by Lee Gutkind
“That hurtcha, Harry?” asked first base coach Roy McMillan, with mock sympathy. “Did that hurtcha or did that hurtcha, Harry?” McMillan elongated each word as if he were talking to a baby. “You sure your poor little foot is still down there, Harry? Coulda been burned right off, you wouldn’t have known the difference,” McMillan chuckled.
“C’mon Harry,” said Giant first baseman Dave Kingman, smiling and thumping his mitt with his fist, “we know it’s killing you. Why don’t you admit it? We ain’t going to laugh.”
“Not me, I’m not going to laugh,” said McMillan, grinning as if this were the happiest day of his year.
“Why don’t you just take time out and scream, Harry?” said Kingman.
“C’mon, Harry,” said McMillan, “don’t be such a big, bad umpire. We know it hurts so much you want to scream. C’mon, scream!”
Wendelstedt stared silently past his tormentors, down toward the batter’s box and forced out a tight grin, worthy of a bad joke. He was still dizzy with pain. He felt as if his foot had been nailed with a large rusty spike into the reddish-brown dirt of Shea Stadium and, at the same time, as if his toe had been jammed up into his knee, but there was no way he was going to admit it, no way Harry Wendelstedt would give those rats the satisfaction of knowing he had been hurt.
Thankfully, Bryant’s next pitch was a ball.
Wendelstedt gradually shifted his weight to his right foot and tried to wiggle the toes on his left. They were hot and stiff, felt sticky and wet. He shut his eyes hard to force away the pain. Then, making it seem as if it were an afterthought, he forced himself to look up and check his position. He was fifteen feet behind the base and straddling the foul line. Just about where the skin of the infield meets the outfield grass. Just right. If there was a man on first, Wendelstedt would have to move in closer to watch for pick-off plays, but as it was, with the bases empty, the umpire had more leeway to follow a ball down the right field foul line. Art Williams, his partner on third, straddled the left field line, about twenty-five feet behind the base. With plenty of time to move laterally up and down the line before a play might reach third, Williams could afford to be more centrally located. Unlike American League umpires, who positioned themselves down the line in foul territory, the National League umpires on first and third stood directly in line with home plate, one foot on the fair side of the line, the other foot foul, belt buckles marking the middle.
There are other differences between the umpiring styles of the two leagues. For one thing, with men on base, the second base umpire in the National League stands on the infield grass, while the American League umpire stands behind the base on the shallow part of the outfield. Although the National League position increases the danger for an umpire, by putting him closer to the batter where he can easily be hit by a line shot, Wendelstedt felt it enabled him to call a play more accurately, especially on a double-play ball or an attempted steal. The National League umpire is always on the inside of the throw or the inside of the base, facing the infielders’ gloves and the direction of the play, while the American League umpire makes his calls from behind the player’s backs. Thus, with minimum shifting, the National League umpire is always in a better position to see the play more clearly. On the other hand, he is further away from the outfield and has a longer run to make when judging whether a ball has been caught or trapped. There is good and bad in both systems, Wendelstedt admitted, but he mostly disliked the idea that the American League umpire has to move forward and into the play. Sometimes, when the play is very close, the umpire could easily and inadvertently inch into the baseline, a perfect target for a streaking runner and his high-flying spikes. This would rarely happen to a National League umpire covering second base correctly. No matter how far forward he moves, it is nearly impossible to be in the way of the runner.
Wendelstedt placed his hands on his knees in a crouch while Bryant dipped, wound, and side-armed a curve that Grote hit behind him foul on the screen. The organist at Shea followed the ball up the screen with a high-pitched twitter, then accompanied it down again with a low, elongated yawn.
The bat boy caught the ball falling from the rim of the screen, ran it into the Met dugout, and dropped it into the heavy, brown cowhide ball bag. Plate umpire Doug Harvey threw out another, which Bryant rubbed up in the palms of his hands.
The next pitch Grote hit slow on the ground to the left of second, where it was scooped up by shortstop Chris Speier. As Speier threw and Grote ran to beat it, Wendelstedt hobbled to what the umpires call the “first base slot” at about a forty-five degree angle, and approximately two feet behind and to the right of the bag. Grote could hustle, but the ball smacked into Kingman’s mitt more than a tenth of a second before Grote’s spikes touched the canvas. Wendelstedt hesitated briefly, checking to see if Kingman’s foot was on the base and whether he held the ball. Then, in a single motion, he raised his arm up, balled his fingers into a fist, and screamed, “You’re out!”
Grote, short and chunky, trotted back down the line. “I got you this time, didn’t I Harry?” he said as he passed Wendelstedt. “C’mon, Harry, you gotta admit it,” he smiled.
Wendelstedt, 230 pounds, six foot three, with a chest like a bulldozer’s bumper and a hard, square, combat-helmet head, turned, and stared down and through the little catcher. Grote, not particularly known for his bravery or backbone, shrugged, turned, and trotted away. He threw his batting helmet into the dirt, a habit of professional baseball players, who presumably blame the batting helmet or the dirt for their own inability to get on base. Then Grote clattered down the concrete steps into the dugout and sank onto the wooden bench. “I got him this time,” he said to no one in particular. “This time I got that fucker good.”
The fine for throwing a batting helmet unnecessarily hard or in response to an umpire’s decision is a hundred dollars. Wendelstedt watched Grote carefully, then shrugged, deciding he didn’t have just cause for such an action; then he turned away. A good umpire tries to enforce the rules but at the same time allow some leeway. No use starting a rhubarb and delaying a game when it isn’t absolutely necessary, umpires reason. Of course, umpires do strictly enforce rules on a team taking too many liberties. Two years before, when Wendelstedt worked with Al Barlick (now retired) and his crew, the Met third base coaches developed the habit of straying out of the coaching box and strolling far up and down the line. The rule keeping coaches inside their chalked box was made so they couldn’t steal the opposing catcher’s sign. Umpires usually overlooked the rule when coaches stood only a step or two from their box, particularly during later innings when the chalk might be partially rubbed away. (One of the many dirty tricks Leo Durocher originated during his stormy managerial career was to have his players drag their spikes when they walked over the coaching box, until the chalk line disappeared.) But that year the Mets were really taking unfair advantage. One day, after three unheeded warnings, Barlick took action. He stopped the game and called out the groundskeepers to rechalk the line. Each time part of the line was rubbed away he’d stop the game and call the groundskeepers to fill it back in. Each time a Met coach stepped as much as an inch over the line he’d stop the game, walk over slowly, ever so slowly, and order them back in. It got downright annoying, but Barlick kept it up, game after game, until he made his point. For the rest of the season the Mets called that crew “Barlick’s Enforcers.”
Sometimes players want to win by playing ball and other times they try to win by playing games. In either case, an umpire will oblige.
Not wanting to sacrifice his strength for what he might achieve on the mound, Met pitcher Tom Seaver, the next batter, struck out on three straight pitches, two of which were over his head, ending the inning. Seaver was one of the primary reasons the Mets weren’t winning this year. He pitched well enough on most occasions for five or six innings, but then seemed to lose his consistency. His curves hung too often and his fastballs weren’t as low and zippy as they once used to be. With a record of two and
five, Seaver had given up more home-run balls this season than all of the other Met pitchers combined. It was too bad, thought Wendelstedt, for Seaver was the only active Met that could be at all compared to a human being. He never bitched, never cried, never begged, never complained. Wendelstedt would rather work behind the plate with Seaver pitching than anyone else in baseball. On an off day, Seaver was twice as good as most pitchers in the league.
As the Giants rolled in and the Mets scattered out, second base umpire Nick Colosi, small, slender, and at 47 slightly balding, born in Sicily, walked over to Wendelstedt. The little bit of sun the umpires had seen during their last swing west had added a golden, healthy-looking hue to Colosi’s normally dark complexion. “You all right, Harry?” he asked, his speech a mixture of New York and Italian inflection.
“Hell no, Nick,” Wendelstedt was able to grin.
“Maybe you ought to say something.”
“Yeah, sure, and give those creeps the satisfaction of knowing I’m hurt? No way, Nick, no way.”
“But if you’re hurt …”
“So, I’m hurt. But what happened to you in Chicago, Nick, with the Mets? Tell me that. You were hurt, too, you know. Look what the hell Dick Young did to you.”
“’Course, I wasn’t particularly honest about that at first,” said Colosi, smiling a sheepish little boy’s smile.
“You told them you had the shits, didn’t you, you bastard,” Wendelstedt laughed.
“Shits, hell! When the press called down to see why I had switched from second to third base I said I had a ‘gastronomical infection.’ That way I could be closer to the bathroom, just in case.”
“You’re devious, Nick. You’re goddamn devious. That’s what everybody is always saying about you.”
“Till old ‘Straight Arrow’ found out about it,” said Colosi, motioning over to Harvey behind home plate. “He said, ‘You better tell the truth. Sure as hell somebody is going to catch you. It’s too dumb a lie to tell.’”
“He was right,” Wendelstedt nodded.
“I know he was right. Thank God Young didn’t pick it up. He would have crucified me. Worse. I just didn’t want them to know about my back.”
“So I’m saying the same thing about my foot, Nick. They find out I’m hurt, they beef every time I make a call.”
“But if you’re really hurt …” Colosi objected.
“No way, Nick. I’d rather lose a gallon of blood than admit it to those bastards.”
It was the top half of the fourth inning and a batter was finally coming out of the dugout and strolling to the plate. Trying not to limp noticeably, Wendelstedt walked quickly back behind first base and straddled the line in position. No way, he said to himself again. He wasn’t that kind of man, he wasn’t the kind of umpire who showed weakness, the kind who showed fallibility. Square-faced and mean-looking, with a pair of heavy, ropelike lips, Harry Wendelstedt cut the figure of a Marine drill sergeant. Thirty pounds too heavy, he was still as straight, solid, and forthright as the Hall of Justice. (At a tavern the evening before Wendelstedt was told by a female patron that he looked like a German baker. He told her she looked like a stale loaf of bread.) To Wendelstedt, being an umpire in the major leagues required something more of a man, required the strength and fortitude of a man’s man, one who showed no pain, no partiality, no fear, and no rage. In his own mind he believed that there wasn’t, nor would there ever be, a woman capable of doing the job of an umpire—certainly not Bernice Gera, the witch who under the guise of “Bernie Gera” had tried to infiltrate the school for umpires he owned with Al Somers. Not his wife Cheryl, not his own mother. No woman!
He had told that to Gera when she had called him at his home in Daytona Beach, Florida, to complain about her rejection by the Al Somers school. “You’re a liar, Mrs. Gera,” he said flatly, “because you tried to get into our school under false pretenses, and umpires can never be liars. If you lie and cheat off the field, then you’ll lie and cheat on the field. I have no use for your kind, no use for any person who lies to me, or for any woman who tries to break into a man’s game.”
Gera eventually made it into baseball, first at school through the Umpire Development Program, financed and operated by the major leagues. Then she had, through court action, landed a job in the New York-Pennsylvania Class A League. But, unable to take the abuse umpires receive from players and fans, she had quit, walked off the field, after the first game of a double-header on her first day of professional baseball. Wendelstedt found more than a little satisfaction in that. Not long after, it was discovered that she, her husband, and her attorney had packed their bags and checked out of the hotel even before the first game had started. She never had had any intention of staying in baseball, Wendelstedt and others realized. He looked forward to the day he would meet her face to face.
The Giants went ahead in their half of the fourth inning with a home run by outfielder Bobby Bonds, and Wendelstedt was now wishing that both Seaver and Bryant would throw perfect games the rest of the day. He could feel his toe ballooning up in his black ripple-soled oxfords. Icy pain climbed slowly up his ankle and thigh like mid-winter frost. In the bottom half of the sixth inning, Harrelson, the Met shortstop, hit four line drive fouls down the right field line on four consecutive pitches, all close enough for Wendelstedt to follow till the ball touched ground. He also made two calls at the base. By the end of that inning he could have cried, but he didn’t, and he knew he wouldn’t.
“You still hurtin’, Harry?” asked a smiling Dave Kingman as he walked off the field. “C’mon, Harry, you gotta admit that liner back in the third inning stung.”
“Shake it up,” growled Wendelstedt, turning his back on Kingman and walking down the line. “Let’s get a batter up there, let’s get some fielders out here, let’s get this game going, let’s get moving. Now!”
No way, Wendelstedt said to himself, no way. He had been injured plenty of times before. In the minor leagues he had gotten a broken collarbone and a broken elbow from errant foul balls. Three of his toes had been broken in three successive seasons and each toenail on each foot had been either smashed or completely stripped away at least once in his career—despite the heavy steel-toed shoes he wore behind home plate. And since when was he different from any other umpire? Jocko Conlan, the recently retired National League veteran, had had three broken collarbones and two broken elbows in his career. Larry Napp, still active in the American League, had once been struck with three successive pitches—one in the mask, two in the groin. He had to be carried off the field in a stretcher. And how about twelve-year National League veteran Bill Williams? He had been smashed in the mouth by a flying catcher’s mask. During the winter his teeth began to rot and fall out, one by one.
People think all that protective equipment safeguards an umpire against injury. Well, maybe it did a little, Wendelstedt admitted. But still. A good fastball crosses the plate at a little more than 95 miles per hour. Are steel-toed shoes and a padded chest protector going to significantly deaden the pain of a ball thrown at that velocity? Maybe a little. And when a ball thrown at that speed comes off the bat, it’s going twice as fast, maybe more. And can steel face masks prevent an umpire from suffering from excruciating headaches—or worse? Umpires have had their teeth shattered, jaws crushed, and cheeks ripped when steel bars in their masks broke and embedded in their flesh. The umpire behind the plate doesn’t have a catcher’s mitt to protect him, and the umpires on the bases don’t wear any protective equipment at all. Each year, on close plays at second and especially third, Wendelstedt could expect to be slashed two or three times by the spikes of base runners.
Sure, he’d been hurt plenty of times before, but he wouldn’t admit it then and he couldn’t admit it now. Not unless he was cold-cocked unconscious. Especially not to the Mets or the Giants and not, most especially, to give satisfaction to that little sissy Grote. Colosi and Harvey could go for pills and medical advice to the trainers, but Wendelstedt wouldn’t. Not that he res
ented it. Harvey had been bothered by some indeterminable illness since the beginning of the season, and Colosi had hurt his back last year and never had it properly taken care of. But Wendelstedt resolved to keep his silence.
In a confidential poll taken at the end of last season by Fred Fleig, secretary of the National League and second man to National League President Chub Feeney, Wendelstedt had been rated the second best umpire in the league by the managers, coaches, and owners of each National League team—excluding the San Francisco Giants, who had claimed that Wendelstedt was the worst umpire ever to officiate in the league. They said he was detrimental to baseball. Fleig, Feeney, Wendelstedt, and most of the other umpires in the league realized that the Giants’ hatred of Wendelstedt stemmed back to two particular calls Wendelstedt had made against the team a few years ago which might well have cost them a pennant. Wendelstedt knew the calls were fair, but the Giants’ resentment of him had remained kindled over the past few seasons. The Giants would be very happy and suddenly very troublesome if they were to find out he had been even slightly injured.
Aside from being the second best umpire in the league, he was also the second biggest (Lee Weyer is six foot four and 240 pounds), the strongest, and the meanest. (In fact, he and Weyer had once planned to go into professional wrestling during the off season as the “W Brothers,” but Fred Fleig had refused to grant them permission.) Wendelstedt, now thirty-six, had only been twenty-five years old when he entered the majors, the first young umpire to make it into the big leagues. He had done it by being strict and snarly and icily efficient. He took no abuse and asked for no sympathy and he wasn’t about to change his policies now.