extended New York Times Magazine article. There are no footnotes (apart from occasional parenthetical factoids), no references, and not even an index. Anyone interested in sociology or culture will have to tease out patterns and themes.
Perhaps what most clearly defines umpires is their relationship with the other actors in baseball: the fans, the players, and team management. In short, umpires are not esteemed. They are most typically disliked, and often reviled. Weber notes that as enforcers of the rules and therefore on-field guardians of the game, umpires and management would seem to have similar interests and greater sympathies for each other. In fact, he found that management generally considers umpires on the level of ushers and hot dog vendors, replaceable low-level labor. One sign of management’s disregard is that baseball is unique among professional sports in the US for outsourcing the training of its on-field officials. (MLB last year began offering umpiring camps, but these are one-day affairs where current big league umpires share knowledge with amateurs and minor league aspirants.)
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....
As a result of a near universal enmity within their work world, umpires tend to compensate by casting themselves as defenders of the game’s integrity, as men (nearly always men) who prevent the game from degenerating into mayhem. It’s not so much an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules or strict enforcement that makes them so, as it is a shared assumption that players will take every advantage in pursuit of a win. Weber notes that while umpires may be less than moral paragons off the field, the last case of professional dishonesty on-field was recorded in the late nineteenth century.
Training reinforces strong bonds within the umpire community. Becoming one requires setting aside family relationships for 6-9 months a year, travelling to a new town every three to four days, living out of hotels, and eating in restaurants. All this is done in the company of fellow umpires, of which there are very few, close to 300 across the minor and major leagues. Weber sees them “as kind of a cult operating in plain sight, a characterization that umpires themselves have no problem with.”
This cult is predominately male, white, and middle-class.
In umpire nation, Applebee’s and Chili’s are high-end establishments, steak is a gourmet meal, and, for some reason, lite beer is preferable to regular beer. It’s a place where the playing of the national anthem before a ball game is serious business, where women are discomforting, Jews are a novelty, homosexuals are unwanted, and liberals tend to keep their opinions to themselves. In umpire nation travel is so relentless that it is more deadening than broadening.
What kind of people join this cult? Weber addresses this in his section on umpiring school, in which, among his classmates, are the overaged dreamers who want to drop out of the rat race and start a new career in baseball but who may never get any further than umpiring neighborhood Little League games. The majority of students are in their 20s, and most of them at the bottom end of the range, young men who largely haven’t yet figured out what to do with their lives, who once aspired to perhaps one day play baseball, but don’t have the skills to do so.
For the most part, my young classmates were solidly blue-collar, decent and competitive young men possessed of the insecurities befitting their age and station, neither scholarly nor clear-minded about the future. When I asked them about the unpromising nature of umpiring as a career, they tended to shrug as though it were of no account. What came across mostly was a fuzzy state of young-adult uncertainty, the hope that something they’d been doing for fun or that simply seemed cool would also turn out to be professionally viable. Asked what it was about umpiring that drew them, almost uniformly they said it just seemed like a great job. “Going to work at the ballpark every day, and just being around baseball,” one young man said to me in what could well have been a generic response. “What could be better than that?
Perhaps the most damning indictment of umpires comes not from fans, players, or management, but from those excluded from the fraternity. At the time of publication, there had been only one female to work a big league game (at spring training, not regular season), and during Weber’s research another joined that rank, a woman by the name of Ria Cortesio. Her story is one of personal persistence when all the signs were that she was not wanted: good umpiring skills, slower promotion, petty rumor and innuendo, and finally, after rising to the top of the promotion list, a scathing evaluation and dismissal. (Her case was not unlike her predecessor's, Pam Postema, who after 13 years successful service in the minor leagues was given a negative evaluation and sacked.) In an interview with Weber, Cortesio reflected: “...within the umpire community... some treat you more horribly than others, but there’s not one umpire who would stand up for me. Not one, in all of professional baseball, who would defend me or stand up for me. You know that umpires call players rats, right? Well, hands down the biggest rats I’ve ever encountered in my life are professional umpires.”
That they may be. What seems to matter most on-field is that umpires project a commanding authority. It’s not so much that they should know the rule book back-to-front or have a precise definition of the strike zone, but that they conduct themselves in such a way that they are respected by players and managers, which is largely a matter of consistency (or being predictable, so that a player might know what he can be called for and what not) and moving the game forward by maintaining a business-like pace. Though on his feet for three to four hours a night (next time you’re at a game, watch and see if he ever sits down), perhaps an umpire’s greatest challenge is mental, trying to keep one to two steps ahead of the players in order to anticipate where the umpire might need to position himself on the next play. As Mike Everitt relates of working third base, sometimes referred to as the rocking chair, because not much happens there relative to home, first and second:
You’re thinking fair-foul calls, you’re thinking check swings, you’re thinking, ‘Okay, two runners on, maybe there’s no outs, so possible bunt.’ You’re looking at the runner on second, seeing if he has good speed, or even average speed, so you can anticipate when he might run on a ground ball or a wild pitch or even a steal. You’re thinking about what the score is, whether they might try to hit-and-run; you’re thinking, ‘Okay, two men on, a ground ball to the shortstop that takes him to his right, maybe the play will come to third for a force out’; that doesn’t happen much, but it did happen last night. Remember? And if you’re not ready for it, it’ll bite you in the ass. You’re thinking about a line drive to the third baseman or shortstop, and whether he might trap it and what the base runners will do. You’re constantly going over this stuff in your head, and then the pitcher throws it, and nothing happens, and you take a deep breath and do it again.
The mental stress induced by this need for continued alterness – umpires apparently suffer greatly from tension headaches – may be relieved in part by advances in technology that allow cameras, sensors, and software to make the call. During Weber’s researching of the book, a number of technologies were being tested, and perhaps surprisingly to some readers (it was to Weber), many umpires were supportive of technology that supports them in making the right call. Having spent a fair amount a time among umpires and made a number of meaningful relationships, it may not be surprising that Weber advocates for the continued value of umpires, but for what seems a confused reason, namely that relying on human judgement “makes the game more complicated, more suspenseful, more human.” I’m sure we can all think of ways to make the game more complicated that don’t involve the introduction of errors and disadvantaging one athlete or team of athletes over another. The role of the umpire, after all, is to be an impartial arbiter, to create and sustain conditions for determining the best performance between a team of competitors. That role can in many ways be better executed by software.
A quick look around the internet reveals that scholarly articles on baseball umpiring over the past few years have focused largely on technology and evaluative techniques. The only recent book-length projects appear to be biographies and manuals, suggesting an in-depth anthropological/ethnographic/sociological account would make a fantastic project for an up-and-coming academic with an interest in sports culture.
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