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

by Lee Gutkind

“Because of the two different protectors, the strike zone is different from league to league. Because we’re closer to the pitch in the National League, we’ll call a low strike, maybe as much as an inch below the kneecap. We’ll also go an inch or so below the pectorals on the chest.”

  Colosi nodded. “On the other hand, the American League umpire is standing further away from the pitch, behind the catcher rather than over him. He can see the high pitch good, but he can’t see the low pitch too well. What happens is that the American League low strike might be as much as two or three or even four inches above the kneecap. An American League umpire could also call a high strike at the neck.”

  Says Harvey: “Which doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with this. The strike zone may be a little different from league to league, but it’s not any bigger or smaller in either league. The size of the strike zone is the same.

  “I keep trying to tell Art Williams,” Harvey continues, “that the most important thing for an umpire to remember is to maintain consistency. Consistency is the most important part of our job. As long as an umpire calls the same strike zone all the time in each league, then it doesn’t matter too much if it’s six inches higher or six inches lower. The batter can eventually adjust to it. As long as the batter knows where the strike zone is going to be, he’ll be able to hit that ball.

  “Of course,” says Harvey, leaning forward and chawing rapidly, “we have what we call the ‘twilight zone’ in baseball. What I mean is, how accurate can we be? The rule book says we’re supposed to call the strike at the knee. Does that mean the top of the knee or the bottom of the knee? Does that mean the top of the ball or the bottom of the ball? What happens if he misses the plate with a curve ball by a bare microscopic inch? If he’s that close, we try to give the pitcher the benefit of the doubt. The idea in baseball is to try to open up that strike zone as much as possible and make the batter hit the ball. That’s baseball. If we were 100 percent rigid, we’d average ten walks a game.

  “Still,” says Harvey, “an umpire’s utmost consideration is consistency. If a pitcher’s wild, if he’s throwing the ball up and down and over and under the batter, the umpire won’t give him the strike when a pitch just so happens to come an inch away from the corner of the plate. He’s got to be able to get it there all of the time.”

  “Pitchers who invariably have trouble with their control,” says Colosi, “are bitching at us all the time because we won’t give them a break. We won’t give them a break because they lack consistency. You give them a break on a couple of pitches and pretty soon they’re fighting for a pitch nearly a foot off the plate.”

  “I’ve been having trouble with (Cardinal pitcher) Bob Gibson,” Harvey explains, “since 1961 when I met him in the Puerto Rican League. Now, Gibson seems to think that the plate has four-inch corners. I told him, ‘The home plate is seventeen inches wide. If I give you four-inch corners, that makes it twenty-five inches wide. That’s not the way the game was written.’

  “Gibson has been bitching about this to me for thirteen years, and he’s getting more and more argumentative as he gets older—and less effective. Even his catcher one time, Ted Simmons, told him to ‘fuck off.’ Simmons makes his money as a hitter. He’s smart. He knows that the bigger the strike zone the more difficult it’s going to be for him to get on base. Why should we turn baseball into a pitcher’s game?”

  Says Colosi: “What makes me really mad is the reaction of the fans, or the players in the dugout, or the hypos in the press box. They think they can call the game as good as we can from where they are. Half the time, they’re watching the catcher’s glove. They don’t understand that we couldn’t give a shit less where the catcher catches the ball because we’re watching how and where the ball crosses the plate. You take a pitcher with a good overhand fastball. The ball crosses the plate at the batter’s knees, so we call it a strike. But the catcher receives the ball at the ankles, so to the fans or reporters it might look like a ball.”

  “Or how about a curve ball that breaks and hits the front corner of the plate?” asks Harvey. “By the time it reaches the catcher, it could be two feet outside, but in the meantime it nicked the plate and is consequently called a strike. It doesn’t matter where the batter stands or where the catcher receives the ball. All I care about, all any umpire should care about, is where the ball crosses the plate. That’s when the judgment is made.”

  Harvey lifted his rubber-soled oxfords onto a stool and began to tighten the laces. Looking in the mirror, Colosi carefully placed a blue, brimmed baseball cap on his head. Williams dragged his face mask and blue hat down slowly from the upper shelf. Harvey then looked at Colosi and Williams. “Where the hell is Harry?” he said.

  Suddenly, Wendelstedt whooped, crashed through the toilet stall door, leaped in the air, twisted around and landed in the main room with a barefooted thud. He had shed his underwear, but stood in the middle of that room, staring sheepishly at his partners, and wearing a T-shirt on which he had drawn a large and elaborate swastika in blue ballpoint ink. Neatly lettered above the swastika were the words, “Super Kraut.”

  “Super Kraut!” he yelled, pounding his chest with his gigantic fist, then goose-stepping round and round the room. “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Super Kraut! Super Kraut! Super Kraut!”

  Harvey, Colosi, and Williams watched as the big man twirled and paraded, bare-assed and barefooted, from one corner of the room to the other, again and again. They began to snicker and chuckle as Wendelstedt continued to perform, then finally they exploded in great gusts of laughter as Harry Wendelstedt, as straight-faced, apple-cheeked, and imperturbable as ever, put on his clothes, his light blue, short-sleeved shirt, his navy blue pants, and his suit jacket. He laced his black, ripple-soled oxfords and led his crew somberly out onto the field.

  The players looked at the umpires strangely, then began winking at one another, but none would ever quite understand why these usually mean-jowled, grim-lipped men periodically chuckled and giggled, smiled, and suddenly guffawed through the game. Nor would the fans ever know, or even imagine, that one of the men on the field, wearing the blue suit of authority of that great and uniquely American game of baseball, was wearing a Nazi swastika over his heart, even though it was a joke.

  Art Williams felt the fog and the weight above his eyes lift as he walked slowly out onto the field. He blinked his eyes and a delightful shiver of relief seemed to dance up his back. He accepted the lineups from both managers with an authoritative and enthusiastic nod, checked his digital ball-strike counter, and loaded up his pockets with five newly rubbed baseballs. He stood erect and respectful through the Canadian and American national anthems, staring up at the two flags flapping silently side by side.

  With a great deal of satisfaction, as the dying music still reverberated in the dusty rafters of the ballpark, he turned to the visiting team’s dugout, raised his arm up in a sharp, snapping manner, and yelled, “PLAY BALL!”

  Mounting Problems

  NATIONAL LEAGUE UMPIRE BRUCE Froemming had been particularly peeved by a recent article in the New York Daily News accusing unnamed major league umpires of carrying satchels to the ball park to smuggle baseballs back to their homes or hotels after each game. The article, written by Dick Young, claimed that the New York Mets last year had ordered one of their employees to account for the number of balls hit into the stands. Young contended that the results of the report, sent to the league office, proved beyond a shadow of doubt that umpires were pocketing a half dozen or more baseballs per game for personal use. Their publicizing this report, one unnamed Met official stated, had caused the umpires to decide all close calls against the Mets in 1974. This was one way, the official continued, the umpires could get even. He concluded that he could name three games the Mets would have won, but for umpire prejudice.

  Said Met Manager Yogi Berra, a few weeks later, after a bitterly disputed game: “This is the fourth time this year we’ve been robbed by
umpires. I don’t mind losing. I’ve done that many times in my career, but this is out and out robbery.”

  Froemming, a hot-blooded, fiery-eyed Dutchman, held his mounting anger until he and his crew of Ed Vargo (crew chief), Paul Runge, and Andy Olsen were scheduled to work again in New York. Having rubbed up the five dozen game baseballs provided by the Mets, Froemming returned them to the Mets’s clubhouse with the following note: “Here’s your five dozen baseballs. Count them. Bruce Froemming.”

  The Met ball boy showed the note to catcher Jerry Grote who read it slowly, nodded his head pensively—and snickered. “That article about the missing baseballs really must have hit home,” he said.

  A few innings later Grote neglected to catch or make any effort to block a pitch that had gotten away from pitcher Harry Parker; it narrowly missed Froemming’s forehead. After the game, Froemming charged that Grote had deliberately let the pitch go by so that it would hit the umpire.

  “Froemming doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Met manager Yogi Berra. “Grote was crossed up on the pitch. He called for a curve, but Parker had trouble seeing the sign and threw a fastball.”

  “It happened earlier in the game, too,” Grote defended himself, “but I was able to catch the ball that time.”

  “Bull,” Froemming replied. “I tell you, he let it go on purpose. There were two keys to the play. First, Grote never moved his glove. Second, he never went out to the pitcher to tell him he crossed him up. This was a bush league stunt, strictly out of class D.”

  The situation concerning umpires’ pilfering of baseballs has a basis of truth. Umpires do pocket baseballs now and again: they give them to the children of friends who are instrumental in helping them get along in a strange city more comfortably. They will offer a baseball to a policeman, a taxi driver, an especially helpful employee of their motel, or a relative who might serve them dinner or provide a pleasant evening. “After all,” says Doug Harvey, “these people around the motel, the maids, waitresses, and desk clerks, are all part of our family. Away from home they’re often all we have.”

  For umpires, the question has never been whether they do or do not take baseballs occasionally, but whether they abuse the privilege.

  For the most part, they don’t. There is no one more impartial, no one who works harder at being as scrupulously honest as the man in blue. What neither Dick Young’s article nor the unnamed Met official mentioned, what no person connected with the great game of baseball mentioned, was that players and managers take just as many baseballs as umpires, since they also meet people and make friends as they travel from town to town. It is part of the same pattern as all the office workers and executives who carry home office supplies for their personal use.

  “What makes me so angry,” says Doug Harvey, “is that the owners, players, and managers go through all sorts of contortions to cheat our asses off. They hose down base paths, tamper with bullpen mounds, back up their lying and cheating during a game by swearing in the name of Jesus Christ or on the graves of their mothers, yet they’re ready and willing to crucify us at the slightest sign of weakness.

  “As to the fact that our calls are going against the Mets or any other team because they’ve dared to cross us, this goes to show the remarkable ego these people have. Can you imagine? How could they think that I could care less about who wins or loses a ball game? I’m not getting a share of the profits from a winning team. I get paid the same amount and on the same day no matter who wins or loses. Do you think I would jeopardize my $25,000 a year salary for doing something I truly love just for the sake of token revenge? That’s too preposterous to even consider.

  “When we’re right,” says Harvey, smiling wryly, “nobody says a word. But when we’re wrong, just the slightest bit wrong, the whole world knows it.”

  “If I gave five dollars for every call I’ve missed in my thirty-one years as an umpire in the major leagues, and I received five cents for every call I made right, I’d be a millionaire today,” says former umpire Al Barlick. “Players can make twenty, thirty mistakes—errors—in one season and no one ever says anything. They make a particularly outstanding catch or hit a game-winning home run, and everybody pounds them on the back. But who cheers an umpire when he makes a good call, tell me that? But you just let an umpire make one mistake, and they’re pegged for horseshit for life.”

  As the saying goes: an umpire is expected to be perfect at the start of his career and improve each day after that.

  While their National League brothers were being condemned, the American League umpires, on the other hand, were having a relatively easy time of it. Until the evening of the Indian uprising in Cleveland. American League attendance figures were seriously sagging compared to the relative stability of the other league’s drawing power: by the All Star break, the American League was half a million under 1973, while the National League was half a million over. So the club owners began coming up with a series of ideas to lure fans to the ballpark. The most popular and successful of these was beer night. In Cleveland, this meant that anyone who managed to find his way out of the woodwork or a reformatory to attend a ball game could drink as many twelve-ounce cups of beer as he could swallow at ten cents each. The results were devastating.

  “We could have gotten killed out there very easily,” said crew chief Nestor Chylak after the game in question. His hand was bleeding and his head was dirty and bruised. He had been hit on the head once by a chair and once by a beer bottle concealed in a paper sack. Chylak and his crew of Larry McCoy, Joe Brinkman, and Nick Bremigan, along with the entire Texas Ranger ballclub, had been attacked by many of the 25,194 beer-fogged fans. It had been two out in the bottom of the ninth inning just as the hometown Indians came from behind to rally for a 5-5 tie. But since the fans were unable to contain themselves, Chylak was forced to forfeit the game to the Rangers, 9-0. (When a game is forfeited like this, all runs for the team held responsible for the trouble are cancelled, and the winning team gets one point for each inning that has been played.)

  Chylak, an eighteen-year major league veteran, said: “These people went beer mad. They turned into uncontrollable beasts. They could have killed somebody out there. Animals. Animals! Have I ever seen anything like it before? Yes, in a zoo.”

  The incident erupted when the fans started to harass Texas right fielder Jeff Burroughs. A few people came down onto the field and began pulling on his clothes, attempting to steal his hat and glove. Wielding bats, his Ranger teammates left the dugout to go to Burroughs’s aid. Soon, members of both teams were on the field, battling hundreds of fans who poured out of the stands holding knives, throwing beer bottles and chairs, and setting off firecrackers.

  The Cleveland club owners and management had control of the beer and of the public address system so they could have at any time shut down their refreshment counters and requested that the fans control themselves. However, Indian General Manager Phil Seghi and Vice President Ted Bonda preferred to blame the umpires, rather than admit to any error in judgment on their own part.

  “If the umpires had tried to keep all the players in the dugout and quell the Burroughs incident by itself,” said Bonda, “I don’t think this would have occurred. Besides, the umpires never warned the fans of the possibility that the game could be forfeited. The umpires were wrong.”

  “What the hell does Bonda expect an umpire to do?” asked Harry Wendelstedt, after reading an account of the riot in the newspaper. “They didn’t have suits of armor on. How the hell can four men control 50 or 60 angry athletes and 25,000 drunken fans? I can’t understand why, no matter what happens, no matter how clear the evidence is, the ball clubs are always willing to blame us and the fans are always ready to hurt and insult us.”

  Undoubtedly, umpires often deserve battle pay for the things they are forced to live through. In the recent past, umpires have been beaned by flying pop bottles, chased out of ballparks by hostile fans, assaulted by umbrella-swinging little old ladies, and showered with
dirt and obscenities by players, fans, and managers. Only a decade ago, when the Chicago White Sox hosted a group of caddies on convention, the umpires were pelted with thousands of golf balls. A few years earlier, Ed Runge of the American League (whose son, Paul Runge, now works in the National League) was fire-bombed on the field after making a controversial decision.

  “Last year,” says umpire Billy Williams, “Ed Vargo’s wife was getting a lot of threatening phone calls from some maniac every time Ed umpired a game involving a certain team. I’m telling you, that’s frightening when those cruds—the goofballs, the crazy bastards who got nothing better to do—think umpires are supposed to be targets for any kind of deranged abuse.

  “Couple of weeks ago, I’m sitting in the coffee shop of our hotel in Houston with some friends late at night, when a man came up and whispered in my ear, ‘If the Astros lose tomorrow night, you’ll be dead by morning.’

  “‘What?’ I looked at him like he was crazy. He was crazy. I didn’t know what he was talking about for a minute. I was so shocked, nothing registered right. “‘Who are you?’ I finally said.

  “‘Pete Rose,’ the man answered, “‘and you better listen to what I said, if you want to live.’

  “Then he walked out. I woulda stopped him, but I couldn’t gather myself together. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to you every day.”

  Despite these two instances which represent the worst extremes umpires encounter, Harry Wendelstedt feels that generally the fans’ treatment of umpires has improved. “I think that people have a lot more to worry about than baseball these days, what with Watergate, inflation, and the Vietnamese and Middle East crises. Still, especially in New York and Philadelphia, you see the rowdiest and most ill-tempered fans in the history of baseball. In Philadelphia, you see the greatest, goriest fights in the history of street fighting right in the ballpark. The idea of retribution for losing has escalated to the point where kids now carry knives in their pockets where they used to carry jelly beans. Using these weapons, they obviously have a much lower regard for human life and for the idea of fair play.”