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

by Lee Gutkind

  “Well, we all come at the base together, the guy running from second, the guy returning to third, the third baseman waiting for the ball, me trying to get in there close enough for a call, the ball, and Leo, trying to squeeze in and hinder the fielder. Splat! It was the most sickening collision you’ve ever heard, pro football without padding. And guess who’s down at the bottom? I got my leg wrapped around my neck, somebody’s head under my ass, and arms and hands flailing all over my body.

  “Eventually everybody starts getting up slowly from on top of me. First Durocher, then the guy who was originally on third, who limps back down the line and crosses the plate. The crowd starts to scream and then Frankie Frisch, the manager of the Pirates, comes running out, steaming. Durocher thinks that the run should count from third and that the guy coming in from second is safe. Frisch, on the other hand, is calling for a double play. Me? I don’t even see the ball.

  “Of course, I found all this out a few days later in the hospital. All I could see right then was this huge cloud of dust and fog that seemed to be surrounding me. I couldn’t concentrate. I heard these two managers screaming bloody murder at me, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying for a while. Then I finally realized what was happening—vaguely—and I recognized a phrase, somebody was yelling. ‘Was he safe or out? Was he safe or out?’

  “‘Who wants to know?’ I yelled.

  “‘Durocher,’ Leo says.

  “‘Then he’s out,’ I told him.

  “Marge said later that she had never seen Leo so goddamned mad in his life. He stomped around the field and raged for half an hour. I don’t believe Laraine was angry, though. According to Marge, all she did was stare at her husband, shake her head, and chuckle.

  “The one thing about my wife, Marge,” Gorman said, lowering his voice as if what he had to say was absolutely confidential, his smile fading from his lips, his heavy jowls somehow drooping, “the one thing about Marge was that she was never sick a day in her life. She was as strong and perky at forty-nine as she was when we dated at seventeen. Maybe that’s why I was so stunned when she died two years ago. Stunned is the right word. I mean, I was numb for a long time. You expect sickness before death, especially in a woman so beautiful and strong and young. But there was never any warning. She was forty-nine-years-old and suddenly she got blood poisoning in both her kidneys. I was traveling out on the West Coast, en route somewhere. Before I knew she was even sick, she was dead.

  “Since then I’ve been attempting to father and mother my children from great distances. We have a live-in housekeeper, but my eldest daughter, Patty Ellen, helped finish bringing up two of the boys. Without her, I just couldn’t have done it. Patty Ellen is married now and Tommy, he just graduated from Marquette University this year. Kevin is still in high school and Bryant is in junior high. I keep in as close contact as I possibly can and I’m home as often as time and schedule permits. I go out of my way to come home, so I can be with my children.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting married again,” says Gorman. “I have someone very special in mind, but I won’t do it. I won’t do it. Not on your life. Not until I quit umpiring. I couldn’t bear to go away so often and so long from the people I love again.”

  Tom Gorman rocked rhythmically in a green chair in his living room at home, watching the late afternoon sun stream through the window in golden shafts of light. “There is one thing that still saddens and shocks me when I think about it. There is one thing about that whole affair that has soured me against baseball somewhat,” he says.

  “About an hour after I had buried Marge I got a call from the league office in San Francisco. They wanted to know when I would be back to work. You’d think they’d give a man some time to lay his wife to rest.”

  Overhustle

  ART WILLIAMS WASN’T EXACTLY nervous before those games in which he worked behind the plate. His hands didn’t tremble, his knees didn’t quake, butterflies didn’t dance in the pit of his stomach, light-headedness never set in. But still, there was something different going on, not within him as much as around him, nothing he could see or feel, nothing a doctor could diagnose, nothing biological that a microscope could dissect into tiny, flitting, bacteriological particles, nothing his loved ones could fathom, but all the same, there was something, a feeling, a dream, a gnawing, doubting, tickling, fog-warped, unsettling sensation.

  Being a black man in a white man’s world was hard; being an umpire, an official in a game of skill and chance, a lawman in a game where your every judgment could very well influence, if not decide, the fate of a man’s career, the size of his paycheck, the weight of an entire team’s purse—that was even more difficult. But to combine those two problems, to be the first black umpire in the National League and the only black umpire in all of the major leagues, to be a black official in a game that has been and will continue to be supported by white owners, white management, and white spectators—that was to be, at least potentially, a misfit supreme. That was to be in a position of terrible vulnerability.

  Art Williams did the best he could both on and off the field and as he grew older and more experienced, he felt himself increasingly capable of dealing with what he confronted as an umpire in the major leagues. Yet there were times, most especially every fourth game when it was his turn to call the plate, that a momentary uneasiness set in. This was an umpire’s most difficult and tiresome job. This was the time in which all eyes were unavoidably on him.

  Early that evening in the umpires’ room at Jarry Park in Montreal, Williams stripped down to his shorts, carried the boxes of new baseballs and the can of Delaware River mud into the bathroom, and sat down near the sink. Colosi, Harvey, and Wendelstedt were in the dressing room talking quietly, but Williams turned his back and concentrated on rubbing the black briny mud into the smooth white balls. Usually he listened with eagerness to the advice and the easy-going banter of his more experienced companions, but today he felt tired of baseball and didn’t want to hear what anybody had to say.

  He glanced up at the mirror. The whites of his eyes were yellowish this evening and his cheeks and the smooth skin above his brow seemed wrinkled and sorrowful.

  Yesterday night had been an excruciatingly bad night for Williams, his worst of the year as an umpire. He had been working first base and doing what he considered to be a competent job when fleet-footed Montreal shortstop Tim Foli hit a slow ground ball to third. It looked like it would be a close play, but Williams was on it, stepping into the slot to the right and at a forty-five degree angle from first base, dropping down on one knee to watch when the ball slapped the glove and the runner’s foot touched the base. The ball beat the runner by nearly half a step, and Williams jumped, whirled around, raised his right fist and yelled, “Out!”

  Then, for a split second, he was confused. The fans were cheering, and his fancy movement on the out call left him somewhat off-balance. He might have lost sight of the play, he wasn’t sure, but the next thing he knew, the ball was rolling on the ground. His fist, signaling out, still hung like a black hammer in air as he lifted his eyes and ran the play back on the screen of his mind. Had Foli knocked the ball out of the first baseman’s glove? Interference? He thought so. “Out!” he bellowed again.

  “He dropped the ball! The first baseman dropped the ball!” Foli croaked, jumping on his haunches like a frog.

  “No, he’s crazy!” yelled first baseman Dick Dietz, motioning at Foli. “He grabbed the ball. He grabbed it!”

  “You’re wrong, goddamn it!” first base coach Walt Hriniak bellowed into Williams’s face, so close that Williams could taste the warm tobacco juice on his breath. “You’re wrong, wrong, wrong!”

  The three men crowded around the lone umpire, barking and shouting, jumping up and down like angry dogs. Williams regarded them momentarily, then blinked his eyes shut for an instant, remembering Doug Harvey’s words. “I’m telling you, son, you can’t let them double team you, triple team you, quadruple team you. That’s what they
like to do. They like to get you so damn confused you look and feel like a fool. You tell them like I always tell them: ‘One man, I’ll talk to one man only. I’ll talk to one man or no man at all.’”

  But Williams knew he had hesitated too long, losing the advantage of his authority. He stood there, paralyzed on that spot of grass and dirt, realizing that perhaps only fifteen seconds had passed, and knowing also, through experience, that too much time had gone by for him to effectively take command of the situation. With his stomach feeling as if it had sunk to his ankles, Williams swallowed and accepted the dreaded situation.

  “What are you going to do?” yelled Foli. “I was safe. I had it made, goddamn it, I had it made. I was safe!”

  “Out!” shouted Dietz, jumping in front of Foli.

  “Safe! Safe! Safe! Safe!” Hriniak jawed, pushing Dietz out of the way.

  Williams composed himself and opened his mouth, with the intention of clearing the field, when Hriniak suddenly stepped forward and bumped him. Whether accidentally or on purpose, it was hard to tell, but instinctively, without stopping to breathe deeply and gather up his frazzled nerves, Williams pushed the man back hard. “You’re gone,” he yelled, pointing to the dugout, “get out of here!”

  “You pushed me, you …” Hriniak rushed forward and bumped him again. This time it was no accident, but Williams held his ground and his temper. “You’re gone! You’re gone! Get out! Get out!” His arm shot out once more toward the dugout.

  Simultaneously, Harvey, Wendelstedt, and Expo manager Gene Mauch reached first base and pulled the men apart, but Williams knew the damage had been done. Whatever the player or coach might do, however they acted, the umpire had to control himself and, in so doing, control the situation. It was an indisputable rule: an official maintained order with respect. He should never exercise authority physically. Besides, the argument had started at least partially because he, the umpire, had turned his back on the play. Rule number two broken: never lose sight of the situation you are judging.

  After the game, when Wendelstedt and Colosi were in the shower, Harvey said to Williams, who was sitting dejectedly in his sweat-soaked blue uniform, hanging his head in disgust: “You can’t ever allow yourself to become off-balance on a play. You’ve got to plant both feet and keep your eyes on the play until you’re sure the play has concluded. You can’t get overconfident, Art. It takes eight years in the major leagues to make a good umpire, Art, and you haven’t been in for even two.

  “I know you just made one mistake, two mistakes, but we’re not supposed to make any mistakes. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. Umpires are human. Umpires do make mistakes. We’re not supposed to make mistakes, but we do, and we suffer for it afterwards. A man who begins his career as an umpire must be perfect, then improve significantly every day after that. That’s the kind of ideals we have to live up to.”

  Harvey walked over and put his arm on Williams’s shoulder. “Why don’t you take your shower,” he said.

  That night Williams paced his room, periodically reading and watching television, attempting again and again to compose exactly the right words to use in explaining the incident when he called League president Chub Feeney the following morning. Williams wasn’t worried that Feeney would fire him. It hadn’t been that bad a mistake, and Feeney was a good and fair man. But it was embarrassing to admit to anyone—especially the president of the National League—that he had broken two iron-clad and elementary umpiring rules.

  Of course, Feeney wasn’t the man who had hired him. Fred Fleig, the National League secretary and supervisor of umpires, was the one who had called him, after only two and a half years of minor league ball, to ask if he thought he could work in the majors. He remembered that night very well. In fact, lying there in that dark room, mounds of pillows hunched up behind his back blankly staring at a late night television show, Williams saw flashes of his past come back to him in vivid, darting images.

  In 1953 Art Williams became the first black to be signed by the Detroit Tigers organization, receiving a one hundred dollar bonus, a figure that became standard for black players. Directly out of high school, he was assigned to the Tigers’ Class A farm team in his home town of Bakersfield; he posted an 11-6 record. The next year he was offered a contract for AAA ball in Buffalo, New York, but the Tigers refused him enough money to bring his wife. So Williams declined the offer, and was consequently sent to the Tigers’ Class A organization in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He pitched well there for the first half of the season until he hurt his arm. Despite his physical troubles, he chalked up a 9-3 record that year.

  But as the only black in the entire Detroit Tiger organization, an organization that even today doesn’t go out of its way to court black athletes, and coming up with a sore arm so early in his career, Williams felt his prospects for the future were significantly diminished. He turned down an offer to play A league ball in Augusta, Georgia, the following year on the advice of his father. Like all black men who grew up in the South, the elder Williams knew that Georgia was no place in 1954 for a young black who wanted an opportunity to make the big leagues. The senior Williams felt there was no way his son could spend a season in the Southern League, pitching in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida and return to his family both spiritually and physically healthy.

  So instead, Williams signed that year with the Wanetka Tigers in the now defunct Class C California League and, on the advice of Tiger scout Joe Gordon, agreed to pitch a game every other day. “This is the only way you’re going to prove to our management,” Gordon told the young pitcher, “that your arm is strong enough for big league ball.”

  Whether the advice was faulty or downright cruel, Williams still isn’t completely certain twenty years later. Maybe he really didn’t possess what a black needed in those days to make the majors; then a black man had to be virtually twice as good a player, sheer superstar material in fact, to harbor any serious hope of ascending the major league ladder. Whatever, Williams wore out his arm while pitching as many games as possible for the next two years. He won twice as many as he lost, but never once received any indication he was being scouted and considered for advancement in the Detroit or any other pro baseball organization. He returned home at the end of the 1957 season and quietly and unobtrusively retired from the game.

  He was so disappointed that he swore to his wife Shirley that he would never again involve himself in baseball. He would never watch a game, in fact, if he could help it. He tucked his memories of those years—the odor of neatsfoot oil rubbed into cowhide, the smell of sweat clinging to dry, hot dust, the crack of a bat and the slap of a ball, the thudding of a mitt, the scrape of steel spikes against concrete runways, the splat of tobacco juice against splintering dugout walls, the banter of teammates and, most especially, the roaring gratification of a crowd—he tucked those thoughts back into the deepest corners of his mind. He did so with a quiet shrug and an off-hand sheepish smile, without any sign of bitterness toward the game or the people who very well might have impeded his progress. Art Williams had always been and would always be a man who took his punches without showing anger outwardly; he was able to mask his pain with a grin.

  A second child was now on the way and so Shirley was no longer able to both continue to nurse full time and care for their growing family. Williams turned to an employment where colored men almost seem to maintain a monopoly: he went to work for the Bakersfield Sanitation Department.

  Today, as Williams travels in the first class sections of airplanes and hires porters to carry his baggage into fancy hotels, he often thinks of his years hefting the garbage of both the rich and poor of Bakersfield. Today, no one has to crawl into a truck and stand knee-deep in filth like you used to have to do, he reflects. There are automatic compactors and, most important, there are union contracts. It gave Art Williams more than a little satisfaction to read that the sanitation workers in San Francisco had recently been awarded a contract guaranteeing them a little less than twenty thousand do
llars a year. It rather tickled him to see white faces popping up on the garbage trucks around the country as he walked the streets of National League cities. Did that mean that collecting garbage now had its own measure of dignity? Or was it merely that Old Whitey disregarded his dignity when it came to making a hefty piece of change? He pondered the question with a smile.

  Williams was soon promoted to supervisor in the Bakersfield Sanitation Department, and he worked for the next twelve years overseeing anywhere from 120 to 150 men. His family grew until he had four children, and for extra cash he took a part-time job with the Bakersfield Recreation Department supervising evening activities at a playground near his home. He also started attending classes part-time at Bakersfield Junior College and began refereeing high school basketball. For seven full years he kept his peace with, and his isolation from, baseball. He wouldn’t watch it on television. He refused to join his friends for the 120 mile, two and a half hour trip to Los Angeles to see the Dodgers play ball. It hurt too much to be confronted with what might have been.

  But when his eldest son, Art Jr., began playing little league baseball, Williams agreed to umpire some of the games. Before he really realized what was happening to his life, Williams quickly moved up into high school and college contests. Within two years he was the most skillful and sought-after umpire in amateur baseball in the state. As a former pitcher working behind the plate, Williams could easily follow a breaking ball with his eye from the moment it left the pitcher’s hand to the instant it struck the catcher’s glove. Often, just by watching the motions of the pitcher, Williams could anticipate what kind of pitch to look for even before the ball was released. On the field, his sense of the game deriving from his past years enabled him to take off in the obvious direction of the play almost as soon as the batter made contact with the ball.

  All of the old feelings, all of the smells and sounds, the excitement and the satisfaction of competition came back to Williams in those next few years. It was like the continuation of an old love affair for the now thirty-eight-year-old father of four children. In the winter of 1969, with his wife’s reluctant blessing, Williams enrolled in the major league’s Umpire Development Program and spent six weeks attending classes and learning his trade in St. Petersburg, Florida, under the direction of former AAA Class minor league umpire Barney Deary.