Baseball blends fame and failure. The best hitters fail more than 60 percent of the time. But umpires aspire to anonymous perfection.
Kissimmee, Fla.—it is past 10 p.m., dark, cold and damp. Traffic hisses on the highway in front of the nondescript motel that for five weeks is home to about 155 young adults. In back, in the gloom beneath the parking lot’s dim lights, a dozen of them seem to have lost their minds. Actually, they are finding their dream.
And doing their homework, far from home. Their choreography on the asphalt is simulating situations in baseball games—runners on first and second, single to left; runner on second, ground ball to the pitcher. And on and on. The participants are pretending to be infielders, outfielders, a batter, base runners and—this is the point of it all—two umpires.
They have come to Jim Evans’s Academy of Professional Umpiring. For six long days a week—on the manicured infields of the Houston Astros’ Spring-Training complex, and on the asphalt—they are learning the craft of baseball’s judicial branch.
For the few who will land jobs in the low rung of baseball’s ladder—say, Class A—starting pay will be $1,900 a month, six months a year, plus $22 per diem. The home team finds motel rooms. For umpires, there are no home games.
Becoming an Umpire
The process of becoming an umpire is as severely meritocratic as the process of becoming a player. In the lower minor leagues, where only two umpires work each game, umpiring is as physically strenuous and mentally stressful as playing.
On a recent morning Evans, who was a big-league umpire for 28 seasons, showed a rapid-fire tape of 25 pitcher’s moves with runners on base. His students had to instantly identify the balks. There were 16. Did the pitcher’s knee bend? Did his shoulder turn, his glove twitch, his heel land improperly?
There are 13 criteria for the correct stance of the home-plate umpire calling a pitch. Get only 12 right and Evans’s instructors—mostly minor-league umpires—will correct you, vigorously. They reject the theory that a student’s self-esteem is indispensable to learning.
When umpiring the bases, the rule is “angle over distance”—having the correct angle to see the play is more important than being close to the play. Students practice umpiring first base blindfolded, distinguishing the sounds of the fielder’s foot hitting the bag and the ball hitting his glove. The final exam’s 200 questions are like these:
Behind the Plate
“Two outs, bases loaded. The batter hits a home run. He rounds first base and passes the runner who was on first. The runner from third touched home plate before the batter passed the runner from first, but the runner from second had not touched the plate at that time. (a) Four runs count because the infraction occurred during a dead ball situation. (b) No runs score because the batter made the third out. (c) This is a time play. One run scores. (d) Because the runner from first did not advance one base, the third out is considered a force out. No run scores.” (The answer is c.)
“No outs, runner on first. A hot grounder is hit up the middle. The shortstop fields the ball but throws wildly trying to retire the runner approaching second base. At the time the ball rolled into the first base dugout, the runner from first had just rounded second and the batter had touched first. Place the runners. (a) Both runners score. (b) Runner scores; batter is awarded third. (c) Runner scores; batter is awarded second. (d) Runner is awarded third; batter is awarded second.” (The answer is d.)
Baseball combines fame and failure. The best batters fail more than 60 percent of the time. But umpires, baseball’s designated grown-ups, aspire to anonymous perfection. For an umpire, success is not being noticed. A Randy Johnson slider slides across a corner of a 17-inch-wide plate at 94 miles an hour. Imagine trying to be perfect on 260 pitches a game.
Sport—strenuous competition structured and restrained by rules—replicates the challenge of freedom and satisfies the human hunger for coherence. If players are mediocre, the result is mediocre baseball. If umpires are mediocre, the result is chaos.
Baseball, national pastime of a litigious nation, allows arguments, within reason. So Evans’s students learn how to manage rhubarbs. He teaches that strong voices and vigorous gestures—body language is language—buttress authority. You especially need that if, like 20-year-old Susan Reed, you are about the size of a bunt.
Petite and laconic and just now wrapped in the armor of a home-plate umpire, she was a college student until, she says blandly, “I forgot my major.” Say what? “My head broke open.” Six months ago in the Missouri Ozarks she was given the last rites of her church after being thrown through the sunroof of her SUV as it rolled over about a dozen times. Her painfully unhealed ankle slows her slightly gimpy run 90 feet up the line to call the play on a runner reaching third.
What pulls her painfully down the third-base line? What pulls all of Evans’s pupils to central Florida for spartan living in a quest, against steep odds, for jobs that will mean many motel years of an endless road trip? One student says what most of them feel: “I get chills every time I walk onto a ball field.” Do you feel that way when you go to work?
“Growing up, my favorite baseball player was ____. I say that because ____.”