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

by Lee Gutkind

  Even then the federal government, armed with comparatively new civil rights legislation, was beginning to poke with suspicion into the hiring practices of National and American League officials. With justification. Close to half of all the athletes playing baseball in the major leagues were members of minority groups, yet there was only one black umpire, Emmett Ashford, in the American League, and he was planning to retire the following year. The situation had changed significantly since Art Williams had been selected to break the color barrier for the Detroit Tigers in 1953, but in 1969 he was again a pioneer having to prove that a black man was at least as good as, perhaps even better than a white man. Now he was to plunge into the strange white world of law and order, of enforcing rules in a game which, two decades ago, only white men were good enough to play.

  “I got a call from the National League office in San Francisco,” says a major league umpire who had been working as an instructor for the Umpire Development Program in St. Petersburg that winter. “They wanted to know if there were any good black candidates and asked me to pick the best so that they could be sure he got a job. Not that these blacks mightn’t have gotten jobs anyway, but there were about two hundred candidates that year for thirty or forty jobs, and they wanted to be sure a black got hired. Well, I picked Williams. He was maybe the best black candidate we had that year—maybe the best we ever had—but what I liked about him was, well, he was respectful. I mean, you could talk to him because he was respectful. Some of them coloreds are, well, uncouth.”

  Williams was hired by the Class D Pioneer League in Southern Florida that year for $525 a month for seven months, including expenses. Simultaneously, he relinquished his position with the Bakersfield Sanitation Department which had netted him eleven thousand dollars annually. Shirley was forced to go back to work that year and for the next four years, but Art was certain of his ability to make it into the big leagues.

  He was elevated to the Class A Midwest League in 1970 and traveled for the season with another black umpire, Harold Van, who had been in baseball for a number of years and was, at the time, a National League prospect. Van, unfortunately never reached the proficiency in his calls required of major league umpires.

  One evening in Appleton, Wisconsin, after a particularly difficult game, a tall, broad-shouldered, gray-haired, middle-aged man came into the umpires’ room and engaged Van in a quiet conversation. Williams showered and dressed, then lingered in the passageway waiting for Van.

  The stranger and Van entered the passageway some time later, stopping in front of Williams.

  “What’s your name, son?” the man asked gruffly.

  Williams told him.

  “Well, I think you did a fine job out there tonight. Just keep on hustling.”

  “Goddamn,” said Van later, “you got yourself a fan. That man don’t know what the word ‘compliment’ means, but he handed one out to you, sure as hell.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Why, that’s Fred Fleig, the supervisor of umpires in the National League—the man who does the hiring and firing.”

  “Well goddamn,” said Williams.

  That night he called to tell Shirley. He felt like a real giant that night.

  Williams worked hard for the rest of that season, harder perhaps than at any time before in his whole life. He had a sense of deep confidence that if he could hang on and perform with a hustling, well-concentrated efficiency, he would accomplish his long-sought objective of reaching the major leagues. Many times he reflected on the silliness of the whole idea. Here he was, a thirty-eight-year-old father of four, attempting to chart a new course in life by officiating a game for boys. Often he was wrenched by the thought that he was abdicating his responsibilities as a father and husband; his wife had had to assume the role of both parents and worse, she had had to become a semi-provider. Most frightening was that Shirley’s long letters communicated a constrained fear of impending financial disaster, even with both their salaries taken into account. Slowly, but ever so surely and certainly, the savings account reserve on which they had counted when Art relinquished his sanitation job was dwindling. Each month they were forced to dip into the well more than they had planned, and now the bucket was nearly scraping bottom. At that point his telephone service had been cancelled twice for nonpayment of the bill.

  Although his salary had increased to six hundred dollars a month for the seven months of the season with his promotion to the Midwest League, Williams had to withhold some of that money for winter financial obligations and for the obviously important traveling expenses during the season. Often during that long summer Williams would spend his nights curled and cramped in the back seat of his car, washing and shaving at local gas stations to save a few dollars to send back home. He had never had a more difficult, heart-breaking, ego-deflating year. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny his happiness and satisfaction at being awarded a second chance to fulfill his boyhood dreams. He returned home at the end of that season with no fear, no dread, no second thoughts about his future. He returned home with a triumphant feeling of confidence and accomplishment.

  Since major league ball clubs invite so many extra players to their spring training camps and divide their teams into two sub-teams (A and B), the American and National League offices require a number of minor league umpires to help officiate. Williams was included in this group of two dozen in January, 1971. The letter came directly from Fred Fleig.

  Of course, there were two dozen of these young umpires and at most there might be two major league umpiring slots open each year; moreover, not all or even many of these men had a chance of ever being selected anyway. Some had worked spring training games four or five times in the past and had already been judged by the major league umpires with whom they worked to be too old, too slow, too fat, or too inefficient to cut it in the big leagues. Williams was the only black prospect and he had advanced quickly in his two years of professional ball.

  He officiated twenty-six B team ballgames that spring while most of the major league umpires worked the A team contests, but what he remembered most of that month he spent in Arizona was his meeting with a man who was to become his confidant, a source of strength and of knowledge when he ascended to the major leagues.

  Doug Harvey, tall, deeply tanned, white-haired, was working the plate in a game between the Padres and the Giants, and Williams, who had finished his game earlier in the day, was sitting on the sidelines watching him. He liked Harvey’s style, the way he steadied himself on one knee and leaned way over the catcher’s shoulder to see the ball. Of all the umpires Williams had studied, Harvey seemed to get closer to the plate and to be able to stay with the pitch much longer than anyone else. This was perhaps the most difficult part of being a successful umpire: the ability to ignore outside influences and internal pressures and to maintain absolute concentration on the game and only the game, including each individual play and pitch. Williams had never seen anyone more in control of himself and of the situation around him than Doug Harvey. It was as if the man put himself into a deep and totally consuming spell, as if time and space, heat, wind, and thirst were immaterial; as if the entire universe consisted only of a bat, a ball, a game.

  Near the end of the game, however, between the eighth and ninth inning, Harvey abruptly turned from his position behind the plate and walked toward Williams. “You’re Art Williams,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Nice to know you.” The two men smiled at each other and shook hands.

  “Look, I’ve got a problem. I just bought a house back in San Diego and I’ve got to make a plane in forty-five minutes to get back home to sign the papers and close the deal. I wonder if you could take over for me behind the plate?”

  “You want me to call the plate for you? With Willie Mays coming up?”

  “The pitches don’t come in no different to Mays than anybody else. You call your own game and it doesn’t matter who’s swinging.”

  Art Williams never forgot Doug Harvey’s kindne
ss and his consummate skill behind the plate and when it was time to request a crew for his first year in the majors, he told Fred Fleig it wouldn’t matter with whom he worked, as long as one of the men was Doug Harvey.

  For the first five weeks of the 1971 season, Williams was elevated to the Class AA Texas League. But when veteran National League umpire Tony Vinson had a heart attack, Larry McSherry of the AAA International League was promoted to the major leagues, and Williams subsequently moved up another notch, assuming McSherry’s position. He remained in the International League that year, working the playoffs, and then returning both to major league spring training and to the International League in 1972. Again he was selected to work the playoffs, an honor bestowed only on the best umpires in the league. Since this particular year the playoffs were to be held in Hawaii, as a celebration Williams was planning to take Shirley. He knew she deserved a vacation after helping to support their big family for three straight years.

  The phone jangled in the small frame house in the south side of Bakersfield, California, that day, only twelve hours before Art and Shirley were scheduled to leave for Hawaii on their first vacation in four years. Shirley, then black-haired and slender, was in the kitchen. She listened until her husband picked up the phone, then cranked on the water, and began to scrub the maple syrup and pancake remains from the grimy breakfast dishes.

  In a while, Art came in and stood in the doorway, watching his wife in silence, her bare black arms elbow-deep in bubbly white dishwater. He was smiling but when he spoke, he hung his head and covered part of his face with a towel. “Damn,” he said softly, shaking his head. Then, when his wife did not respond, he said it again louder—“Damn!”

  “What now?” asked Shirley, lifting a glittering plate from the bubbly water and running her thumb against it until it squeaked.

  “That was Mr. Fleig,” said Williams somberly.

  Shirley turned to watch her husband. “And …” she said cautiously, sensing something, probably something bad, by the way her generally open and enthusiastic husband was speaking.

  “Well, something has changed,” said Williams, shaking his head and rubbing his face with the towel.

  “What’s changed?” said Shirley.

  “I hate to tell you this.”

  “Well, you have to tell me sometime. Now what’s the trouble? Is something wrong?”

  “We’re not going to Hawaii,” said Williams softly, shaking his head again and again.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Of course I want to know. Now tell me what’s going on.”

  “We’re not going to Hawaii,” said Williams, pausing. “We’re not going to Hawaii,” he said again, slowly. “Because …” he paused. “Starting tomorrow …” he paused again.

  “C’mon! Starting tomorrow, what?”

  “Because starting tomorrow,” Williams shouted, throwing the towel into the air, lifting his wife high by the waist and twirling her around the room, scattering dirty water and light silvery soap bubbles in every direction, “starting tomorrow I’ll be in the major leagues!”

  Art Williams suddenly found himself chuckling as he lay in his rumpled bed in the Sherbrooke Motor Hotel in Montreal watching the morning light quietly curl in through the cracks in the curtains. Thankfully, he had endured the darkness and the boredom by thinking his way through the night. He washed and shaved quickly, then looked at his watch, shrugged, and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast. He consumed an order of pancakes and two orders of sausage, washed down by four or five cups of bitter-tasting coffee. Afterwards, as he headed back to his room, he patted his stomach, wishing he hadn’t eaten so much. It was becoming increasingly difficult to control his weight lately. This year alone he had picked up more than ten pounds.

  Back in his room his heart beat heavily as he recited the number of the National League office to the operator. As he listened to the phone ringing, he was still attempting to conjure up an adequate explanation for yesterday’s two very embarrassing and hard-to-excuse errors. Turning his back on a play and pushing a player were mistakes on the level of an electrician’s testing an appliance he had forgotten to plug in. Sure, he knew that neither Fleig or Feeney would do anything drastic to him. It was the embarrassment of confessing to his absolutely inexplicable errors. The operator told Williams no one seemed to be answering.

  Williams looked at his watch, thumbed through his wallet, and read the operator Feeney’s home number.

  “Hello?”

  He heard Feeney’s voice, somewhat groggy and distant.

  “Chub?” Williams tried to sound cheerful. “This is Art Williams. I’m in Montreal. How are things in San Francisco?”

  “Who?”

  “Art Williams. I’m in Montreal with Doug Harvey’s crew.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  Had Feeney already heard about the game? Williams couldn’t quite understand the reason for Feeney’s instant irritation. He took a deep breath. “I wanted to explain to you, I mean, I wanted to tell you about what happened in last night’s game.”

  “Do you know what time it is?” Feeney demanded.

  Williams glanced at his watch and, at the same time, felt a sinking, queasy, bottomless feeling in his stomach. “Why, it’s nine o’clock, Chub.”

  “It may be nine o’clock in Montreal, young man,” said Feeney loudly, “but in California it’s still the middle of the night!”

  Today, sitting on a stool in front of the sink in the umpires’ room in Jarry Park in Montreal, his eyes avoiding an all too accurate mirror, the big black man splattered saliva and mud on the last baseball to be tossed into the cowhide bag. Sighing, he kneaded the mud into the ball with a silent fury, betrayed only by the grim set of his leathery lips.

  “I’m telling you,” he heard Wendelstedt in the next room, “there are no finer looking women in the world than those found right here in Montreal. You know how some women come to ballparks in other towns? In baggy pants and blue jeans, their hair blowing in a hundred different directions? Sometimes I look up in the stands and see these chicks munching on popcorn, smoking, their faces covered with rouge, and I say to myself, ‘The monsters have invaded!’ Later on I discover the truth. It’s only ladies’ day.

  “Then I come to Montreal, which is probably where beautiful women were invented. I mean, they got furs on, fancy dresses, high-heeled shoes. When they go to the ballpark, they look sharp, the way women ought to look.”

  “So,” said Harvey, “what’s the point?”

  “Harry don’t ever talk to make a point,” said Colosi, “Harry just talks.”

  “So I’m telling you, this happened to me last year,” said Wendelstedt. “Are you listening to this, Art?” he queried, rising and walking slowly over to the door between the dressing room and the bathroom in his underpants.

  Williams nodded, his back still turned.

  “I’m working third base this particular night, see, and there’s this broad, the most beautiful broad I’ve ever seen, sitting in the front box seat directly in line with the base. I’m tellin’ ya, I’ve never seen anyone more gorgeous in my life. She’s tall, and her long blonde hair, hair that’s almost golden like the sun it’s so shiny yellow, is swept into an absolutely meticulous bun. And that’s not all,” said Wendelstedt, shaking his head and lifting his eyes, “I swear, never in my life have I seen legs as long and curvaceous and smooth and white. Were I to give this chick a name, it would be Eve.”

  Wendelstedt paused for a deep breath to elongate suspense; he began to pace barefoot around the room. “This woman has also got the most appealing breasts I have ever seen. These were some tits, not too big, but luxurious, full and shaped perfectly. All I could think of when she leaned over the railing and I saw what I saw was cream puffs. Standing there, I wanted to bury my face in all that sweetness and goo for a month.

  “You may well be sitting there and thinking I’m describing Miss America—or
Miss Canada in this particular case,” said Wendelstedt, “but if you’da seen her ass …‘Oh my God in heaven,’ you’d say, ‘better than Miss America, better even than Miss World.’ I’m telling ya, this had to be Miss Universe, Miss Galaxy, Miss Solar System, she was so goddamn gorgeous. She was so beautiful that she was absolutely out of this world.”

  “Yeah, but Harry, hey Harry,” said Colosi. “What did she look like?”

  Harvey chuckled. Wendelstedt set his lips tight, made his face go red, and stared at Colosi momentarily before continuing. “The thing I remember about that night was the Expos were getting whipped something terrible. Something like ten to two after a few innings. A real massacre. And you know Montreal fans. They want to slit the throats of anybody scores a run against their team. But not this woman. She kept ogling me, staring at me, puckering up her lips at me as the game went on. And she let me see every part of her body and every morsel of clothes she was wearing. Which wasn’t much. She got up and walked back and forth to the ladies’ room, I’ll betcha a hundred times, just so I could see her ass in that hiked-up black satin miniskirt. I’ll tell ya, her ass swayed so much, I was getting seasick watching.

  “I had a couple of pretty tough calls to make in that game, and they all happened to go against the Expos, but she didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes you can stand around at third base three, four games in a row and nothing seems to happen. But on this night I was really getting the heat.”

  “Isn’t that always the case?” asked Harvey. “Sometimes you go through a whole season without nothing to look at. Other times you get slam-bangers every time you stick your nose out on the field.”