Wednesday, May 13, 2020

THE UMPIRE WAS BLIND! MY LATEST BOOK RELEASE


How many times have you seen your favorite sports teams victimized by the faulty decisions of umpires, referees or other officials?  

For most passionate fans, the answer is: Too often!

In 2018, I began researching controversial calls made by umpires in major league baseball. Within a couple of months, I had gathered enough material to fill an entire book. Though I initially set out to discredit baseball’s men in blue, I came to sympathize with them by the time I had finished the project. The book—my first non-fiction work since 2017—is now available through McFarland Publishing. Though I got a little flippant with the title, don’t let that fool you. I have the utmost respect for umpires. And I certainly wouldn’t want to trade jobs with them.  

The Umpire Was Blind! contains more than fifty game accounts spanning well over a century of baseball history. From the infamous “Merkle Game” in 1908 to Bill Miller’s bizarre strike zone in Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, the most heavily debated performances by umpires are explored in great depth. The following excerpt will give you a good idea of the mindset I had adopted by the time I finished writing it.   

              ...With offense on the decline and strikeouts dramatically on the rise in the majors, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred made an arrangement with the independent Atlantic League to implement various experimental changes. In addition to moving the pitching rubber back from its standard sixty-feet, six-inch placement, Atlantic League president Rick White agreed to begin using “robot umpires” during the 2019 season.

             The so-called “robo-umps” don’t look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator movies. The technology is actually known as TrackMan. It’s a 3D Doppler radar system that precisely measures the location, trajectory and spin rate of hit and pitched baseballs. The device can be precisely aligned to the strike zone to determine balls and strikes. Most major league parks already have the devices in place, though they have mostly been used for coaching and scouting purposes.

            After a series of questionable calls in the 2019 World Series, Manfred announced that the electronic strike zone would be used on an experimental basis in selected minor league ballparks during the 2020 campaign. In particular, the Class-A Florida State League was mentioned as a possible setting. The MLB Umpires Association officially agreed to cooperate with the development and testing of the technology in conjunction with a new five-year labor contract.  

            No matter how the experiment turns out, the fact of the matter is that home plate umpires (in some capacity) are likely here to stay. And it’s difficult not to sympathize with them given the demanding nature of their jobs. According to retired American League arbiter Nestor Chylak, officials are expected to “be perfect on the first day of the season and then get better every day.” Adhering to an extremely convoluted rulebook, they make hair-trigger decisions knowing that their calls will affect the fortunes of the players and teams involved. They are among the most vilified figures in all of sports. Many of the insults hurled at them have become clichés. A few of the more charitable ones are as follows:

            --You drop more calls than AT&T!

            --I thought only horses slept standing up!

            --Flip over the plate and read the directions!

            --Is your rulebook written in Braille?!

            Despite their imperfections, umpires have played a vital role in the game’s history. Former major league commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti described the public perception of umpires in figurative terms: “Baseball fits America well because it expresses our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of law givers.” That resentment has flourished for a very long time…

I hope potential readers will find the subject matter as intriguing as I did.

As we continue to hold umpires in contempt for their flawed decisions, we must also realize that baseball is an extremely complicated game. And the men who preside over it are only human.     

Giants pitching great Christy Mathewson once said: “Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.”

As it turns out, that odor is less offensive depending on the vehicle.

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