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

by Lee Gutkind

  “I tell those goddamn players,” said Harvey “‘I don’t want you to call all umpires horseshit either. If you say all umpires are horseshit, then you’re calling me horseshit. You do that and I’m going to throw your horseshit ass out of the game.’

  “I’m telling you right now, Art, and I’m telling you true, that if there’s anything you cannot do in this great game of baseball, it is to allow a player, coach, or manager to call you horseshit. That you simply must not do.

  “The way I figure it,” said Harvey, “the way you gotta figure it,” he pointed at Williams, “is that ballplayers arguing with you are trying to steal food out of our children’s mouths.”

  Williams looked up quickly.

  “That’s what I said,” Harvey nodded, “now you listen to me, son, ’cause I’m telling you straight. A ballplayer arguing with you is trying to steal food out of the mouth of your children, they’re trying to repossess your home and throw your family to the dogs.

  “You gotta understand that the only reason a ballplayer argues with you is because he’s trying to make himself look good. And the only way he’s going to make himself look good under those circumstances is to make you look like horseshit.

  “You look like horseshit too many times,” said Harvey, “and it gets back to the league office. And when the league office begins to think that you look like horseshit, the next thing you know, you’re out of a job. Now, you tell me that that player bitching at you, calling you horseshit right out in front of twenty million people, isn’t endangering the health and education and care of your children. Why, they’re trying to sabotage your future, they’re trying to ruin your whole life, they’re trying to lift you out of baseball and set you down in the unemployment lines.

  “All because you stood there,” said Harvey, his voice rising and falling in a singsong, “and took it like a sop-faced chicken ass while they called you horseshit. An umpire can’t allow anybody to call him horseshit. You can’t call a good umpire horseshit even once.”

  Harvey concluded with a deep breath and a flourish, dragging the soles of his boots as he moved quickly across the room to the door. Both Williams and Harvey walked briskly outside without another word.

  Harry Wendelstedt, still hunching naked on his stool, waited until he could hear the door thump closed decisively. Then he sighed. For a while he sat there on the cold, wooden stool studying his bare feet and the corns and callouses on the tops of his toes, listening to the echoes in the hollow room and then the ever-increasing roar of silence.

  Much later Wendelstedt awoke in bed, kicked his blankets and pillows to the floor, then opened his eyes. The whole room was spinning. The walls seemed to be whirling around his head as if he had been dropped into the center of a great whirlpool.

  Harry Wendelstedt stood on the Astroturf in Houston, Texas, two days later at the opening game of a three-game series with Cincinnati, listening to the national anthem. Standing with his hat over his heart, watching the scoreboard flash the words to a relatively disinterested audience, Wendelstedt felt the ground move out from under him. The whole world seemed to simultaneously tilt in a thousand different directions. He remembered crashing to the ground.

  “I felt them grabbing my feet and my head and rolling me over onto a canvas stretcher,” he said many days after. “I felt them lifting me up. I felt light, like a balloon drifting with the clouds, but I couldn’t get my bearings. I tried opening and closing my eyes. Each time I opened my eyes I saw the stadium swirling around me. Each time I closed my eyes I had this sensation of falling, plunging with incredible speed down through a seam in the earth.”

  He was shoveled into a station wagon ambulance which sped over the field, off the Astroturf, down a concrete ramp, across the parking lot, and into traffic. At some point along that highway the driver flipped the siren on, but only much later did Wendelstedt realize that the noise he was hearing was coming from the dome on the roof of the vehicle in which he was traveling, rather than from the screeching inside his head.

  Dog Days

  THE DOCTORS DIAGNOSED WENDELSTEDT’S sudden sickness as an inner ear infection caused by water leaking into the inside of the ear. A fungus had begun to grow, which, when developed enough, tended to totally disrupt the victim’s equilibrium. Thus, in a stationary or prone position, Wendelstedt could converse easily, judge distances, and maintain a satisfactory sense of balance. In trying to stand up, however, he would be overwhelmed by nausea and dizziness, almost as if the floor were being swept right out from under him. The treatment? Drugs and a long, drawn-out sentence of bed rest.

  Although the former part of the treatment turned Wendelstedt into, as he put it, a perpetual zombie, the latter part also affected the other three members of his umpiring crew. Harry Wendelstedt languished in a lonely bed for one week in a Houston Hospital and then, in much more comfortable surroundings, for two and a half additional weeks at his home in Daytona Beach, Florida. That left Doug Harvey, Art Williams, and Jerry Dale with the awesome task of umpiring major league baseball through the dog days of the season with a crew short one man. This was especially hard on crew chief Doug Harvey.

  Harvey received his new arch supports, designed to alleviate the pressure of his body weight on the bone spurs, and thankfully, the pain he had come to expect in his feet, which then welled up into his calves after only a few innings of each game, quickly diminished.

  And yet, as the doctor in Houston had predicted, the supports did little to improve the state of weariness in which he lived. Doug Harvey was wrung out, like a sponge squeezed dry. It seemed as if fate or fortune had planned to allow him no edge, for each time he sensed some improvement in his physical condition, something always happened to make up for it. Three or four times through the season he had felt his strength and stamina returning only to be set back by a fourteen- or sixteen-inning, five-hour game behind the plate or an eight-hour, rain-delayed double-header. Now, with Harry Wendelstedt ill and out for an indefinite time, Harvey, burdened with two of the weaker umpires in the league, had to work a three-man umpiring system, which often meant calling a game behind the plate every other day, as well as doing double duty on the base paths—covering a foul line, one half of the outfield, and the diamond—during the grimiest, hottest, and most difficult month of the year.

  To complicate matters, that same evening that Harry Wendelstedt found himself swimming with dizziness, crew chief Chris Pelekoudas, following a line-shot foul ball down the first base line in Philadelphia’s Veterans’ Stadium, suddenly stumbled and fell. He pulled himself up onto one knee and began choking, his mouth open wide and sucking in the moist summer air. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath and he felt his limbs stiffening up, so much so that he, too, needed the aid of a stretcher and was taken from the field in an ambulance. Initially diagnosed as a stroke, Pelekoudas was actually suffering from severe hypertension, a malady that also required bed rest for cure.

  Thus, within an hour, one twelfth of the National League’s umpiring corps had been struck down.

  The unfortunate coincidence of losing two umpires in the same league at the same time points up one of the biggest weaknesses in the major leagues’ umpiring setup. With all its money and power and talk of future expansion (both leagues had recently decided to add two additional teams within the next three years), neither the National nor American League had been willing to, nor were capable of, establishing a reasonable back-up system for their officials. Baseball’s illogical tradition of treating the umpires like machinery rather than men extends past the fans and players and into management. Major league administrators, led by their well-dressed front man Bowie Kuhn, can’t seem to cope with the idea that umpires can become seriously ill, or that they could require a leave of absence to come to the aid of a family member. There is absolutely no well-conceived contingency plan for such an eventuality.

  In case of emergency, both leagues own the contracts of a few minor league umpires who, like ballplayers, are available for call-up
to the major leagues on twenty-four-hour notice. Jim Quick, twenty-five, and Eric Gregg, twenty-one, both of the Pacific Coast AAA League are owned by the National League, but the very fact that the league has only two reserve umpires and that neither of them had, up to that point, ever worked a day of major league ball, further illustrates the weakness of the system. To plunge an inexperienced and predictably frightened umpire into the heat of a pennant race is like throwing a child into a swimming pool and hoping he will immediately learn enough not to drown. And of the two minor league umpires under contract to the National League, Gregg, a twenty-one-year-old black, was anything but ready for the major leagues. Consequently, Quick joined Pelekoudas’s crew in California two days after the Philadelphia series, but Harvey’s crew received little help.

  Harvey, Williams, and Dale limped through the four games in Houston without Wendelstedt, then worked two games in Atlanta. Next they went to Pittsburgh for two games with the Cardinals and three with the Cubs. For the St. Louis series, the National League sent Andy Olsen to Pittsburgh to work the fourth man’s position, since his crew had received an unusual schedule that included two days off. But then, after two games, Olsen was sent back to New York, leaving Harvey, Williams, and Dale to work a single game Saturday and a Sunday double-header in 94 degree heat and in pollution hovering near the danger zone. Harvey and crew received Monday off, moved to Philadelphia for three games, on to New York for three more, and back to Philadelphia for four additional contests. When Pelekoudas returned to work and Harvey and company were dragging themselves into Montreal for six straight games, the National League finally submitted and dispatched Jim Quick to join them.

  In the end they worked nineteen games as a three-man unit, and six games with a totally inexperienced umpire. In all, they were confronted with twenty-seven games in twenty-seven days, at a period when they were undoubtedly way below their average level of efficiency. Eleven of the games in which the three-man system was utilized involved teams in a tight race for a pennant.

  It makes little sense to put men through such physical and mental hardship. It makes little sense to jeopardize the seasons and careers of those players and teams for whom the three men umpired, just to save a few dollars. The solution to replacing umpires temporarily out of action is simple: an alternate suggestion has been advanced by a number of umpires, including Harvey and Wendelstedt.

  “What we need is more major league umpires,” they say, “young kids up from the minors. They would be here sort of on an internship basis, learning, yet participating simultaneously in the game. When someone is ill or when an umpire is unavoidably called away from his crew, one of these guys can jump in and take over. When all the umpires are healthy, these ‘substitutes’ can alternate around the league. After all, umpires are lonely …why not send them home a couple of days a month? Sometimes umpires work when they’re not feeling too well—so why not use one of these alternate umpires to allow a veteran a few days’ rest?”

  This idea would offer young umpires some needed major league experience, so that they would be much more qualified to officiate effectively during the more important parts of the season. National League officials would also gain by having the opportunity to study prospective umpires and assess their potential for continued major league ball. At this point, the league’s evaluation of young officials is based on their work and effectiveness in the minor leagues and during major league spring training. But managers and coaches of any major league ball club attest to the fact that minor league sensations are as plentiful as mice in a meadow. Big-time ball is the only realistic proving ground for players and, therefore, for umpires.

  Such a system would have helped Art Williams tremendously, for he could have been worked into the major league umpiring network gradually, rather than be thrust into it as he was. The system would have made it possible for Doug Harvey to regain his strength so that, in the latter half of the season, he would have been strong enough to work up to his maximum potential.

  Most major league umpires feel that such suggestions are totally unrealistic, not because such a plan is a bad one, but because neither league would be willing to invest the time and money necessary to operate this system. Only in the past few years have umpires made significant advances in salary, medical, and retirement benefits, and the leaders of the Major League Umpires Association feel that they have more financial objectives to lobby for first.

  “Think of it this way,” says Harry Wendelstedt. “Ten years ago a guy entering major league ball as an umpire was paid seventy-five hundred dollars. That’s at a time when the average middle class family was making ten thousand dollars a year. We couldn’t go any further as far as advancement—after all, we were in the major leagues, and crew chiefs don’t get any more money than anyone else—yet we were twenty-five hundred dollars below the middle class average. We were offered no dental coverage and we paid our own Blue Cross and Blue Shield. We had no job security. Now at least there’s a tenure system after five years of major league ball. But before we went on strike during the 1971 playoff games, we had nothing. Baseball’s bigwigs could fuck us over with one fell swoop of the pen.

  “Why, our pension only totaled two hundred dollars a year for each year of major league service. That meant that a guy who might have as much as forty years in baseball, but only ten years in the major leagues before retirement—and we can’t wait for sixty-five until we retire, we gotta go at fifty-five—ends up with a grand total of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. And he’s been at the top of his profession for ten years!

  “We’ve made some important progress since then, I admit. Great medical benefits, a halfway decent retirement program that pays an umpire five hundred dollars for each year of major league ball. Umpires now start in the major leagues at $15,500 and a twenty year major league veteran can make more than $30,000; we get $11,000 to work a World Series and about half that amount if we’re selected for the playoffs. But still, that’s pretty pitiful for a person who has worked maybe twenty, thirty years and advanced to the pinnacle of his profession. We’re talking about a person who has to make his mark in the world—at least in a financial sense, before he hits fifty-five. Compare what we make to the $200,000 salaries of players. Compare it with the average run-of-the-mill player who makes anywhere from $35,000-to $50,000 a year. You better believe that if we’re going to do any striking or lobbying, it’s going to be on behalf of our pocketbooks right now. Our request for increased pension benefits has been tabled until next year to see what effect the energy crisis has on attendance figures, but we won’t hold still when we meet around a conference table this winter. Already, some of the guys who just recently retired have been forced to take part-time jobs.

  “Out of a sense of pure practicality,” Wendelstedt continued, “the league should provide those alternate umpires. With umpires who are well and rested, baseball could be a better game.

  “But improving the game doesn’t seem to concern the administrators and owners of baseball teams,” Wendelstedt frowned. “All they want to do is win—at anybody’s expense. To make bundles of money and to win. That seems to be their only clear-cut objective.”

  Harry Wendelstedt made that statement and others like it near the beginning of the 1974 baseball year, but in his bed in his home in Daytona Beach, Florida, recuperating from an inner ear infection, spending a good part of his days mulling over the plight of the umpire—a constant preoccupation—he would have undoubtedly added more fire and bitterness and profanity to his words. Umpires’ tongues seem to loosen near the end of the season, their patience wears thinner, their tolerance for criticism and their ability to control tempers grow brittle. The pressure of the final month of the season seems to sap an umpire’s self-control. Like flint scraped against a rock, the sparks fly. Harry Wendelstedt was to discover this unfortunate truth upon his return to umpiring, when he would rendezvous with his crew in California during the first few days of September.

  Nice Guys Finish Last

>   IT WAS IN SAN DIEGO, on a breezy Thursday night three days after Wendelstedt had rejoined the crew, still somewhat sluggish and groggy from his twenty-seven-day menu of medicine, that the bare threads of ego and anger finally snapped.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Wendelstedt asked Harvey as they met halfway down the third base line between innings. “I think he’s losing his marbles. He’s in a fog.”

  Harvey shook his head and sighed. Both men were becoming increasingly impatient with their partner’s lack of attentiveness to the more sophisticated aspects of umpiring. Wendelstedt had almost exploded the evening before when the Cardinals had sent in their top reliever, Al Hrabosky, to work the final two innings and protect a slim one run lead. At some point in his career Hrabosky had acquired the irritating and time-consuming habit of stepping off the mound and talking to himself, sort of psyching himself up between each and every pitch. Certainly there was no rule prohibiting such tactics—as long as the pitcher consumes no more than twenty seconds from the time he receives the ball until he delivers it. This eliminates the possibility of a pitcher being able to delay the game indefinitely—a ruse often employed during poor weather conditions with one team hopelessly behind. The second base umpire is charged with the responsibility of carrying a stopwatch, timing the pitcher when he becomes suspect, and calling an automatic ball after the full twenty seconds between pitches have lapsed. (When no one is on base. The rule is suspended with base runners.)

  Although, in their own minds, Wendelstedt and Harvey had counted anywhere from thirty to thirty-five seconds between some pitches, Williams hadn’t even pulled out the stopwatch until Wendelstedt trotted over from first base to remind him. Even then, he didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to cite an infraction.

  “Damn,” Williams had said after the game, “I just forgot. I had my hand in my pocket, my fingers over the watch, I knew exactly what Hrabosky was doing, but I forgot to time him. I can’t explain it.”