[BSUmp16]

Reading all these posts reminded me of a section I had read in Bruce Weber's Book "As They See 'Em" (which is well worth the read). I think this excerpt gets to the heart of the matter:

It's fair to say my umpiring beginnings were modest. My first game was a Little League contest; I was on the bases. And my first call of any consequence I got wrong on purpose. The team at bat had scored a dozen or so runs in the third inning, largely because the first baseman had dropped three perfectly good throws, and with the score something like 20-1, the poor kid finally held on to one. The runner, however, had beaten the throw by a stride and a half. I did my job.

"He's out!" I bellowed.

The reactions were interesting. The center fielder, sprinting by on his way to the dugout, said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Umpire," with the plaintive gratitude of a squirming boy who'd been excused early from an overlong church sermon. One of the parents on the sideline growled at me, "You're kidding, right, Blue?"

"I'd had enough, hadn't you?" I said.

"That's bull****."

My partner, one of the league's regular umpires, stared daggers of disgust in my direction and didn't talk to me for the rest of the game, which thankfully ended, owing to a local slaughter rule, after the fourth inning.

Afterward, the coach of the winning team came over and shook my hand and winked at me. "Nice job on that call," he said.

I didn't think a lot about it at the time; it became just a small, funny story I enjoyed telling. But in retrospect it was a good introductory lesson in the distinctions among an umpire's authority, his power; and his job. Is an umpire only supposed to get it right, with nothing to come between him and the pure call? Or does he more appropriately consider context? Things such as sportsmanship, the personality of the players, just deserts, the way the game "ought" to be played? And if it is okay to consider context, is it always okay? And if it's not always okay, when isn't it? What sorts of calls should or shouldn't be affected?

Anyway, I thought I did the right thing: I still think so, though obviously not everyone agreed. The point is that ambiguity, ethical ambiguity, is much more a part of umpiring than anyone ever acknowledges, except, of course, when the umpires themselves, experienced ones, look in the mirror. Longtime baseball watchers will be aware, for example, of "the neighborhood play," something that has always catalyzed a certain amount of outrage on the part of fans but that has mostly, though not entirely, disappeared from the big leagues because of slow-motion instant replay on television.

The neighborhood play occurs on an attempted double play, when the pivotman takes the throw as he gets to second base and throws to first, but in so doing does not actually touch the bag with his foot, or he touches it but not at the same time he has the ball in his possession. He just gets close, either physically or temporally; i.e., he's in the neighborhood. For most of baseball history, umpires tended not to be sticklers about this call, allowing the fielders some leeway, on the logic that the pivotman is at some risk of being hurt because a base runner is often bearing down on him, and while he is catching and throwing, he is unable to get out of the way or protect himself against being upended.

"If you want to break down what you mean by 'neighborhood,' yes, there's a neighborhood play," Tom Hallion would explain to me later that year. "If the throw, the fielder, and everything stays in an ordinary progression of what's supposed to happen, what should happen, what normally happens, I'd say, yeah, you would give him the call even if he's not right on the bag. Let's say the fielder drags his foot and misses the bag, but the throw is there, the fielder doesn't have to reach or make an extraordinary fielding motion, everything is normal. Then it's an out. Because if I call the guy safe, here's what they say: 'Do you want this guy f**king killed?'

"But nowadays you can't give them as much, you can't give them a foot off the bag. Your life's on the line to get it right because they have sixteen freakin' cameras on you. I had a play in Minnesota the other day, guy on first base gets picked off, he goes down to second, slides in, and the second baseman just takes the glove and does a lazy, lazy tag on him, goes down, tags him up here, on the shoulder, like it's just a formality. "

Ordinarily, an umpire would give the defense the benefit of the doubt, Hallion said, a reward for the pitcher who had skillfully separated the runner from first base with a crafty pickoff throw and didn't deserve to have his good move erased by a teammate's lack of effort. Nonetheless, Hallion called the runner safe.

"Well, the guy should have been out, he got picked off," Hallion said. "But I said to the second baseman, 'You're killing me with that tag. You gotta give me something better than that. I can't give you that.'

"This is the kind of call you make from experience," Hallion concluded.