Millions of American baseball fans know, with absolute
certainty, that umpires are simply overpaid galoots who are
doing an easy job badly. Millions of American baseball fans
are wrong.
As They See 'Em is an insider's look at the largely unknown
world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and
the very occasional woman) who make sure America's favorite
pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and
true. Bruce Weber, a New York Times reporter, not only
interviewed dozens of professional umpires but entered
their world, trained to become an umpire, and then spent a
season working games from Little League to big league
spring training.
As They See 'Em is Weber's entertaining account of this
experience as well as a lively exploration of what amounts
to an eccentric secret society, with its own customs, its
own rituals, its own colorful vocabulary. (Know what
a "whacker" is? A "pole bender"? "Rat cheese"? Think you
could "strap it on" or "take the stick"?) He explains the
arcane set of rules by which umps work and details the
exasperating, tortuous path that allows only a select few
to graduate from the minor leagues to the majors. He
describes what it's like to work in a ballpark where not
only the fans but the players, the managers and coaches,
the announcers, the team owners, and even the league
presidents, resent them -- and vice versa. And he asks,
quite sensibly, why anyone would do a job that offers the
chance to earn only blame and never credit.
Weber reveals how umps are tutored to work behind the
plate, what they learn to watch for on the bases, and how
proper positioning for every imaginable situation on the
field is drilled into them. He describes how they're
counseled to respond -- or not -- to managers who are
screaming at them from inches away with purposeful inanity,
and tells us exactly which "magic" words result in an
automatic ejection. Writing with deep knowledge of and
affection for baseball, he delves into such questions as:
Why isn't every strike created equal? Is the ump part of
the game or outside of it? Why doesn't a tie go to the
runner? And what do umps and managers say to each other
during an argument, really?
In addition to professional umpires, Weber spoke to current
and former players including Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds,
Tom Glavine, Barry Zito, Paul Lo Duca, Kenny Lofton, Ron
Darling, and Robin Yount, as well as former baseball
commissioner Fay Vincent, Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox,
Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, Detroit Tigers
manager Jim Leyland, and many others in the professional
game. He attended the 2006 and 2007 World Series,
interviewing the umpire crews who called those games and
who spoke candidly about the pressure of being scrutinized
by millions -- maybe billions! -- of fans around the world,
all of them armed with television's slo-mo, hi-def instant
replay. As fans know, in 2008, a rash of miscalled home run
balls led baseball, for the first time, to use replay to
help big league umps make their decisions.Weber discusses
these events and the umpires' surprising reaction to them.
Packed with fascinating reportage that reveals the game as
never before and answers the kinds of questions that fans,
exasperated by the clichés of conventional sports
commentary, pose to themselves around the television set,
Bruce Weber's As They See 'Em is a towering grand slam.
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