Volume 5, Issue 10: Nobody Knows Anything

"You see out there, it's the 1990s. But in this house, it's 1954."

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My grandfather Dennis Dooley, my mother’s father, was many things. He was a World War II veteran who still wore his dog tags around his neck every day, a fitness buff with a tight crew cut who busted out of his white sleeveless tank top well into his 60s, a diabetic whose checked his insulin levels every morning with his breakfast grapefruit, a gas station owner and operator, a loving father to four and grandfather to eight, a man who could grill a steak in the garage in the dead of a freezing Central Illinois winter like he was put on this earth specifically for that purpose.

But it was a side hobby that gave him more joy than just about anything else. My grandfather was the best baseball umpire tiny Moweaqua, Illinois had ever seen. For 25 years, every kid from Assumption to Stonington to Pawnee knew Mr. Dooley. With his children all grown and out of the house, he would spend every Saturday at the ballpark, umping every game, at every level. Whenever I saw him, the grandkid who clearly loved baseball as much as he did, he would tell me stories of his weekends at the diamond, out in the sunshine, just watching kids play ball.

You would think that his stories would be full of parents screaming at him, or kids getting thrown out of the game, but while it’s possible he was just protecting the gentle ears of the 10-year-old who revered him, I don’t think that’s the case. It might have gone done that way today, but it wasn’t then. As practiced by Dennis Dooley, the umpire was not merely someone who called balls and strikes; the umpire was the authority, the man who judged what was right and wrong, the arbiter of fair play, the last line of defense against the barbarians at the gate. Dennis Dooley took being an umpire seriously. Dennis Dooley believed his job was about more than a baseball game; he believed his job was about truth. It was about standing for justice. It was about being, in the end, a rule of law.

His favorite story, one I’ve told in various publications in the past but am still going to repeat here, involved a close play at home plate. A kid came streaming around third base and slid into home right as the catcher tagged him, a bang-bang play. My grandfather called him out. The kid jumped up and yelled, “I beat the tag! I was safe!”

My grandfather bent down, looked him dead in the eye and said, “No, you were out. I am the umpire, and I called you out. Therefore, by definition, you are out. That’s all there is to it.” The law was the law. Debate was beside the point. The authority had spoken.

Grandpa Dooley loved to tell this story laughing, adding, with a wink, “The funny thing is: I think I missed the call.”

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This week, my son’s Little League team, which has already started practice and has its first game a week from today, played a scrimmage. I don’t coach Little League anymore—if you’ve read The Time Has Come, the best explanation I can give you is that there were too many Jason Wallers for my particular constitution—but I try to make myself available to help out if they’re short on coaches for a practice or need someone to operate the scoreboard or something. On Monday, for the first scrimmage, they needed an umpire. So they asked me.

I spent a couple of summers in college umpiring to make some extra cash, but that was 30 years ago and I mostly just remember trying to get six-year-olds not to put their helmets on backwards. This wasn’t a real game—they weren’t even keeping score, and there were coaches standing around in the outfield, ready to advise on how to hit the cutoff man—so I said yes without thinking much about it. I stood behind the pitching mound, joked with my son (who was the starting pitcher) that he was about to have the smallest strike zone in the history of the sport and then said those two sacred words: “Play ball!”

And—instantly—I felt the weight of it. Everything that happened in the game depended, I realized, on me. They couldn’t pitch until I said so. They didn’t know whether what they’d succeeded at what they were trying to do until I told them if they had. The entire mood of the everyone at the park rested on what I announced had just happened. If I said one thing, they were happy. If I said something else, they were sad. Some pitches were right on the corner, borderline calls, they could go either way. I wasn’t always sure if my call correct was right or not, and it cleaved 50-50 regardless; no matter what I said, one side of the park would cheer, and the other side would groan. Literally every single movement in this event, this event that dozens of people had taken time out of their busy schedules, on a slightly soggy and chilly Monday night, to watch with rapt attention, depended on me.

This did not make me feel powerful. It actually made me feel small—as if I was not worthy of this responsibility, as if there was something beautiful and important that I had been put in charge of, and if I did not accept this role with the seriousness that it deserved, I would somehow despoil it.

So I straightened up, yelled “Play ball!” again, a little louder this time, and set about being the best goddamned umpire the Athens Little League had ever seen. I announced the count every pitch, I sprinted into the ideal viewing position on every play in the field, I ducked out of the way any time a shortstop made a play where I was in his field of vision, I communicated with both teams’ coaches between every inning to make sure we were all on the same page.

It was my job, I realized, to take the chaos of this event, the unpredictable madness of an athletic competition, and wring the truth of it. It was my job to observe what was happening in front of me and determine, and announce, the objective reality in a way that made sense to everyone who had dedicated their time to being a part of the whole endeavor. I am generally an affable, even outright silly presence at the ballpark, if just as a way to remind everyone that this is a game, being played by children, and that we should all treat it accordingly. But now, as the umpire, I found myself awed by the gravity of it. What’s fair? What’s foul? Who’s safe? Who’s out? They were all relying on me to decide.

I took it as seriously as I have taken anything in a long, long time. If I’m being honest, I am still buzzing about it, five days later. There’s one call I’m pretty sure I missed, and it has been killing me all week. I feel like I let them all down. I must be an authority they can trust. I owe them the truth.

And, I remind you: This was all just an exhibition scrimmage where no one was even keeping score.

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One of the more underappreciated sports book this century is As They See ‘Em, written by Bruce Weber. (Not that Bruce Weber. No, not that one either. This one, the one who wrote for The New York Times for 30 years.) Weber embedded himself, for months on end, with baseball umpires. He spent some time with big-league umpires, but the focus of the book is on the wannabes, those who spend years of their lives, with little to no pay, traveling across the country, trying to work their way to the majors while getting screamed at by fans at fields all across America. The job is brutally punishing and absurdly competitive: Here’s an indicative anecdote from the NYT review of the book (written by Jim Bouton!)

The two umpire schools each recommend about 25 students for further evaluation by the Professional Baseball Umpiring Corporation, which is responsible for hiring and supervising umpires in the lower minor leagues. The PBUC watches them work college and high school games for 10 days and then whittles the group down; those left are offered jobs at $1,900 a month for five months.

What’s it like to work for the PBUC? Request a leave of absence of more than a few days after your wife has a miscarriage, and you might get a letter that says: “Please” let us know “if you wish to follow your umpire schedule as assigned or if you wish to resign from your position as an umpire. Thank you.”

Who would want to do such a job? Weber discovers two personality traits that are essential. The first is obvious: You have to love baseball so much that you would watch it for free, that you’re willing to dedicate everything to it even though the sport you love so much will reward you by making sure you end up hated by everyone, criminally underpaid and profoundly, almost existentially lonely. (Umpires spend most of their 20s and 30s alone in sad cheap hotel rooms in cities like Topeka and Walla Walla.) But the second one is even more important: You have to believe that you are helping. You have to believe that, in this competitive game played by fiercely dedicated partisans who will blame you for everything that goes wrong and never praise you for anything that goes right, there is a greater truth—and that you are personally responsible for finding it. You have to be willing to be hated in service of a larger purpose. You have to, at the deepest level of your soul, think the world can be a better place. And that you might just be able to be a part of helping to make it that way. Even if it means everyone’s going to hate you for it.

I thought about it a lot the night after the game, about what it means to want to do that with your life, about believing that it’s your personal sacred calling to try to make the world more fair and just and truthful, to connect those around you to a larger communal sense of righteousness and shared purpose, even if they all despise you, even if they think you’re helplessly biased, even if you end up screwing it all up because you’re just as human as they are, just like everybody else. And I think I figured out why it suddenly meant so much to me to be out on that field: Being an umpire is a lot like working as a journalist. You mess up a lot. You get yelled at constantly. Your job is always on shaky, sinking ground. You consider yourself more important to the larger process than you actually are. But you still do it because you still love it. You do it because you have instilled in yourself, with no real qualifications other than dedication, repetition and insistence, the belief that you are uniquely chosen to be an arbiter in a situation that doesn’t actually have anything to do with you. You do it in spite of all of these things because you are called to it. You do it because you believe you can make this crazy, chaotic world a little better. You do it because it can sometimes feel like it’s the only thing you can do.

Umpires, like journalists, are falling out of public favor. We believe technology can replace them, can get us closer to that larger truth than the frailties and flaws that come with being a human can. I don’t know if that’s correct or not. I don’t think so, but of course I wouldn’t think so. But I do know that it matters to care. I know that it matters that we should reach for that higher truth, to aspire to it, to believe, in the end, that a higher truth is possible to find, if we look hard enough—if we believe we can. My grandfather, in many ways, would not recognize this world as it is currently constituted. But I have no doubt that he would do everything in his power to try to find some order to it anyway. To find some truth. To try to make it better. Even if sometimes he missed the call.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. LeBron James Is Ending His Career With Dignity, New York. Unlike LeBron!

2. MLB Season Preview: Most Excited Fanbase in Every Division, MLB.com. Cardinals definitely not the pick here.

3. The Most Indispensible Player on Every Team, MLB.com. It’s always fun to try to come up with a Rockie for lists like this.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discuss “Dune: Part Two” and “Spaceman,” and preview the Oscars.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are back weekly, until the end of the season, it’s on, it’s baseball season.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, no show this week, taping this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” Franklin Foer, The Atlantic. Franklin Foer remains my favorite of the Foers.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Push,” Ryan Gosling. Ryan Gosling is not going to win the Best Supporting Actor Award for “Barbie” as the Oscars tomorrow, but he would be my pick—I think it’s actually sort of insane how committed he is in that movie. I was listening to his version of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push” in the car the other day, and I was reminded not only of how this is one of the funniest scenes of the film, but also, as terrible as this song is, it’s … also pretty catchy, dammit. I cannot stop laughing at how he sings the word “granted.” Read Grierson’s great piece about Greta Gerwig’s brilliant idea to build a comic set piece around this song.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

On Wednesday, young William and I are headed to Minneapolis for the Big Ten Men’s Basketball Tournament. Here are two William Bryan Leitches, my dad and my son, readying for March Madness ahead.

If you are an Illini fan—that is to say, if you are virtuous and just—you can listen to me talk about this year’s team, and Illini history, for an hour or so on the IlliniBoard podcast with the indefatigable Robert Rosenthal here.

By the way, we’ll be having our annual newsletter March Madness men’s and women’s brackets contests again in a couple of weeks, so prepare thyselves. It’s almost that time. Go Illini.

Best,
Will