To be an umpire is to be something of a bad time. Umpires embody the same spirit that leads our mothers to force a helmet on us at the roller rink. They’re your friend Wanda, who just wants to remind you, because you did complain last time, that strong beers give you heartburn, so even though it’s your birthday and you just want to have some fun, you might want to lay off. Wanda isn’t wrong — your body doesn’t do well with all sorts of things anymore — but she could also be described as “harshing the vibe.”
Umpires stomp on our good time and get in the way of our boys and their wins, so we yell and squawk their way, but we’d be lost without them. They’re a very necessary bummer and they normally perform their bummering quite ably. You can tell, because we have baseball at all. They aren’t perfect, and they have their foul-ups and biases, but if umpires were much worse at their very hard jobs, even just some medium amount worse, we couldn’t have the sport. It would offend us; it would get us down. The action on the field would grind to a halt. We’d say baseball was stupid.
The calls, especially at home plate, have to be mostly very good mostly all the time, or the whole thing comes tumbling down. And so umpires do their very hard jobs mostly very well with very little thanks and a not small amount of jeering. And what’s more, they’re calm while they do it. That mellow is important. The job well done keeps us moving; the calm lets us believe it’s fair. The calm lets us trust it. And so they’re calm. Not perfectly so; not when the yelling and the squawking really pick up. But usually? Quite calm.
Case in point: on Wednesday evening, a bug flew into second base umpire Bruce Dreckman’s ear during the ninth inning of the Yankees-White Sox game. Here is Dreckman, running in from the infield as Jonathan Holder prepared to pitch to Nicky Delmonico. He calls for a trainer, looking vaguely stricken, but only vaguely. Greg Bird appears confused. What’s going on here? Well jeez, Greg, he has a moth in his ear.
Dreckman grasps the shoulders of Steve Donohue, head athletic trainer for the Yankees. It’s moving around in there, Steve. Oh god, it tickles.
Bruce and Steve descend into the dugout, with Bruce giving his ear the little dig-and-flick of a man who has just gotten out of the pool and is unable to shake that last. little. bit. of. water. Except it is not water. It is a bug.
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