UMPIRES OF THE OLD SCHOOL: HANK O'DAY

            Raised in Chicago, O’Day was the middle child of seven kids born to Irish immigrants. He took an interest in baseball during his school years, but his father disapproved of the sport, referring to it as a “frivolous pastime.” Because of this, O’Day and his brothers played sandlot ball under a pseudonym.

            O’Day worked as a steamfitter’s apprentice before moving to California to play for St. Mary’s College. A pitcher of moderate talent, he joined the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association in 1884. Catcher Deacon McGuire said of O’Day’s abilities: “He was crafty and had a world of stuff, but he threw the heaviest and hardest ball I ever caught. It was like lead and it came at me like a shell from a cannon.” To protect his hands, McGuire adopted the practice of placing slabs of raw meat inside his gloves.

            In the thick of a pennant race, the New York Giants purchased O’Day’s contract from the Washington Senators in 1898. O’Day won 9 games for the New Yorkers down the stretch, helping them to their first NL championship. In those days, the World Series was just an exhibition. In a best-of-eleven format, the Giants faced the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, winners of the American Association pennant, to determine the best team in baseball. O’Day pitched brilliantly, going 2-0 with a 1.17 ERA in 3 appearances as the Giants won the Series. He spent one more season at the major league level before his arm went dead.

            During his playing career, O’Day served as a substitute umpire on several occasions. In 1895, he was hired by the National League. He appeared in 75 games that year, including one that could have caused him serious harm. After the Senators dropped a tough match to Cleveland, a mob of angry fans surrounded O’Day. He was pulled into the dressing room by Washington manager Gus Schmelz and placed under police protection. On the way out of the stadium, he was pelted with bricks and assorted projectiles.

            Over the course of his career, O’Day suffered multiple head wounds and a broken toe as a result of being hit by foul balls. The stress of umpiring also led to serious stomach problems that kept him out of action for a full season. Referring to the many traumas experienced by O’Day, AL counterpart Silk O’Loughlin once said: “Look at O’Day. He’s one of the best umpires, maybe the best today, but he’s sour. Umpiring does something to you. The abuse you get from the players, the insults from the crowds, and the awful things they write about you in the newspapers take their toll.”

              O’Day was a quiet recluse with few interests outside of baseball. A writer from Baseball Magazine once joked that O’Day had never cracked a smile during his entire career. And another source described him as a “strange character who lived in a shell, emerging only when he visited the field to render his decisions.” One of those decisions was among the most controversial in baseball history.

                In 1908, the Giants and Cubs became embroiled in a tight pennant race. During a game between the two clubs on September 23, New York’s Moose McCormick scored on a walk-off single by Al Bridwell. Rookie infielder Fred Merkle, who was on first base, failed to touch second on the play, peeling off toward the Giants’ clubhouse instead. This was a common practice in those days, but it didn’t sit well with Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers, who tagged the bag and appealed to O’Day that the run shouldn’t count. Remarkably, the veteran arbiter upheld Evers’ protest, erasing the run. When the two teams remained tied at the end of the regular season, a replay of the “Merkle Game” was necessary. The Cubs won, capturing the pennant and, later, the World Series.

              Another dramatic on-field moment for O’Day occurred in 1898, when Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis caught fire during a game he was umpiring. The blaze quickly swept through the grandstand, endangering thousands of fans. Maintaining his composure throughout, O’Day was among the men who created a makeshift escape chute using the players’ benches. Hundreds of fans slid down the chute and were escorted to safety.

            After leaving his umpiring job in 1927, O’Day worked as a scout. He also served in an advisory capacity to the NL. In 1935, he fell ill with bronchial pneumonia and died. He passed away shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013.

UMPIRES OF THE OLD SCHOOL: GEORGE MORIARTY

            Moriarty grew up near the Union Stock Yards on Chicago’s South Side and never completed middle school. He had six siblings, one of whom had a brief trial with the Cincinnati Reds. George began his baseball career at the age of sixteen. Originally signed by the Cubs, he bounced up and down from the majors to the minors for several years before the New York Highlanders (later known as the Yankees) purchased his contract in 1906. He reached his peak as a player with the Detroit Tigers.

            In 1909, Moriarty became the Tigers’ regular third baseman, helping the club to a World Series berth that year. A daring base runner with a penchant for stealing home, he was popular among teammates, earning the title of team captain. Like most players of the Deadball Era, Moriarty was rough and always ready to fight. Interestingly, the ferocious Ty Cobb was said to have backed down from a scrape with Moriarty.

            By 1915, Moriarty’s playing skills had eroded significantly, prompting the Tigers to release him. He appeared in seven games with the White Sox the following season before returning to the minors. He played and managed for the Memphis Chickasaws of the Southern League. The club finished in sixth place and Moriarty fell ill with typhoid fever, making it a miserable year for him all around.

            In 1917, Moriarty chose a new career path, accepting a job as an AL umpire. Remarkably, he was hired without any prior experience. The learning curve was steep, but Moriarty became renowned for his accurate calls and ability to keep unruly players in line. Joe Williams of the New York World Telegram described Moriarty as “a fiery individual who never hesitated to speak his peace.” Moriarty’s contentious nature invited trouble more than once during his career.

            On May 30, 1932, the Indians throttled the White Sox, 12-6, in the opening game of a doubleheader at League Park in Cleveland. Working with colleague Bill Dinneen that day, Moriarty drew the home plate assignment in both games. The White Sox were clinging to a lead in the finale when Moriarty exchanged words with Chicago coach Johnny Butler, who ended up being tossed from the game. With tensions running high, Moriarty made a controversial decision on a pitch to Cleveland’s Earl Averill in the bottom of the ninth. Catcher Charlie Berry thought it was strike three, but Moriarty saw it differently, calling Milt Gaston’s offering a ball. Given another chance, the clutch-hitting Averill delivered a game-tying triple to right-center field. He scored the winning run shortly afterward.

            Several versions of the events that followed exist. Sticking only to established facts, Moriarty was harassed by White Sox players after the game. He challenged them to a fight and, when Gaston accepted, the arbiter decked him. Three members of the Chicago staff joined the fray, leaving Moriarty with an assortment of cuts and bruises to go with the broken hand he had sustained when he punched out Gaston. “Moriarty was looking for a fight and it seems that he got it,” White Sox manager Lew Fonseca told reporters afterward. “Everyone in baseball knows many stories of Moriarty’s brawling tendencies and his eagerness to start a fight at the slightest provocation.”

            Following a full investigation of the incident, AL President Will Harridge issued a variety of fines and suspensions to White Sox personnel. Meanwhile, Moriarty got off with a stern reprimand. During the offseason, he salvaged his reputation by serving as an AL ambassador. Appearing in various venues, he toured the country reading his own poetry and giving lectures that were very well received. An amateur writer on the side, Moriarty’s editorials, poems and musical compositions were sporadically published over the years. At one point, he had a nationally syndicated baseball column.    

                        In 1935, Moriarty found himself embroiled in controversy again. During Game 3 of the World Series, several members of the Cubs took to harassing Tigers superstar Hank Greenberg, who had made headlines the previous year for refusing to play on Yom Kippur—the Hebrew Day of Atonement. Moriarty felt that the anti-Semitic remarks made by Chicago players were offensive and berated them harshly for it. He then set a World Series precedent by issuing multiple ejections. At the time, there was a rule in place forbidding umpires to remove players from Series games without the Commissioner’s approval. Moriarty received a $200 fine for his actions.

            In 1940, Moriarty finally decided to put an end to his umpiring career with more than 3,000 games to his credit. He took a job as a traveling lecturer for the American League public relations staff and scouted for the Tigers well into the 1950s. After leaving baseball behind, he retired to Coral Gables, Florida. He was seventy-nine years old when he died of kidney cancer in 1964.

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.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE WILD CARD

Before 1993, only two teams were permitted to advance to the League Championship Series. But when expansion necessitated the formation of an additional division in each league, the playoff scenario became rather complex. Established in 1994, the Wild Card format would not be used that year due to a players strike that pre-empted the postseason. A “wild card” rule had been employed once before then—in 1981, when another players strike dramatically shortened the regular season schedule. The wild card scenario changed again in 2011 with the addition of two more teams into the mix.

Opinions vary wildly on the current format, which includes a do or die one-game showdown between two sets of Wild Card teams. Yankees manager Joe Girardi commented: “I know it’s for the excitement and the drama. But to play 162 games, you should get more than one game.” A writer from Business Insider echoed that sentiment, remarking that “The problem with the new playoff format is that four teams who fought for six months to be among the top teams in their respective leagues now have their entire seasons riding on what is essentially a crap shoot.” On the other side of the coin, there are those who support the setup established in 2011. “I think it’s working,” said baseball columnist Jay Rigdon. “…It does keep more teams involved in the playoff picture by definition, and those one-game playoff nights are some of baseball’s best theater.”   

Whichever camp you align yourself with, the Wild Card format has produced some interesting results as illustrated below.

--Entering the 2016 season, five Wild Card teams had gone on to win the World Series: The Marlins in ’97 and 2003, The Angels in 2002, The Red Sox in 2004, the Cardinals in 2011 and the Giants in 2014.

--Wild Card teams appeared in the World Series for six straight years beginning in 2002.

--The Marlins currently hold the record for most postseason series wins by a Wild Card team (6). To date, they have never been beaten in a postseason series during a Wild Card year. 

--The Best regular season record by a Wild Card team was compiled by the 2015 Pirates, who went 98-64. The Bucs lost the Wild Card game to the Cubs that year, 1-0.

--The worst regular season winning percentage by a Wild Card team belonged to the 1995 Colorado Rockies, who notched a .535 mark.

--During the first ten years of Wild Card play, 39 games were decided by a single run and 20 went into extra innings.