Play Ball!
Later today, we talk with former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent, who wrote an Op-Ed piece yesterday (the first day of the mid-season All-Star break) on the most under-appreciated men on the field, the umpires. Standing stolidly amid the multi-millionaires, the men in blue are working class heroes. When they do their job properly, they're supposed to be invisible, utterly impartial arbiters and are expected to remain stoic amid the ego storms of ballplayers, coaches and managers.
On one hand, the decisions they make are pretty simple - ball/strike, fair/foul, out/safe. In a world colored in shades of grey (and some more unattractive colors), many of us would happily embrace such professional clarity. To an outsider, the job appears to involve no more than three to four hours a day (except for now-rare doubleheaders) in the glorious surroundings of Yankee Stadium or Camden Yards and get paid pretty well, especially for seasonal work. As we'll hear, it ain't that easy.
And consider their apprenticeship. We all know that almost every ballplayer spends four or five years riding the buses in the minor leagues. The umps, too, toil for years, traveling endlessly across the country. Think, just for a minute, about the crew that works a series in El Paso and heads out to their next assignment. There is nowhere close. And these younger men (almost all of them are male) have to master their craft and their emotions under what sometimes approaches a state of siege. Remember the incident last season, where a player upset with a called strike three threw his bat at the ump? Extreme, perhaps, but, except in degree, not all that unusual when highly competitive and very young men respond to what they feel (sometimes rightly) are outrageously bad calls. And, like the players, the umps have no assurance of promotion.
So tonight, when the anthem ends in San Fransisco, take a moment to nod to the umpires.
Play Ball!
10:11 AM ET | 07-10-2007 | permalink
