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Baseball's Judicial Branch
By George F. Will
Thursday, April 9, 2009
In Mark Twain's "A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court," a time-traveling American brought baseball to
sixth-century England, where arguments with umpires were robust: "The umpire's
first decision was usually his last. . . . When it was noticed that no umpire
ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular." But it remains a necessary,
extraordinarily demanding and insufficiently appreciated craft.
Now, however, comes "As They See
'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires" by Bruce Weber of the New York
Times. Forests are felled to produce baseball books, about 600 a year, most of
them not worth the paper they should never have been printed on. Weber's,
however, is a terrific introduction to, among much else, the rule book's
Talmudic subtleties, such as:
A great fielding play can cost
the fielder's team the game. With less than two out, if a player makes a catch
and falls into the stands, every runner moves up a base. So with a runner on
third in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game, if a fielder makes a catch but
his momentum flips him over the railing into the seats, his team loses.
Also: There is a play on which
the umpire must give a manager a choice of two different outcomes on a batted
ball. With one out and runners on first and third, the batter swings, his bat
ticks the catcher's glove but drives a fly ball that is caught by an outfielder.
The runner on third tags and scores, the runner on first stays there. But
because the catcher interfered with the batter's swing, the umpire awards the
batter first base, moving the runner there to second. Because that nullifies the
sacrifice fly, the runner who scored is returned to third. But why should the
batting team lose a run because the other team's catcher committed an
infraction? So the manager of the team at bat is given a choice -- bases loaded,
one out, no run in, or man on first, two out, one run in.
Umpires -- the only people who
are on the field during the entire game and the only ones indifferent to the
outcome -- were depicted in pre-Civil War drawings wearing
top hats and
carrying walking sticks. An account of the (supposedly) first game between
organized teams -- June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, N.J. -- mentioned the umpire
fining a player six cents for swearing.
Umpires still are custodians of
decorum. "As the umpire," Weber writes, "you are neither inside the game, as the
players are, nor outside it among the fans, but . . . the game passes through
you, like rainwater through a filter, and . . . your job is to influence it for
the better, to strain out the impurities."
Baseball is, Weber notes, the
only sport that asks an on-field official to demarcate the most important aspect
of the field of play -- the strike zone. Although defined in the rule book, its
precise dimensions are determined daily by the home plate umpire.
Umpires are islands of exemption
from America's obsessive lawyering: As has been said, three strikes and you're
out -- the best lawyer can't help you. But because it is the national pastime of
a litigious nation, baseball is the only sport in which a nonplayer is allowed
onto the field to argue against rulings.
Umpires are used to having their
eyesight questioned -- when someone criticized
Bruce Froemming's,
he said, "The sun is 93 million miles away, and I can see that" -- but their
integrity is unquestioned. As Weber notes, players, not umpires, conspired to
fix the
1919 World Series;
a manager (Pete Rose), not an umpire, was banned from baseball for betting on
games. As umpires say, "If they played by the honor system, they wouldn't need
us."
Sport -- strenuous exertion
structured and restrained by rules -- replicates the challenges of political
freedom. Umpires, baseball's judicial branch, embody what any society always
needs and what America, in its current financial disarray, craves -- regulated
striving that, by preventing ordered competition from descending into chaos,
enables excellence to prevail.
"You can't," Weber says, "hide on
a baseball field." But a batter who fails two-thirds of the time for 15 years
goes to
Cooperstown. An
umpire can fail once in a high-stakes moment and be remembered for that forever.
It is amazing how rarely they fail as they strive not to be noticed in their
pursuit of unobtrusive perfection.
georgewill@washpost.com
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