We Wuz Robbed, 1988

It's the end of an era...and the beginning of a new one.

I read, with some sadness, that the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School is closing its doors after having trained baseball’s arbiters since 1938. Before Harry took control of the school in 1976 American League umpire Bill McGowan had been training umpires, long before the very notion of an automated balls and strikes system was even an idea. A dumb one, if you ask me. But there are others, closer to the game than I am, who feel that the ABS system is just one more step on the slippery slope that is taking the human element out of a very traditional game, played and officiated by…humans.

I’m not the only one who feels that way. Cy Young winner Chris Sale of the Atlanta Braves: “I will never challenge a pitch…I’m not an umpire.” He understands the human element of the game that sometimes rules in his favor and sometimes against.

Maybe the higher stakes of the game have led to this trend toward automation. Maybe it’s something that would’ve been done in the game’s infancy, if Thomas Edison weren’t so busy perfecting the light bulb. But it just seems like a little bit of the charm of the game we love is being replaced by the drive to be absolutely right all the time. Don’t get me wrong; I like instant replay, though sometimes determining whether a runner’s little finger was off the bag by a quarter of an inch while being tagged by a shortstop can take long enough to grab a beer and wait it out in the dugout. (If you know, you know.) It’s anything but instant.

And yes, I know that replay would’ve assured Detroit’s Armando Galarraga a place in baseball history. It was the egregiously botched call for the final out that denied him his perfect game in 2010.

And yes, we’re spared the ridiculous in-your-face arguments between an umpire and an overweight polyester-clad manager that always ended in favor of the umpire, bad call or not.

Still, come on. Tradition.

Maybe I’m just barking at clouds.

I don’t know if giving our robot overlords the final say in questionable calls is driving a human umpire school like Harry Wendelstedt’s out of business. You’d have to ask Hunter Wendelstedt, heir to Harry’s school, about that. He’s a major league umpire himself, so he may be biased.

I’m just glad that in 1988, while working at TBS, I got to travel to Florida to get a closeup look at how the men in blue got their start and to try my hand at the balls and strikes thing myself. How hard could it be? I had a bone to pick with Harry Wendelstedt anyway, the same Harry W. who incurred the wrath of a 15-year-old (me) by making what I, in my teenage wisdom, deemed a hideously bad call against my favorite team at the time, the Giants.

It was 1968 and Don Drysdale of the Dodgers was in the midst of his record-setting string of scoreless innings pitched. But in this game, he loaded the bases with no one out. The Giants’ Dick Dietz was at the plate when Drysdale hit him with the pitch. Dietz to first, shutout gone. Not so fast. Harry jumped out in front of the plate and declared that Dietz hadn’t made an effort to get out of the way of the pitch and therefore the at-bat continued. Ultimately, when the Giants failed to plate a run, the streak lived on. I was livid. I mean, I was watching it on a 19-inch TV and it was obviously a flawed call. Harry was three feet away. How could he possibly have missed it? Now, 20 years later, I was riding around Ormond Beach, Florida with Harry at the wheel and me in the passenger seat explaining why he was wrong in 1968. He explained that he wasn’t and, since he was the umpire, he had the final word.

Besides, when I got the gear on and took the field to see what’s so hard about being an umpire, I found out. And I’m guessing Harry really did make the right call in 1968. Probably.

I didn’t get an umpiring job out of this piece, of course, but it did win me a Georgia Emmy Award. The funny thing is, it beat out a feature about some reporter who documented his own heart surgery. Was that the right call? Who knows? What am I, an umpire?