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

by Lee Gutkind

  “In two years of major league umpiring,” said Wendelstedt, “he’s only ejected two men. And both this year. We’re not in a contest to see how many people we can eject, I know that, but surely you can figure that something is terribly wrong with the way he’s handling situations when every other umpire ejects anywhere from five to ten ballplayers each year. He’s not immune to the heat, you know. He’s got to learn to stand up for his rights.”

  Harvey nodded. “You’re right, but I don’t know what else to do. I want to help the kid.”

  Wendelstedt sighed and shrugged. He was not in very good spirits, mostly because he was missing his family again after having just been with them for three straight days and also because he had worn himself out during his vacation, splashing in the pool with his son, Harry Hunter, and Cheryl and eating, drinking, and visiting with his friends. It was a vacation after which he needed a vacation. He had tried to cram in a whole summer in less than half a week. “I’m giving up,” he said. “I’ve taken Williams out for drinks and dinner and I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, but I just can’t do any more. I like him and I want to help, but he doesn’t want my help. He won’t respond. That’s all there is to that.”

  “But he’s going to lose his job.”

  “He won’t lose his job,” Wendelstedt shook his head. “The league is committed to having a black umpire.”

  “But Fleig said …”

  “Fleig is a good guy. He’s always done right by me, but this time, he’s not saying what he means.”

  “Well, I’m going to keep trying,” Harvey pledged.

  “Not me,” said Wendelstedt. “I’m too tired to go at it any more.”

  “Listen, Art,” said Harvey that evening in the umpires’ room in Busch Stadium in St. Louis. “You see Manny Sanguillen (Pirate catcher) complaining to me about a call I made out there tonight? You think I let him get away with it?”

  Williams shook his head and looked up at Harvey. He had worked first base that evening and had a difficult time of it. Lou Brock, the Cardinal left fielder, who was attempting to break Maury Wills’s record for most bases stolen in one season, had been very difficult to deal with. Brock had to get on base if he was going to add to his already impressive total of stolen bases, and so he fought for every close play with the fury and conviction of a man bent on destiny. That night Williams had been a constant target.

  “You can’t let people shit on you,” said Wendelstedt. “You’re an umpire. Don’t you know what that means? We’ve got to control that game, we’ve got to rule those players. Otherwise, they’re going to tramp all over us.”

  “Sanguillen was bitching about a call I made in the first inning,” said Harvey. “Pitch after pitch, inning after inning, he’s still bitching about that same call I made in that goddamn first inning.”

  “I can just picture him,” Wendelstedt said, “that goddamn Sanguillen can drive you crazy. I can just picture him, looking up at you, smiling that goddamn gap-toothed smile of his and squealing, ‘You mees that peetch! You mees that peetch! You no like me. You mees that peetch!’”

  “You got it, Harry,” said Williams, smiling.

  “He’s really something,” said Wendelstedt.

  “I stood up right in front of goddamn home plate, put my ass toward the pitcher and told him,” said Harvey, ‘Manny, let’s get something straight right now. You didn’t like that pitch I called, but I called it three innings ago, so right or wrong, good or bad, what’s done is done. Now don’t quote me history, Manny, I’m warning you right now. You’ve talked about that pitch for three innings and if you think I’m going to listen to you talk about that pitch for another three innings, you’re fuckin’ out of your mind. A crying catcher is like a bad tooth,’ I told him, ‘and if you don’t get rid of a bad tooth it’s going to hurt you more and more. I’m not here to pull the daisies, Manny, I’m here to work a game. Now, I’m tellin’ you Manny, don’t quote me history. Don’t quote me history or I’ll run your ass right out of the ballpark.’” Harvey turned to Williams, still sitting on his stool looking up at his crew chief. “You see what I mean, Art?”

  “Sure,” said Williams, “you gotta be tough like Harry.” Williams smiled and winked over toward his partner.

  Wendelstedt shrugged back at the black man, then lapsed into a weighty, almost painful silence. Considerably depressed, he just didn’t feel like talking about umpiring anymore, to Williams or, for that matter, to anyone else right then. He sat there instead, silently thinking, unable to understand, yet understanding completely. He couldn’t understand why the high standards necessary for superior accomplishment in his profession, a profession that required a man to be wholly honest and impartial for three to seven hours each day, a profession that demanded a demon’s concentration, an artist’s dedication, a clergyman’s sense of propriety—were to be sacrificed or temporarily set aside for the sake of racial equality.

  Logically, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to take a man who had spent only two and a half years of preparation in minor league ball and thrust him into the heartache and hell of major league competition, not when there were many more qualified people in the minor leagues, baking in the sun and breathing in the dust year after year, just waiting and praying for the opportunity which, through increased skill and everlasting patience, they had earned. What had ever happened to the great American concepts of fair play to all competitors and justice to all men, white or black or red or yellow?

  For the American League to have purchased a Spanish-speaking umpire from the Mexican League last winter, a man who needed an interpreter to communicate in English, just so the league could boast a Latin American umpire, was unfair. For the National League to have rushed Art Williams through the minor league system was equally unfair. It was unfair to the ten or so umpires who had put in their time and paid their dues and were now ready to be tested in the majors. It was unfair to Art Williams, who had been put in the awkward position of trying to do a man’s job with less than an adequate frame of reference. Because of his color, Wendelstedt knew, Art Williams might very well remain in the major leagues and eventually come to be an adequate umpire. But in the meantime, his mistakes undermined the efforts of umpires in both leagues. And if Art Williams failed to stick, what would this mean to other black umpires in the future? Surely, it couldn’t have anything but a bad effect.

  Wendelstedt knew that he would be accused of racism if he ever stated his views publicly, and he was honest enough with himself to know that deep down, evidence of prejudice and bigotry very well might be unearthed. Yet, he was convinced that his attitude and disappointment had nothing to do with the color of Art Williams’s skin. It was the principle of the situation more than anything else, he thought, as he snapped open a cold can of beer and stared over at Harvey morosely.

  Harvey, slumped like a sack of potatoes in a folding chair in front of his dressing cubicle, stared at Williams, shook his head, and sighed. He wondered whether it was worth continuing the discussion. He had tried so often this year to help Williams, repeatedly drilling him, attempting to transfer the knowledge that he, now a veteran, had learned. He was convinced that Williams had the physical tools to be a good umpire, but did he have the courage and the fortitude to hold up under the ever increasing pressure, especially in a season where, it seemed, none of the National League teams in the eastern division could win enough games to stumble far enough ahead to take a commanding lead? Right now, as they sat, their elbows resting on their knees, sweat dribbling down their cheeks and scarring the floor, only three and a half games separated the fourth place Pirates from the first place Philadelphia Phillies. In fact, only ten games separated the Phillies from the New York Mets in the back of the pack.

  Doug Harvey stood, slipped the straps of his white chest protector down over his shoulders, and allowed the protector to thump to the floor. Grunting dejectedly, he picked it up and hung it on a hook in the wooden cubicle, then sat, stooped over, and began unlaci
ng his shoes.

  He was tired. In fact, he could never remember being as tired, as wrung out, as he felt right then. The game that night had gone almost four hours, twelve full innings, in windless, ninety degree heat, and Harvey’s whole body throbbed. When he slipped off his shoes and socks, his feet were red and swollen, and when he tried to wiggle his toes to trigger the circulation, they only half-heartedly responded to his signal.

  On their last trip to Houston before the All Star break, he had gone to see a specialist at the Texas Medical Center, where Dr. Denton Cooley had completed so many of those successful heart transplants. After a thorough examination the doctor had discovered that the bottoms of his feet were riddled with bone spurs. “These are something like knuckles,” the doctor had explained, “that grow directly over a bruised or overused part of the bone. What happens is, these spurs must absorb and subsequently reject the entire weight of your body. It’s damn painful.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” Harvey said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m standing in a bed of hot coals or that there’s a bonfire under my feet.”

  “Yes,” the doctor nodded.

  “I swear, doctor, I sleep twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day, and when I wake up, it’s like I haven’t been asleep for a week. Could these bone spurs be the cause of that?”

  “I don’t think so. I think the reaction you had to the penicillin from the dog bite was quite serious. It’s obviously sapped your strength and will continue to do so for quite a long time. Recuperation is gradual. Slowly, you’ll feel yourself gathering more energy. There’s no telling how much longer it’s going to take, but right now you’ll just have to try to live through it.”

  “That’s what the league doctor in San Francisco and my family doctor in San Diego told me.”

  “Judging from all the evidence, it’s the only advice we can give.”

  Harvey had sunk his feet into molds of wet plaster of Paris that afternoon from which special insoles would subsequently be made for insertion in his shoes to alleviate some of the pressure on the spurs. He would pick them up on his next trip to Houston, two days hence.

  Harvey looked across the dressing room. Williams, slowly chewing one of the sandwiches provided for the umpires after the game, was looking up at him expectantly. Dale had already stripped off his clothes and padded into the shower room and Harvey could hear the water spraying against the polished tile. Wendelstedt sat hunched on his stool in front of his cubicle, silently nursing a beer.

  That Dale was certainly a strange case, Harvey thought. Dale did not travel with the umpires as they moved from town to town, nor did he participate in pre-game or post-game banter in the umpires’ dressing room. Like a shadow, he moved in and out of their lives, doing his job, but doing little else to enhance the solidarity of the crew.

  Yet, as with all conservative and understated people, Jerry Dale did have one flashy eccentricity known only to those who had seen the man with his pants down. He wore absolutely bizarre brief underwear, made of shiny black nylon with murals silk-screened in elaborate colors over the crotch. Dale had a red and blue and green and gold fighting cock, a purple and yellow crow, a gold and black tiger, and a red and amber jewel-studded gorilla, to name only a few of the works of art that adorned him.

  “Look Art,” said Harvey slowly, “umpires have been getting a lot of shit this season. The Pirates and the Mets especially have been throwing plenty at us, but let me tell you something son, you ain’t seen the half of it. Up to this time, we been playing for peanuts here in the National League. None of the games were that important because there were plenty games remaining. None of the times at bat were that important for individual players because a guy could figure, if he was playing regular, that he’d be up another three hundred times. But now we’re coming down to the wire, my boy, we’re into the ‘dog days’ of the season, with double-headers up our ass in the hottest and most despicable month of the year. We got five months down and two months to go and the players and managers are starting to look more seriously into the future.

  “And what do they see?” asked Harvey, pausing to raise a forefinger. “I’ll tell ya what they see. They see, first of all, that any of the ten teams in this goddamn twelve-team division can ass-kick themselves into the playoffs. You got ten games separating all six teams in the eastern division and thirteen and a half games separating the first four teams in the west. You got the Dodgers five and a half games out in front of Cincinnati, but after last year, with Cincinnati down seven games with a month to go in the season and coming back to win in the last two weeks, the Dodgers ain’t got it made. You know that well as I do.

  “Come August, everybody’s on fucking pins and needles ’cause the whole fucking season can be boiled down to the last six weeks. Everything’s on the line. Most valuable player, batting title, Cy Young Award. You make a bad call at second base and maybe that deprives Lou Brock of stealing a hundred bases this year. What’s he got now? Eighty? At the beginning of the season, he didn’t know he had one chance in hell of breaking Wills’s record, but now that he knows he’s got a real shot, he’s going to be fighting you every which way. No matter if you’re right ninety-nine out of one hundred times, no matter if you’re right one hundred out of one hundred times, he and everybody else is going to fight you for every questionable pitch and every close call. Right now, everything counts double.

  “And how about the players having a bad season? They’re going to be on the umpire’s ass too. The good players, the steady ones that perform year after year, like Billy Williams of the Cubs, they won’t hassle you. They know that if they’re having a bad year, it’s not the umpire’s fault. They know the strike zone hasn’t changed, they’ve changed, they’ve gotten older and maybe fucked up their swing. It’s the goddamn younger players mostly, the marginal players, that are fighting for a job, the ‘humpty dumpties’ who don’t know whether they’ll be up here next year, they’re the ones that’s going to get you. They’re going to argue their way to first base is what they’re going to try to do, and if you keep taking the horseshit and abuse you been taking through this whole year, they’re going to succeed. And you’ll look like a chicken ass. To the players and the fans and the people in the league office, that’s exactly what you’ll look like. A goddamn, horseshit chicken ass!”

  Harvey stood up and dropped his pants, his belt buckle clinking to the floor, and kicked them across the room. He pulled his T-shirt etched with a “straight arrow” over his head, then stepped out of his soggy long johns, brown with dust, and gray from repeated washings. He looked back over at Williams.

  “Now you take a guy like Ralph Garr (Atlanta outfielder). Nice kid, doesn’t cause any trouble. He’s batting .360 and leading the whole goddamn league by thirty-five points. You’d think there’d be no reason in the world for him to bitch at me. But I had to eject him last week on that ground ball he tried to leg out to first base, didn’t I? You see, he’s starting to run scared. He’s got the batting title in his pocket and the pressure to keep it there is tremendous.”

  “That was a tough play,” said Williams.

  “Horseshit tough play. He was out by half a step. He shoulda known it, but he wanted that goddamn base hit so bad he couldn’t think straight.”

  “He sure was mad,” said Williams.

  “You talk about mad. I thought old Smokey Alston was going to beat your head in when you stopped that line shot by Jimmy Wynn. You can’t go laughing at things like that.”

  “I was so embarrassed, Doug. I couldn’t get out of the way. The ball just hit me and I felt terrible, ’cause there were men on base and it was sure to fall in for extra bases.”

  “I’m not faulting you for that,” said Harvey. “That happens to all umpires once in a while, but what I’m saying is, you can’t smile like a goddamn, horseshit Guinea. That was a serious thing for Alston. With a couple of runs, he might have won that game. You can’t do that, Art, embarrassed or not. These guys w
ant to win too much.”

  Finishing his sandwich, Williams tossed his undershorts into a pile of dirty laundry in the middle of the floor and followed Harvey into the shower room. He eased under the shower backwards, so that the heat would first sooth the stiffness in the small of his back, then slowly stepped in so that the hard hot spray would climb up his neck and finally tumble over his head and chest. Stepping away from the water, he soaped himself thoroughly, white bubbles beading and popping on his brown smooth skin and pictured, as he washed, the layer of dust and sweat and worry accumulated during and after the game, swirling like a whirlpool down the gaping drain. Williams looked over at Doug Harvey as he washed. The man’s eyes were closed, his head tilted back under the force of the water, his glittering silver hair plastered over his forehead and above his eyes.

  Of all the men Art Williams had ever known, in baseball and in other walks of life, he thought Doug Harvey to be the finest. Never had he expected any man, most especially a white man, to take so much time and patience in helping him become what he most wanted to be: a major league umpire. Williams was never insulted or in any way distressed when Harvey criticized his performance on the field because he knew Doug Harvey wanted him to succeed. Harvey’s willingness to give of his time and knowledge and to explain with impeccable patience any problem that might be confronting the young umpire was most appreciated. “I never mind telling you anything you want to know about officiating this game,” Harvey often said. “I don’t mind telling you anything once. But I never want to have to say it twice. Not ever.”

  And yet, what Art Williams couldn’t understand, what he tried desperately to understand, was why he was being criticized so often and so intensely, not only by Harvey and Wendelstedt, but even by the league office in San Francisco. God knows he was trying to become a better umpire, trying harder and working more diligently than he ever thought possible. In his own mind he was convinced that he had made tremendous progress in the past two years, working with Harvey and Wendelstedt this year, and Harvey and veteran Shag Crawford the year before. He had attempted to copy the styles of Harvey and Crawford and was certain that a little of the best qualities of both men had rubbed off on him.