Kill the Ump

umpire.jpgMy father was not a Sports Guy. He had almost no interest in athletic endeavors. In high school, he ran track, and he had a self-made mosaic of medals to prove it, the trophies glued to a field of black felt and hemmed in by a wooden frame. Once in a blue moon, he’d demand to watch some running event on The Wide World of Sports, as that sport still held a grip on him long after he was able to actually run, or even jog. But he could care less about the big, all-American team sports (my mom, a huge Mets fan, is solely responsible for that sickness).

But he did make an effort to get involved with his kids’ sporting endeavors. He told me his father–who was a legendary soccer player back in his hometown in Ireland, or so I was told–never went to any of his track meets, and that always bugged him. He rarely expressed any resentment about his father, so it was remarkable to hear him express something close to hurt about his upbringing.

He went along with family trips to far-flung outposts of the tri-state area and beyond, as my brothers played in an endless series of soccer tournaments, outdoor and indoor. Parsippany. Binghamton. Katonah. Danbury. We even went to Montreal once. Dad was delighted by the Quebecois translations in the local McDonalds.

He was willing to pitch in, especially when it impacted our pocketbooks. We could all get discounts on joining the CYO basketball league if a parent volunteered to work Bingo Night at St. Mary’s, so dad took one for the team. I don’t think it was a hardship for him, because he’d come home with harrowing tales of the sad sacks he encountered there. Like most comedians, he found other people’s misery almost as hilarious as his own.

At some point, he thought it might be fun to be a little league umpire. The reduced membership fee for three kids was a factor, too, but I think he honestly believed it would be enjoyable. Which was off because, as with most sports, baseball’s charms eluded him, and he’d grown up with immigrant parents who had a similar lack of interest in the Great American Pastime.

He told me he actually went to a game at Ebbets Field, not long after he first came to New York from Dublin. To Little Kid Me, that was like saying you’d been to Heaven itself. I was obsessed with old-timey, sepia-tone, classic Subway Series baseball. I was fascinated by the fact that Brooklyn–Brooklyn! our Ancestral Home!–once had its very own major league team. I was a ten-year-old Ken Burns.

What was it like? I asked.

Dirty, he said. Smelly. Loud. Full of drunks. Full of puking drunks. People screaming the most horrendous things at the top of their lungs. I had no idea people would go out in public and do things like that.

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

When my dad decided to do something, he did it. He studied the rules of the game. He went to the mandatory umpiring class. He brought home a handheld pitch counter, and often clicked through it with one hand while completing a crossword in the other, as if the balls and strikes were each another bead on a rosary.

Dad’s umpiring career started out fine. At first, he only had to man the amorphous middle infield position. Every now and then, he had to call a close slide at second base. Otherwise, it was as easy as summer work out in the sun could get.

The little league wouldn’t let parents umpire their own games, because, duh. So he would often be umpiring some other game, and mine would finish, and I’d have to wander over his field and wait for his shift to end before we could go home. It was very strange to sit in the bleachers and listen to him declare OUT and SAFE with extreme authority, in stark contrast to the backseat he took in most family affairs.

He certainly sounded like an umpire. He was an excellent mimic, and he knew having the right voice is half the battle. Sounding authoritative is 75 percent of being so.

Things began to change when he started umpiring behind home plate. Because that’s when he had to call balls and strikes, and as anyone who’s been to a baseball game can tell you, everyone in the stands thinks they can call a strike zone better than the man in blue behind the plate.

He started to get hassled by angry parents, which he did not enjoy. He was still adjusting to sobriety. He couldn’t handle simple annoyances like getting stuck in traffic or jostled in a crowd, and he certainly couldn’t handle being yelled at by angry parents who disagreed with the strike zone he called for their Precious Babies.

After each game, he became less and less enthusiastic, until he began to dread his work behind the plate. What happened was inevitable, really, but it was still horrible/awesome when it happened.

It was already a bad day in the household. Though I had played catcher for the vast majority of my little league career, I got it in my head that I wanted to pitch. I still don’t know why I thought I could do this. I still don’t know why I wanted to do this. I really enjoyed being a catcher. It didn’t matter to me that it was an unglamorous position. In fact, I liked doing a necessary but hard job no one else wanted. It made feel tougher than everybody else.

Whether it was a desire for the spotlight or the general delusion of Little Kid-Dom, I begged to take the mound, and my coach let me do it. My first start, I did okay, good enough to earn another shot. My second time out was disastrous. Several hits, several runs, and then walk after walk after walk. It was as if the ball was afraid to go near the strike zone, because it knew it would be smacked around.

The league had rules in place: each pitcher could only issue so many walks. After that point, he could run up an endless full count if the batter wasn’t willing to swing. It was supposed to save the poor pitcher some shame, but all it did was emphasize how terrible I was. I could feel my team becoming silently furious behind me. The coach finally, mercifully yanked me. I stalked back to the dugout, humiliated. The rest of my baseball life would be spent on the other side of the battery.

By the time my game ended, my dad had begun umpiring another one. I sat in the bleachers, not far from a ragged looking man who decided to make his life a living hell. Every single pitch, this guy bitched about it. His voice was high-pitched and ruined, either from years of smoking or drinking or both. No matter what decision my dad made, this man hated it. I was still ambivalent in my feelings towards my father, but I still didn’t want to see him slandered by this jerk. But I said nothing. I sat and seethed about my hideous pitching performance, and this loudmouth.

Finally, after a few innings, my father had had it. He pulled off his mask, dropped his chest protector to the ground, and stalked off to the fence that separated the field from the stands.

You think you can do better?! he yelled at his tormentor. The man was stunned. He hadn’t expected to be directly confronted, and he had no answer. I’ve always had it in my head that maybe dad knew this man, that perhaps he was a member of his Other Family. It was odd that the man would stop being such a jerk just because my dad, not an intimidating man in any sense, took of his umpire’s mask.

You think you can do better?! my dad repeated. The jerk looked around, as if my dad might be addressing someone else.

My father began walking up the foul line, and he kept on walking. Past third base. Past left field. All the way out into the gravel parking lot. You can’t leave! screamed one of the coaches, but my dad strenuously disagreed.

I ran after him because he was my ride. We didn’t say a word all the way home. My father never umpired again and, as far as I know, never willingly watched a baseball again for the rest of his life.

The Assassination of Larry Jones by the Coward, His Knee

99_chipper_reed.pngLarry Wayne Jones, known to most people (and himself, for some reason) as Chipper, has a torn ACL in his knee and is out for the rest of the season. At his age, and given his injury history, there’s every reason to think his career may be over. (The mere fact that I’m writing this means he’ll be fit as a stallion by spring training next year and hit 72 homers against the Mets.)

Let’s assume what everyone else is assuming, that his playing days have ended. I should be relieved, even ecstatic about this news. If all the evil I wished on him over the years could be rendered in corporeal form, it would stretch from here to Jupiter. And yet, upon hearing the news, I feel oddly sad.

When it comes to baseball, I can separate my personal feelings from objective reality. And the objective reality is, Chipper Jones may be the best switch hitter ever not named Mickey Mantle or Eddie Murray. Much like Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr., you can only imagine what his numbers would have been like if he hadn’t lost so many seasons to injury. Plus, he played a physically demanding position that is underrepresented in the Hall of Fame. If he never plays another game, he’s still a lock for Cooperstown.

Do I hate him? Oh god, yes. I’ve despised him ever since that immortal (to me) year of 1999, when he clearly delighted in beating the Mets at every opportunity. You could tell he relished the thought of eliminating them from postseason contention, as the Braves nearly did in their last series at Shea that season. When an excruciating extra-inning loss left the Mets two games out of the wild card spot with three games to play, Chipper told the press that Mets fans should “go home and put their Yankee stuff on”.

For that statement alone, if I ever see him in the street, I will hit him in the face with a shovel.

That said, Chipper will be missed because he may be the last of the Great Baseball Villains. He loved being a thorn in a certain team’s side. This was once very common in the game, when rivalries were real and deeply personal, rather than the trumped-up sports hatred of the ESPN era, where The Worldwide Leader inflates artificial rivalries as much as they can even if they haven’t evolved organically. Or obsesses about actual rivalries to the point where everyone becomes sick of them (see: Yankees-Red Sox)

In ye olden days, every team had a villain or two. Someone to boo and project all their hatred on. Dodgers fans hated Juan Marichal. Giants fans hated Don Drysdale. Yankees fans hated George Brett. And everybody hated Barry Bonds. The recent Reds-Cardinals kung fu exposition notwithstanding, we don’t see much of this in baseball anymore.

The mere mention of the Braves fills me with anger. But when I watch them now, there’s very few people who inspire actual anger within me, because all of the villains of the late 90s/early 00s are gone. No more Greg Maddux. No more Brian Jordan. No more John Rocker. No more Eddie Perez or Ryan Klesko or Andruw Jones. Every single one of those guys hated the Mets, and you could tell.

In their place, the Braves are now a team with a disturbing amount of fresh-faced young’uns. Guys like Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and Matt DIaz, guys who just put their heads down and play and just wanna help the team win, by golly. They don’t even have the decency to be hateable. And to top it all off, Bobby Cox is soon to retire. If the Braves didn’t cling to their horribly racist Tomahawk Chop, there’d be nothing to hate about them at all.

Chipper held himself as a beacon of Hate, and he did not mellow as the years went on. He named one of his kids Shea, because he hit so well there, as a giant genetic “fuck you” to Mets fans. He bitched about David Wright winning a Gold Glove. In more recent years, he professed enjoying his visits to New York and even had not-terrible things to say about Mets fans, which I think he did for the sole purpose of driving them nuts.

Earlier this year, I went to a Mets-Braves game with my daughter. When Chipper strode to the plate, the crowd erupted in its customary mocking chant of LAAAAAAAAA-REEEEEE!. 

“Why they saying Larry?” my daughter said, knitting her brow in confusion.

“Because he likes to call himself Chipper, but his real name is Larry,” I explained.

She scowled. “Why?” She sounded annoyed. She had no idea what hell this man had inflicted on the Mets. She just knew, at age three, that a grown man shouldn’t call himself Chipper. So she yelled LARRY! along with everyone else and laughed.

I wouldn’t have had that moment without you, Larry, so thanks. And also, go die.

Transcripts from the LeBron Tapes

Don’t think for one min that I haven’t been taking mental notes
of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone!
— @KingJames, 8.10.2010


lebronnixon.jpgKing James: You take a fellow like this Michael Jordan, I notice–he is always creating something, isn’t he?

Bosh: He incidentally is on–you shouldn’t get involved in this, but he’s on our list, too.

King James: Good.

Bosh: They’re going after a couple of ex-ballers. They’re going after Charles Barkley, too.

King James: Like what? Have they been making any money on the outside?

Bosh: Those two? You kidding me? We think they might have something on them, yeah. I think we can finally get [NBA commissioner David] Stern to admit he really suspended Jordan for gambling that time when he pretended to play baseball. Just want to harass them. Just give them a little trouble.

King James: Exactly. Pound these people.

Bosh: Just give them something to worry about.

King James: It’s routine.

Bosh: Yeah. Oh, that’s right, you talked to [Dwayne] Wade today, too. He was trying to dig up some dirt of Kevin Durant. I can’t even remember why.

King James: That subdued extension announcement of his. No ESPN special. No dry ice. Nothing. Just tweeted about it, like he’s trying to out-humble me. Pissed me off.

Bosh: Should we sic Jim Gray on him? The man’s loyal.

King James: Gray? He ain’t no attack dog.

Bosh: Are you kidding? Dig you see him rip apart Corey Pavin?

King James: Alright, but do it through the proper channels. We can’t have this shit coming back to me.

Bosh: Of course.

King James: [inaudible] Delonte West?

Bosh: He was traded with Sebastain Telfair, then released by the Timberwolves. Haven’t we done enough?