Forget robots — these very real humans want to umpire the future of baseball via YahooSports
VERO BEACH, Fla. — Over three days of umpire camp — not to be confused with umpire school, more on that later — there is little attention paid to the strike zone. I’m loath to lead with a detail like that, which lends itself to too many punchlines.
For the participants of the camp, the goal is to get to any of those levels. Back home, they umpire high school games, or college, or Little League and they make good money for a day rate. But even if your playing days are behind you — most umpires turn to officiating after injuries or the realities of their baseball ability catch up to them — you can still dream of getting the call to the show.
Story continues“When I watch sports now, that’s all I watch is officials,” 28-year-old Ian Land said, repeating a sentiment shared by every single one of the participants I spoke to. It’s hard, then, to accept even an incremental marginalization of their idols and their aspirations. “Initially I definitely did,” said Josiah Shepherd, an aspiring umpire who just completed a masters in operation management at Rhode Island College, where he coached baseball.
Other participants cited the need for technicians to work with the automated zone systems as an antidote to the looming loss of job opportunities. So perhaps unemployment isn’t what’s really at stake — it’s the craft and the culture. “I can say two years before it came out when we started hearing about replay, [people said] ‘I don’t think I like this. I have to stand on TV and say I messed up,’” Reliford, the longtime major league umpire, said. “But as you know, I think the umpires are very appreciative of replay.”
“If I was offered the opportunity to see replay on a lot of my plays, I would,” Land said. “Because not only is it a confidence booster if you got it right, it’s a learning experience if you got it wrong.” At umpire camp, they focus on two main subjects: esoteric rules that they may only reference once in an entire career, and the carefully choreographed authority that keeps games from going off the rails.
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