by Lee Gutkind
“I had just finished working a game in Auburn in the New York-Penn (Pennsylvania) League,” says ex-American League umpire Jake O’Donnell, now an American Basketball Association (ABA) official, “and I was on my way to the car. It had been a rough day. I ejected the home team’s manager after an argument and the crowd wouldn’t let me forget it. When the game was over, all I wanted to do was get to my car and get out of there. I reached the car, but I didn’t go anywhere. All my tires were slashed. All I could think of was ‘Helluva career you’ve chosen, Jake, helluva career.’”
Of course, any umpire asked to think back to his days and nights working minor league ball will grit his teeth and solemnly point out that nowhere else in America do baboons and wild hogs—deranged beyond rehabilitation—regularly collect in such large numbers each and every night.
“I was umpiring a game behind the plate one night,” says George Hoffmann, eighty-two, a veteran minor league umpire. “You know, I was leaning real low over the catcher’s shoulder, trying to concentrate above the noise of the crowd. And the people were really cheering. I didn’t understand why, but I’ll tell you, I had never heard them so happy in this particular town. Well, suddenly, I had a funny feeling. You know that kind of feeling you get when somebody is watching you or sneaking up close behind you? Just a feeling, a tickle, that’s hard to explain. So I turned around. And there’s this big black man, seemed to me he was ten feet tall, poised right behind me with his arm lifted up and a knife in his hand. I thought I had really had it that time. There was nothing else to do but run. I beat him by two steps and locked myself in the umpires’ room until he went away. I musta waited two hours.”
Hoffmann shook his head and laughed. Lines of memory and time zigzagged across his ruddy face.
“I got away ’most every time the fans were after me. I had a feeling that they really didn’t want to catch me, they just liked chasing. One of the closest calls I had came early in my career in Class D ball when two rival towns, no more than twenty miles apart, were playing each other. It was definitely a grudge match. Anyway, the two managers got into a terrible fistfight during the course of the game and I ejected them both.
“Naturally, the fans had no other choice but to come after me. I mean, there was only two umpires, me and my partner, so we were much more vulnerable than anybody else. They waited for us outside the door to our dressing room, but we outsmarted them—at least we thought we did—by climbing out through the back window. Before we were spotted, we made it to the car and took off down the road.
“Unfortunately, there was only one road out of this area—we were in Pennsylvania—and either way we went we’d have to go through one of the two towns. Would you believe that they had roadblocks set up on the outskirts of both towns? They wouldn’t let us in one town, so we turned around and went back—and they wouldn’t let us in the other town. Oh, they would have let us in, all right, but they wouldn’t have let us out alive. Well, we stayed on the road all night, continually driving back and forth for fear of stopping, falling asleep, and being ambushed. We waited until the next morning when they returned to their farms and went off to work. It was really frightening, though. I would have made book on the fact that my number was up. I kept trying to remember, all through that night, if I had purchased a grave site.”
Says veteran Tom Gorman: “The toughest thing was being black in the minor leagues in the old days. I remember one time I was in Georgia—Gaymar, Georgia, I think it was—and Monte Irvin, one of the first black players in baseball, was playing on Leo Durocher’s team. This was just at the beginning of Durocher’s managing career. Irvin, of course, went on to be a star with the Giants and is now the public relations director for the major leagues.
“When I came out on the field before the game I saw the sheriff of the town sitting in the seat directly behind home plate. He was wearing a big, low-hanging six-shooter and a ten gallon hat. He said to me: ‘Is that nigger going to play ball today?’
“‘I don’t know,’ I said.
“‘Well, if he steps up to that plate, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to shoot him.’
“‘Sheriff, I want you to tell that to somebody else,’ I said. Then I went and brought Leo over.
“‘If that nigger steps up to the plate tonight or any other night in this town,’ the sheriff said, ‘I’m going to shoot him.’
“Well, Leo didn’t say anything. He just nodded reflectively, shuffled around a little bit, drawing designs in the dirt with the toe of his spikes, then walked away. I watched carefully, though, waiting for him to tell Irvin, but that old bastard never said a word to the kid. He was gonna let him play!
“Meanwhile, I was getting nervous. I was working behind the plate, you know? I didn’t want to be in the line of fire. So I went over and I told Monte what the sheriff had said.
“‘Is that what he said?’
“‘I’m not kidding you, Monte.’
“Irvin nodded and went back into the dressing room, put on his street clothes and started walking back to his hotel. Durocher took off after him. They talked for a couple of seconds, then Leo turned around and tore into me.
“‘YOU TOLD HIM! YOU TOLD HIM!’ Leo yelled. ‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TELL HIM FOR? YOU WANT US TO LOSE THIS GAME?’”
There isn’t an umpire in the major leagues today that doesn’t have a couple of minor league stories on the tip of his tongue. Some have been exaggerated, but a good many are true. For umpires, working one’s way into the major leagues often includes running a gauntlet made up of hostile players and fanatical fans. But, as many umpires have repeatedly found out—most recently Nestor Chylak and his crew in Cleveland—even reaching the major leagues, the fruition of their dreams, doesn’t necessarily secure their safety. Even in the major leagues, insulting and abusing the umpire are integral parts of our national pastime.
The heat continued for Harvey, Wendelstedt, Colosi, and Williams as the 1974 baseball season plodded toward its midway point. In a four game series between Chicago and Pittsburgh held in Chicago, Harvey first took on the entire Pirate dugout in an argument involving a game-winning double by Bill Madlock which the Pirates claimed had been a foul ball. Wendelstedt then had his difficulties with the Pirates when he refused to call a third strike on Rick Monday. The Pirates contended that Monday had swung at the ball, and they appealed to third base umpire Doug Harvey, who ruled with Wendelstedt. This, the Pirates claimed, cost them still another game.
Thus, the Pirates left “the Windy City” for three games in St. Louis, breathing fire and resentment toward the men in blue, most of which was unjustified. The Pirates had been commiting an average of two errors a game, and they hadn’t been hitting with regularity. They couldn’t attribute their fifth place standing, nine and one half games behind the pack, to the umpires, although they tried when Harvey’s crew showed up in St. Louis.
During the series, the Pirates lost three out of three games and eight out of eight arguments. The most disputed play came in the second inning of the second game of a Sunday doubleheader. With none out, Richie Hebner at second, and Paul Popovich at first, left fielder Lou Brock raced in, attempting to snatch Mike Ryan’s fly ball. Hebner was so sure that it would fall in for a base hit that he kept running, not even pausing to see Doug Harvey’s ruling on the play. Unfortunately for Hebner, however, Harvey ruled that Brock caught the ball. Brock threw to second and the Cardinals completed a double play. Eventually, they made a clean sweep of the double-header.
But bullpen coach Don Leppert was incensed and accused Harvey of loafing on the play: “If he (Harvey) was out there when he should have been, it would have been an easy call. The ball hit almost a foot in front of Brock.”
In all, on that very tiring afternoon, Doug Harvey’s crew ejected three members of the Pirate team and fined them a total of three hundred dollars for throwing batting helmets. Hebner was subsequently fined another two hundred fifty dollars by the league and even more money was taken from him
by his own front office for not paying attention to the play. His mistake and subsequent outburst eventually reduced his bank account by nearly a thousand dollars.
Umpires’ schedules are made up and forwarded to the crews two or three weeks in advance by Fred Fleig, secretary and second in command of the National League. Fleig, a graduate of Harvard Business School and a thirty-year veteran baseball administrator, tries to coordinate the travels of his umpiring crews so that they stay no more than four days in any one town or with any one team. He attempts to arrange that crews work each city and officiate games involving each team an equal number of times. Understandably, the distribution isn’t perfect and when he can make exceptions to place umpires near their families, he will. Three of the four members of Tom Gorman’s crew, for example, live in or near New York during the off-season. Thus, Gorman’s crew might work the Mets’ home games more than any other crew in the league. Harvey’s crew might be awarded an extra swing through the West Coast, since both Williams and Harvey live less than a few hours from Los Angeles and Harvey is quite close to San Diego.
Fleig, however, has been around long enough to know that a team, especially one that has been consistently losing since the beginning of the year, and a crew of umpires cannot sustain a peaceful relationship in ten straight games. (Prior to the Chicago series, Harvey and company had been in Pittsburgh for three games.)
“Umpires move around often, jumping from city to city,” explains Doug Harvey. “Don’t think we like to do this, living out of a suitcase and adjusting to a back-breaking bed every other day. But there are two good reasons why this is so important. First, we can’t afford to get too involved with the problems of a ballteam or to become too cozy or casual with the players on the team. This can happen if you spend a long enough time with the same group of boys. Listen to a sportscaster or go up to the press box and talk to some of the writers. As reporters, they’re supposed to be as objective as we are. But how can they, being with the same team and the same people nine months of the year? You spend ten, twelve games on their field with the same guys, you see them in the locker room, occasionally pass the time of day, and pretty soon your business relationship is eroded. They become casual, they think they can talk to you, reason with you, take advantage of your acquaintanceship. Being with a team that long is just no good.
“Secondly, if the team is losing, and you’re there every time they drop a game, they’re going to start to look for excuses. They’ll make the connection all right, you can bet on it. And what happens if we do blow a play, the first or second game? It sometimes happens, you know. Well, they’re going to be on you for the rest of your time together. It’s expected. As it is, players never forget. They come up to you in August and ask about a pitch somebody threw in April. And we’re expected to remember. They’ve got memories like elephants—for everything but their own mistakes. But if we get out of there in three days, the next time they see you, two, three weeks later, it’s forgotten. But look here! When we stay with the Pirates ten days running there’s going to be trouble. No way to avoid it. No way at all.” He lifted up his shoulders, shrugged, and sighed.
It had not been a very invigorating or satisfying ten days for Doug Harvey. For that matter, it had not been a very good month or a very good season. It was the first time that any of the four men could remember umpires being under such continuous attack from all quarters. It was almost as if the whole structure of respect and regard for the importance and the integrity of the regulations and of the men who enforced them was crumbling.
Of course, as Doug Harvey pointed out, Richard M. Nixon’s authority was also unravelling like a ragged shoelace under the onslaught of criticism from the press and the populace. But there was reason for the attacks on the President of the United States, there was reason for the pain inflicted upon him by the press, and reason for his fall from grace in the eyes of the people. But what had happened to the authority of the baseball umpire? What had caused the undermining of his position? What was happening to the great game of baseball when winning meant only dollar signs while losing was taken so personally that it was no longer accepted with grace, but occasioned open and furious hostility?
Such thoughts were in the umpires’ minds on July 23 as they packed their bags and readied themselves for their trip home for the three-day All Star game break. In the privacy of their own rooms, each of the four men felt a shiver of foreboding edge its way up his back and prick his neck. Whatever had made the first four months of the season so difficult for them should pass in the heat of the pennant drive. Yet, each of the four, most especially Wendelstedt and Williams, would have to cope with much more serious and personal difficulties during the final two months of the baseball year.
Don’t Let Anybody Ever Call You Horseshit
DOUG HARVEY, HARRY WENDELSTEDT, and Art Williams returned from their all too brief vacation a little bit healthier and a whole lot happier after spending three days with family and friends. Then they discovered that the National League had launched a major shake-up of umpiring crews to coincide with the All Star break. In the process, Nick Colosi had been snatched to beef up Tom Gorman’s withering corps and had been replaced by a relative rookie, a man with only three years’ experience in major league ball, Jerry Dale.
It was National League practice to switch umpire crews very late in the year, usually two or three weeks before the end of the season, especially during tight eastern and western division competition, so that the best four or eight umpires in the league could be collected in one or two crews to work the most significant games. This early reassignment, although unexpected, did not surprise either Doug Harvey or Harry Wendelstedt. National League President Chub Feeney had indicated his dissatisfaction with some of the umpires that year: he told a reporter in Pittsburgh during the All Star game that three of the twenty-four National League umpires were in danger of losing their jobs.
Although Feeney had mentioned no names, most of the reporters, players, coaches, and certainly the umpires had some pretty accurate ideas as to whom the President had in mind. Five-year-veteran Dave (Satch) Davidson, who, along with Colosi, had been assigned to join Tom Gorman, was in perhaps the most vulnerable position. Davidson, a product of the major league’s Umpire Development Program, had been in trouble since first entering the National League, mostly because of his inability to coordinate his reflexes with his knowledge of the rule book. Although he usually knew the answers to the questions shot at him during disputed calls by players and managers, he often found himself flustered to inarticulateness under the heat and pressure of dissent. He seemed to wither under the excitement of close plays, sometimes changing his mind on a call, or flashing the hand sign for “out” while simultaneously yelling “safe!” Many umpires attributed Davidson’s failings to an inability to maintain his concentration. He was the only umpire in the National League who reported to spring training season on a probationary contract. It was hoped that under the tutelage of Tom Gorman, twelve-year veteran Billy Williams, and Nick Colosi, Davidson would improve enough during the last third of the season to secure his position in the major leagues.
Jerry Dale was also in trouble. A native of Indiana now living in California, Dale taught junior high school during the winter months and had attained a master’s degree from UCLA; his thesis had focused on the personality characteristics of major league umpires. Thirty-eight years old, gray-haired, stocky, and soft-spoken, Jerry Dale was not a favorite of many of the more fiery umpires in the league.
“I’m a loner,” he said. “When I’m on an airplane I bury myself in a book. On the road, I don’t stay in the same hotels with other umpires. I don’t eat with them, drink with them, socialize with them very often. I’m a loner and I like it just that way.”
Although Dale was considered a potentially skillful official, neither his quiet personality and his insistence upon a private existence, nor the fact that he would tolerate all kinds of abuse and criticism from coaches, managers, players on the fie
ld helped him as an umpire.
This latter problem also represented the ultimate danger for Art Williams, the third umpire Feeney had allegedly singled out. Much of the knowledge and many of the skills required for good major league umpiring could be learned through experience, practice, and study. But the most important, the essential quality demanded by the profession, was a spirit of unbending pride and insurmountable courage. Wendelstedt, Harvey, Froemming, Barlick, and many other umpires believed that an umpire was a man’s man whose every bone and sinew, every bubble and breath of life should be a reflection and reinforcement of machismo. In short, that meant that on the field, you didn’t take any shit from anyone. Although Dale was experiencing other difficulties in adapting to the big leagues, the fact that he tolerated so much abuse was considered his primary problem. Art Williams’s dilemma was even more complicated. Already a number of ballclubs had complained to the National League office about what they felt was his shoddy officiating. Fred Fleig, supervisor of umpires, in a meeting with Harvey, Wendelstedt, and Williams, had warned Williams that if he didn’t show marked improvement during the last third of the season, his job would be in jeopardy.
Doug Harvey’s patience was wearing thin. He just couldn’t quite understand why the instructions and criticism he and Wendelstedt had offered throughout the season weren’t reflected in the quality of Art Williams’s work.
Both before and after Williams’s disastrous confrontation with Expo Coach Walt Hriniak, they repeatedly told him that his fancy step-out call left him in an awkward position, off-balance to judge a follow-up play. But Williams seemed either unable or unwilling to control his footwork. Neither could Harvey understand why Williams seldom asked questions or sought advice to improve himself. “Certainly he doesn’t believe he’s umpiring up to major league standards,” Harvey told Wendelstedt a few days after the All Star break. “It takes the best qualified umpire five years to learn to do a decent job in the major leagues, and Williams is far from the best in both ability and courage.”