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Why Baseball Needs Umpires

by Richard Cole
June 16, 2010

I don’t recall the kid’s name. Let’s call him Jason. Jason would be almost 50 today. But in 1972 he was only 10 or 11. Nonetheless, little Jason taught me a lesson I’ll never ever forget.

Some of you will remember Bob McKerr. Please do. Back then, Bob was a deputy state school superintendent working for John Porter. He was in charge of the state’s school-finance program. He and I were spending lots of time together in the state Capitol. He was “Mr. State Aid.”

One thing I remember so distinctly about Bob is that he was a man of great integrity. I was always kind of baffled that he used to start a lot of sentences with the word “Frankly.” I always thought that was strange because it implied that, unlike other things Bob said, this time he was about to be “frank.” Frankly, however, everything I ever remember Bob saying was frank. He was the straightest-talking guy in Lansing.

I was a brash 25-year-old lobbyist — “Director of School Law and Legislation” was the euphemism. My job was to help John Porter and Bob and others in the department have their way with the legislature. I was brash, but I was smart enough to do everything Bob McKerr told me to do. So when he said, “Frankly, I think we ought to coach a little league team together,” I said, “Where do I sign up?”

And sign up we did — as coaches for a team sponsored by the Lansing Police Department and managed by Lansing’s “Mr. Cop.”

I can’t tell you I remember much about Mr. Cop, but I can say he seemed big and gruff and almost overwhelming to me — very intimidating. So you can imagine how he must have looked to little Jason, as Jason was dusting off his pants after a close play at the plate and Mr. Cop was screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” we heard Mr. Cop yelling as Bob ran from his third base coaching spot and I ran in from mine near first. “Never, ever correct an umpire,” Mr. Cop told Jason.

It still wasn’t clear to me what happened. Jason, I thought, had beaten the throw to the plate and was safe. It was a bang-bang play, very close. But Jason knew, as only a runner can, that the timing of his foot crossing the plate and the opposing catcher putting the tag on his knee occurred in an order that Jason knew, for sure, was different than the one the umpire had seen. So Jason spoke up.

By the time Bob and I got between little Jason and big Mr. Cop, we heard Jason whimpering: “But I was out. He got me.”

Sure enough, the umpire — based on Jason’s testimony — had reversed his earlier “safe” call. Jason was out. And this sent Mr. Cop into a tirade.

Bob and I were almost in shock. But we were not in shock enough to hesitate jumping in between Mr. Cop and little Jason. And I don’t know who was madder or more vocal, but by then Bob and I were both defending Jason louder than Mr. Cop was berating him.

“You are wrong,” I remember screaming at the cop. “If every kid were like Jason, we wouldn’t need umpires.”

Jason, you see, had simply appealed a play that he knew was a bad call by the ump. The ump had called him safe and his team had scored the winning run, but Jason knew the truth. Somewhere Jason had learned that truth was the most important part of the story. He told the ump that the only right thing to do was to call him out.

Well, I suppose you know by now what triggered this memory. I don’t remember ever being as disappointed about an umpire’s call as I was on the evening of June 2, 2010. Watching a CNN International News Broadcast from my hotel room in Rome, I saw something that I still cannot believe. That’s right. The umpire’s call had made news in countries around the world that didn’t even have baseball teams.

Armanda Galarraga, the up-and-down pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, had done something no other Major League Baseball player had ever done before. He had thrown a 28-out perfect game. The problem was that on his way to first base to complete the 27th out — the third out in the ninth inning of an otherwise perfect game — he had beaten the Cleveland Indians rookie hitter to first for the final out — bang, bang. But before he could celebrate the game of his life, he recognized that the umpire got it wrong and called this Indian safe.

All Mr. Galarraga did was smile. His teammates and his manager, on the other hand, went into shock.

Well, the rest is history. Wikipedia already has a clear account of what it says is now known (as of this writing only a week after the actual event) as the “28-out perfect game.” Wikipedia says the game is also known as “the Galarraga.” As Casey Stengel used to say: “You can look it up.”

Galarraga proved, through this trying time, to be the absolute prince of a gentleman that his teammates knew he was when they named him Tiger rookie of the year in 2008.

The umpire who screwed up will forever be known as the putz from Toledo who created “the Galaragga” with one of the worst calls in recorded baseball history. He redeemed himself, somewhat, by weeping that he had made a terrible mistake. And he begged forgiveness because his mistake had cost Galarraga his spot in baseball history.

Bud Selig, the main man in Major League Baseball, proved himself to value institutions and their “precedents” more than people. He stubbornly and stupidly refuses, to this day, to recognize the injustice in Detroit on June 2, 2010. He wouldn’t have to change the outcome of a game. He’d simply have to acknowledge the umpire’s mistake as a simple “scoring error.” This act of charity and compassion would give Galarraga his rightful place in baseball history. Selig could do this with the stroke of a pen.

There are heroes in this story. Galarraga, for sure, is a hero — never a bitter word.

Ironically, Jim Joyce, the umpire with the bad call, looks a bit like a hero also. How can you hate a man who admits he simply screwed up, and apologizes so publicly and thoroughly?

And there are goats in this story as well. Selig will go down as the goat whose stubborn regard for tradition deprived us all of the joy of seeing a great young man get the award he so richly deserved.

The young boy of 10 or 11 whom I call Jason — the young boy who just couldn’t seem to understand why a cop he looked up to would be screaming at him for telling the truth — will always be a hero to me.

But there is another Jason in this story — this time the rookie Cleveland Indian named Jason Donald.

I really want to give Jason Donald the benefit of the doubt. I’d like to hope that the roar of the crowd at the moment he crossed first base was so loud that even he — the closest man to the play — didn’t hear the smack of the ball hitting Galarraga’s mitt before his own foot hit the bag. But my sense of the game tells me that no one on the field could have known faster, or should have know with more surety, that he was late to the bag.

And if that is true, there is no bigger goat in this story than the rookie who ruined Galarraga’s perfect game.

In his defense, even if this interpretation is correct, this Jason stole the game from Galarraga by honoring baseball’s greatest tradition — the one that goes along with spitballs and steroids — cheating.

If Cleveland’s Jason knew he was out — that the umpire was wrong — all he had to do was say the same thing Lansing’s Jason told the ump and the cop in 1972: “But I was out. He got me.”

And that’s why, despite all their faults, we need umpires, and we need cops.

In addition to serving as professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University, Richard Cole is co-founder of Michigan’s Next Governor Project (see August Dome feature).The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.