How to Dance with a Little League Umpire

Editor’s note: Justin has previously written at The Hardball Times, among other outposts of the baseball internet, including The Good Phight and Baseball Prospectus. He’ll now add contributing to FanGraphs to that list. We’re excited to welcome him.

This dance only has a couple moves, and they go like this:

One partner, the coach, mutters or shouts an invitation for the other partner, the umpire, to dance with him. The umpire should not — and likely won’t — accept.

Not at first.

He must listen, certainly, and he must hear. He must register every mean or vile thing that comes out of the coach’s mouth. But he must also not hear them. Because it is not time to make his move.

Not yet.

It’s still the coach’s turn to dance. He flails his arms. He stomps his feet. And then, finally, the umpire makes two moves — the only two he’s got.

The first one can be a few things: A whisper. A head cock. Maybe a request for the coach to dance a little longer. Just one more step. Just one more word. Just so the ump can see if he’ll do it.

And if the coach obliges, the ump makes his other move.

He points up and out at the horizon, and tells the coach the dance is over. He can go off somewhere in the direction the ump just pointed. It doesn’t matter where. But he’s got to go now. Because the dance is done, even though the music’s still playing.

With all the chest-pounding, finger-pointing, eye-bulging, and hands-on-hipping we see from major league umpires, it can appear a less graceful, a less coordinated dance than it actually is. But down in the little leagues, all of the mental alertness and situational awareness umpiring requires can be, by necessity, more clearly on display.

“The interesting difference between umpiring kids and adults is that the adults are the ones you have to deal with anyways,” John Gallante says in the same direct, constructive tone with which he says everything else.

Gallante is the Regional Umpiring Director for Perfect Game, as well as the President and Assignor of the Tri-State Elite Umpires Association. He has umpired countless games, he has trained other youth baseball umpires, and he coaches a 13U team, giving him a rare set of bilingual communication skills with which not every umpire comes equipped.

Baseball players can typically look back and tell you about the sepia-toned moment in which they fell in love with the game. Gallante’s umpiring story is a lot shorter: He was 21 years old. He needed money. He saw an ad.

After his initial training, he followed the typical path, driving far and wide to umpire sparsely attended youth games and learning exactly why umpiring doesn’t work when nobody wants to be an umpire.

“There is a severe shortage of amateur umpires in this country,” Gallante says. “JV and freshman baseball games are routinely serviced with only one umpire on the same size field that they would have four on in the major leagues. And that is because, generally, the pay has not increased tremendously, and the abuse has increased. So. You know. Guys have to ask themselves, how much is worth it?”

A lack of back-up while officiating a sport that generates infinite possibilities is going to see a lot more dancing, especially since, as Gallante learned, there’s no training that can teach you to be everywhere at once. Eventually, he and 12 other umps branched off and started training to incorporate what they thought was missing from the process.

“Without the educational experience or training to go into this, we’re really selling the game and the players short,” Gallante says. “You’re thrown on the field to fend for yourself and you learn by experience. When you go out there and you just have to navigate it yourself, you fall into some natural habits that a normal human being on the field would. And it turns out, those things aren’t exactly… helpful.”

Gallante believes that the best umpires don’t have the luxury of genuine ignorance. They must hear and interpret everything that’s said in order to formulate a proper reaction, especially in youth sports, where the goal is for the children to gain something from the experience beyond second-hand embarrassment. During one game, Gallante heard a parent shouting, “Don’t worry, Billy, we have pitchers who throw hard too,” after Billy, a child, had been hit by a pitch.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘What does he mean? That the other team is going to throw at somebody to get even for this hit by pitch?’” Gallante posits. “To me, this is something we have to be proactive with. That’s an inciting statement. It’s threatening, it’s inappropriate. But that’s just one example of being aware of what everybody’s saying at all times. Because if a kid does get hit again later, the writing was on the wall there. It’s not like it’s a surprise.”

Youth baseball umpires have to pinpoint the moment to have their reaction, as saying the wrong thing (or nothing) at the wrong time (or no time) can lead to an implosion of the fragile decorum that holds nine innings of baseball together. Too slow, and one coach may not like that the other was able to seemingly intimidate and influence some outcomes. Too aggressive, and you’re charged with instigation. And then there’s always the possibility that someone is completely unhinged: Gallante’s been screamed at, threatened with violence, and followed to his car.

Gallante laments: “Nobody would ever dream of saying some of the things that are said in the parking lot of a youth baseball game.”

Anytime an umpire who has undergone training at the hands of Gallante finds himself in the path of a red-faced parent’s spittle, he likely goes back to that training to determine where exactly this situation could have been snuffed out earlier.

Gallante, who is 30, trains umpires decades older than him on how to operate on a level that lets them keep control of the game. With the help of Kurt Weidner, an umpire who has absorbed a litany of abuse over the years and can now spit it back out quite naturally on command, he equips his umpires with easy mantras to repeat to themselves:

Ignore. Acknowledge. Warn. Eject.

“We get accused of baiting a lot,” Gallante says, “but to me, you have to be a special kind of stupid to repeat the phrase ‘you [bleeping] suck’ after the guy you said it to asks what you said.”

Eject and walk away.

“You probably wouldn’t know it from watching MLB, but those guys have a lot more freedom to do what they want—they can stay there and get in a real back and forth in which their tensions are as high as the coach’s are. We don’t have that opportunity,” he says. “In the heat of the moment, I don’t think most coaches know what’s going to get them thrown out.”

The trouble is that officiating is unavoidably subjective. The ump saw it one way, the coach or parent saw it another, and there are a number of factors coloring everyone’s view. That ball hit the outside corner, says the ump, but to a parent in the stands who just knows their kid has a good eye, it was outside the zone.

Then there are the coaches whose intention is to get thrown out of the game. And as a coach himself, Gallante can see how that’s part of the job. Sort of.

“The coach has to do what he has to do on behalf of his players, and I think if he didn’t question a call he thought was clearly wrong or ask for an explanation, I don’t think he’s really doing his players any justice. If I were a player on that team, I’d be a little peeved he’s not doing everything he can to help us win,” Gallante admits. “It’s a game — arguing with the umpires will affect it one way or another. When he makes it clear that an umpire missed a call and now that umpire is feeling a little bit of heat on the next call, that’s just part of coaching and I’m fine with all that. That’s the human element.

“If you’re one of two grown-ass people having a public shouting match at a children’s sporting event, it’s tough to look anything but dumb. As an argument flares and phones come out, you may think you’re one cool insult or one intimidating hissyfit away from winning the crowd over, but any spectators of the debacle are probably watching with grim fascination or a gleeful sense of “…at least I’m not that guy.”

But we’re talking about sports; everyone out there is hoping to, at some point, in some way, look like the biggest bad-ass on the field. When that means making a clutch play, it’s the sport at its best. When that means screaming profanity after profanity at a guy making $50 to call a game in the rain in front of a bench full of children, it’s the sport at its worst.

The game will get played, and it will need umpires to play it. There will always be strikes on the corner and snarls from the dugout, and the dance will go on. John Gallante is helping his umpires learn the right moves.

“The game needs umpires,” Gallante says, “and we take pride in supplying that part of the game. I usually find solace in the fact that it’s not the kids, and that the kids understand the human element. Which is what makes it worth it for me.”