The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand!: The Game as Umpires See It (Writing Baseball)

by Lee Gutkind

  “I ain’t goin’ to the graveyard but once,” said Rooks. “And when that day come, I’se stayin’.”

  Harvey, who had been watching the road, braced himself against the dashboard while the three men in the back crashed against the front seat, then bounced back into their chairs. “Well anyway, you drive fearlessly,” said Harvey. “Goddamn it Willie, don’t you ever watch where you’re going? You almost hit a goddamn bus.”

  “He watch the girls,” said Williams, shaking his head. “He watch his passengers. He watch his fingernails.”

  “If he has any time left,” said Colosi, “then he’ll watch where he’s driving.”

  “I been at this so long,” said Rooks, turning to address Colosi, Wendelstedt, and Williams, “I can smell my way through this here city.”

  “The way you drive,” said Wendelstedt, “you must have a chronic bad cold.”

  “Goddamn it, Willie, would you watch the goddamn traffic!” Laughing, Harvey grabbed Rooks by the shoulders and turned him around, facing front.

  Willie Rooks is an easy-going, smiling man who knows every ballplayer, every reporter, every bookmaker and policeman in town. Almost everyone, anyway. Anyone he didn’t know, he had always figured, weren’t hardly worth knowing. His life had been both satisfying and successful since he purchased his first cab more than twenty-five years ago and began to prowl the streets of Chicago the necessary sixteen, sometimes twenty hours a day to make his living. With his savings, Rooks had sent his youngest son to maritime school, and the child had done the father proud, becoming the first black to captain a federally-owned freighter, carrying government cargo from one end of the Mississippi to the other.

  A handsome old man, Rooks is brown and shiny-skinned, somewhat paunchy, with closely-cropped, gray-white hair clinging to the back of his head. When Willie Rooks is asked his age by friends or regular passengers, each time he tells them truthfully, “sixty-two, eighty-five, ninety, forty-seven,” depending on the way he feels that particular day.

  As to how long Rooks has been transporting umpires back and forth from hotels to their respective ballparks, or to the airport to catch a departing plane, he actually cannot remember. He vaguely recalls that soon after he purchased his cab he picked up a group of big, joking men at the airport late one night. He got along so well with them that by the time they had reached their destination, he had agreed to chauffeur them around the city for as long as they wanted. Each time that crew returned, they called up the Rooks Cab Company and subsequently more crews began to phone. After a few years there wasn’t an umpire in either league who didn’t ride with Willie Rooks and there wasn’t a taxi driver in all of Chicago who transported umpires except for Willie Rooks.

  When umpires first started riding with Rooks he offered a cut-rate deal, since they had only about seven dollars a day to spend for transportation, food, and lodgings and their highest salary back then was no more than eight thousand dollars. Rooks is no stranger to hardship, but he vividly remembers the umps and the way they struggled to make ends meet. He remembers that they would stuff themselves with the hot dogs, Cokes, and packaged miniature pies provided after each ballgame, thus eliminating the need to waste money on dinner that evening or on lunch the following day. At least Rooks’s job was steady then. At least he didn’t have to worry about earning and saving enough money in seven months, to stretch out for an entire year. But as the umpires grew more prosperous, eventually striking for and gaining salary hikes and increased expense accounts, so too did Willie Rooks’s prosperity grow. Now he received much more from umpires than from regular fares and, as gasoline prices and operating expenses increased, so too did the contributions of the men in blue. Just yesterday, Harvey and Wendelstedt had decided to pay Rooks sixteen dollars for each trip back and forth to Wrigley. And Rooks had never had to ask. Not once. Other umpires weren’t so generous, but all were fair and scrupulously honest.

  “I went down to George’s last night after dinner,” Harvey said. “That’s the place old Jocko used to take us to. Jocko Conlan (former National League umpire) knew how to find the nice places and the good people in every city.”

  “Was Annette Sax still there?” asked Colosi.

  “She’ll always be there. Did you know she used to sing for Al Capone? Capone used to send his limousine over for her on nights he had parties. She’s a grandmother with three grandchildren now and although George has moved his club a couple of times, Annette has sung for that man for forty straight years. That’s really something. I really admire that. Before he retired, Jocko used to take me there, and as soon as he walked in, Annette would stop whatever she was singing and drag him up on stage. Jocko was the best tenor I ever heard. They called him the singing ump. I’m tellin’ ya, no man could sing prettier. The place is really run down now, ya know, and her voice is a little scratchy, but it still makes me feel pretty good to go there, just to know she’s still around singing those oldies. She knows every song that’s ever been written.”

  “That’s what I like about this city, and that’s what I like about baseball,” said Wendelstedt. “The tradition. Especially here in Chicago where the ballpark is still real old time. At Wrigley, you can smell the hot dogs, popcorn, and peanuts. And you can imagine that the same dirt you’re standing on, give or take a layer or two, was occupied by guys like Gabby Hartnett, Cy Young, Babe Ruth. That’s really somethin’ when you stop to think about it.”

  “Of course, old isn’t necessarily good,” Colosi said.

  “You better believe it,” said Wendelstedt. “You remember the old Houston ballfield? You remember what happened when it rained?”

  “The water spread like a rug over the outfield grass,” said Harvey. “And it laid there all day. I remember coming to Houston my first year in the league. That was 1962. I had come from the minors to the majors, but when I got to Houston and saw what those poor guys had to play on, I thought I had been demoted again.”

  “It rained so much the water never had time to evaporate and the outfield was a swamp.” Wendelstedt shook his head. “The ground was always so muddy and wet, it choked the power mowers. The grass grew up to our ankles and they couldn’t cut it. And you know what lived under those nice high blades of beautiful grass?”

  “Snakes,” said Harvey. “I used to watch outfielders go after a fly ball, then suddenly scream and run in the other direction as the hitter rounded the bases. You found out later that the fielder had stepped on a snake. It was ridiculous.”

  “And how about those mosquitoes?” said Wendelstedt. “In the afternoon they came in like dive bombers the size of your fist, but at night they sent in the heavy artillery. They were smart to build the Astrodome. They knew that if they didn’t get their team inside somewhere, the city would never sustain and support a major league franchise.”

  “You can’t say that about all or even most of these so-called stadium engineers,” said Harvey. “For the most part, the men who choose the sights and do the designing of these ‘masterpieces,’ are the laziest, dumbest sons o’ bitches I ever heard of. You take Shea Stadium.”

  “You take Shea Stadium. That place is worse than a backyard in a tenement.”

  “They built the damn park too fast, without much forethought,” said Harvey. “They made it mostly out of cement and put a thick layer of clay below it. Consequently, the outfield was covered with six inches of water throughout the season and none of the fans, players, or even the engineers could figure out why. I coulda told them there wasn’t any drainage, but it took ’em years to figure that out. Two years ago they had to chop up all the cement and replace the clay with granite. So, some stupid engineer cost the taxpayers a fortune.”

  “Shea is pretty bad all right,” said Wendelstedt, “but the worst ballpark is Candlestick Park in San Francisco. That place is cold and windy, you never know where a ball’s going to land; it’s just beyond belief. The engineers commissioned to pick a sight for Candlestick musta thought they’d been told to pick a sight for a memor
ial to Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney, ’cause there ain’t no more despicable place in America, that’s for sure. I tell ya, they had to be drunk to pick that place. Candlestick Park is the ‘monsoon bowl of the world.’ It’s unfair to the fans, unfair to the players, unfair to everybody. You’ll never see good baseball played out there. Why do you think the San Francisco Giants have never won a championship?”

  Rooks pulled up at the curb in front of the gray, dusty, circus-like edifice of Wrigley and watched silently while the umpires trooped out. Then he took his cab around the corner and pulled it into his reserved “no parking” slot. He had decided to stay and watch the game today rather than attempt to cruise the city. It was too cold and raw and windy for an old man to care about drumming up a few dollars’ business. Maybe a few years ago, but not now. Besides, he liked to spend as much time as possible talking to the umpires, and perhaps even better than that, listening while they talked. Those boys had been all over everywhere, from Candlestick to the Astrodome to Yankee Stadium, from one end of the country, from one end of the world, in fact, to the other. And he hadn’t been many places at all. It was his hope someday to attend a World Series, although, to his sadness and chagrin, he was damn well certain that the Cubs would never be in it.

  Upon arrival in Chicago, Harvey was notified by telegram that his crew would be required to measure and confirm the dimensions of the field and bullpen pitching mounds at Wrigley. This is a complicated and rather painstaking task performed by umpires in each ballpark twice a year.

  Umpires must insure that the pitching mound is comprised of an eighteen foot in diameter circle, the center of which must measure fifty-nine feet from the back of home plate; that the front edge of the rubber must be eighteen inches behind the center of the mound, thus establishing a distance of sixty feet, six inches, from the front edge of the rubber (pitchers plant their spikes and push off against the rubber) where the pitcher begins his motion, to the point where the catcher receives the ball at the back of home plate. But the most difficult and time-consuming part of the entire process is the confirmation of the pitcher’s slope: this includes the height above home plate at which the pitcher is permitted to throw, as well as the length and uniformity of the slope of the mound.

  To check this, umpires, assisted by the groundscrew, (they call the head groundskeeper in Chicago Dick the Prick) hammer one stake into the ground at a point six inches in front of the rubber and a second stake six feet in front of the rubber both in line with home plate. Then they tie strings to the bottom and top of the stakes and stretch both strings from one stake to another across the mound. Finally they step back and survey the mound, trying to decide if it is uniformly sloped from one inch to ten inches within a five foot by six inch distance. They will measure this many different times and in many different ways before granting their approval.

  Doug Harvey explains: “Actually, we’re pretty sure no one is going to tamper with the field mound. Whatever its height or condition, right or wrong—and the groundskeepers work hard to keep it right—it’s going to equally affect both the home and visiting pitchers. We don’t even have to be too concerned with the mound in the home team bullpen, but you better believe we’re especially careful when we examine the mound in the visiting team’s bullpen. What the home team has been known to do is sometimes raise or lower or otherwise tamper with the height or the uniformity of the slope just to ruin the rhythm and the timing of the pitchers warming up there. And you know, the funny thing is, when we do find something wrong, you can’t believe how the goddamn coaches and players argue with you. We don’t accuse them of anything, we just tell them that they better get the grounds-crew to straighten it out before the game and to keep it that way. But they actually believe that when we find something like this, we should ignore it, not make any waves. Can you imagine? They expect us to compromise our principles—even jeopardize our jobs in their behalf!”

  Aside from officiating each game and measuring pitching mounds, umpires are obliged to follow up each ejection of a player, coach, or manager both with a personal phone call to league president Chub Feeney, within twelve hours after the game and, subsequently, with a written report of the ejection outlining the reasons for such drastic action. Such a system eliminates the possibility of an umpire being vindictive to a player or a team. It also enables league officials to be informed immediately in case a game is protested in response to the ejection.

  Players, managers, and coaches are ejected for many good reasons—for unnecessarily delaying a game by doggedly and uselessly disputing a call or for yelling at an umpire mercilessly during a game and ruining his concentration. Colosi had ejected a groundskeeper earlier that year for incessantly rapping with a hammer on a Plexiglas screen. “I warned him ten times,” explained Colosi. “You have to try to warn the players, tell them they’re gone if they don’t stop doing what they’re doing. Most of the time, they listen. Sometimes they don’t and then you’ve got to give them the thumb. You can’t let people step on you in this game or you won’t be up in the big time for long.”

  “More often than not,” says veteran Tom Gorman, “you’re throwing people out because they’re using vulgar language. Any man who calls me something I wouldn’t call him is going to be in trouble. This is not to say that we all don’t swear once in a while—but sometimes there’s reason, and sometimes they do it just to be nasty. For example, if anybody comes down on my family, my mother, they get the thumb. Right away. Instantly. I can’t stand looking at them, they’re no damn good. Get out of here. On the other hand, some guys can’t seem to put together a sentence without swearing. You take Gene Mauch, manager of the Montreal Expos. Every other word he says is fuck. ‘Fuck this, fuck that.’ He probably says fuck when he goes to church and makes his confession. If I threw him out for every time he swore in a week, he’d spend the rest of his life in the locker room. Why, he’s the vulgarest man alive. You see, we take this into consideration. He doesn’t necessarily mean anything by it.”

  What happens if you throw a man out and he won’t leave? Or if, after throwing him out one day, he cusses you out the next? What happens if, no matter how often you try, you can’t seem to discipline the player, manager, or coach successfully?

  “Well,” says Gorman, “the league is supposed to take it from there. They have the option of suspending a man or fining him, after they talk to you and read your report. The problem is, the league is very hesitant about taking positive action. The president doesn’t want to get the owners mad at him. After all, the owners pay his salary and if he suspends a player or a manager for a few days, he’s not going to have so many friends come reappointment time.”

  Gorman, a thick-necked man with a scarlet Irish face and heavy, sagging jowls, hesitated for a moment, then smiled.

  “One time, right before Chub Feeney took over for Warren Giles as president of the National League, I was having trouble with Johnny Logan, shortstop for what used to be the Milwaukee Braves. I threw him out one day for swearing at me. Next day, he swore at me again and I threw him out again. Logan just didn’t seem to care.

  “That night I called up Warren Giles and told him I needed some help with Logan, couldn’t control the son of a bitch.”

  “‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Giles said. I got the distinct impression he didn’t care one hoot about my problem.

  “Next day I saw Logan on the street and I told him he better watch his mouth or he was gonna end up fined or suspended. ‘I ain’t gonna let you play another ball game,’ I warned.

  “‘Yeah, sure,’ Logan says, ‘go take a walk. Don’t bother me.’

  “Next night, same thing happened. Logan cussed me out, called me every name in the book and I ejected him. Later, I called up Giles and Giles was as disinterested as ever.

  “‘Ok, ok,’ he says, ‘so Logan swore at you a little. Doesn’t mean I need to take drastic action. Give the guy a break. Ain’t you got any compassion?’ he says. ‘So what if he called you a few bad names?’
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  “‘Called me bad names?’ I said to Giles. ‘Called me bad names? It’s you he says is horseshit.’

  “‘What did he call me?’ Giles all of a sudden went crazy. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

  “‘He called you horseshit,’ I said.

  “Next day, Logan was fined $250.”

  “Warren Giles,” says thirty-year veteran National League umpire Al Barlick, now retired and working as a part-time consultant on umpires for the National League. “Warren Giles,” he says again, sadly shaking his head. He is a large man, with a belly as big as a beach ball, a gravelly, trombone-like voice, and salt-and-pepper hair cut in a military flat top.

  “Every time I hear his name, it gets me upset. He was the worst excuse for a league president I’ve ever seen,” says Barlick who, periodically through his career, was troubled by a weak heart.

  “In 1956, when my heart first went bad, the league office, then in Cincinnati, sent my league physical to my personal doctor. I had been just recently hospitalized and Fred Fleig figured the physical I had taken at the beginning of the season might help the doctor diagnose my problem. It was nice of Fleig. Fleig has always been nice to umpires. He’s always been a man we could trust. Chub Feeney is a good guy, too. He doesn’t understand as much about umpires as he should, but he’s fair and decent and honest. He keeps his word. But Warren Giles …

  “Earlier that spring,” says Barlick, “when I first took the physical, I called up Giles and asked him about the results. He said it didn’t look good. That’s all he ever said. ‘It didn’t look good.’ I coulda told him that myself.

  “When my doctor read the physical report from the league, he looked up at me in astonishment. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled. You know what that physical said? It said I had high blood pressure, sugar diabetes, and emphysema, but Giles never once said a word about it. He decided not to tell me, I figure, because he didn’t want to pay an extra umpire’s salary all season while I was in the hospital. I guess he was just hoping I would last out the year.