'Hard-working' isn't reason enough for some umpires to stay in the Majors

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For the first time in a while I had the chance to collapse in front of the TV last night with the remote in my hand and flip from one baseball game to another. I have to admit in some ways I miss the old days when I would sit down and watch ONE game—usually keeping score—from start to finish.

Now, I’m addicted to the remote. Sometimes I will change the channel between pitches much less between innings.

As luck would have it, I hit on the Yankees and Royals at precisely the moment that Billy Butler hit his ‘home run,’ in the bottom of the fourth inning to give the Royals a 4-2 lead. Except for this: It wasn’t a home run. The ball clearly hit the padding just in front of the fence that is the home run line in left field in Kauffman Stadium.

It wasn’t an easy call. You couldn’t blame umpire Dan DeMuth for missing it as he ran out in the direction of the fence to judge where the ball landed.

Thank goodness for replay.

While the umpires went into their room to watch the replay the Royals network showed the replay from several different angles. There wasn’t any doubt the ball had hit the padding just short of the fence. As they watched the replay from several angles, Royals announcers Ryan Lefebvre and Frank White said the ball was clearly not a home run.

“Billy’s going to have to put his helmet back on and go out to second base,” Lefebvre said at one point.

When replay first came in a couple of years ago one of the concerns was that it would slow games down—they’re already slow enough—the way replay now brings football games to a complete halt. Commissioner Bud Selig insisted that wouldn’t be a problem and estimated most replays wouldn’t delay the game for more than two minutes.

This one should have taken perhaps half that time.

It took more than five minutes. After a while Lefebvre and White began to wonder what was going on.

“Maybe they’re taking the time to get a cold drink,” Lefebvre said. “So Frank, what’d you have for dinner?”

Finally, the umpires came out and DeMuth—the crew chief—signaled home run, which sent Yankees manager Joe Girardi into an understandable tizzy. He argued. His bench argued. His bench was warned to keep quiet. After all, even if the call was wrong it was, well, um, a call.

I bring all this up not because I care who won the game; I truly don’t, although I’ve had a warm spot in my heart for the Royals since I covered their 1985 World Championship team which included White—a truly wonderful guy. I don’t bring it up because I think DeMuth’s a bad umpire although I’m baffled at how he could look at replay and not change his call.

I bring it up because it seems like very few nights go by when some umpire in some game doesn’t badly blow a call. I’m not talking about missing a high strike or even not seeing a ball barely short-hop an outfielder. People miss those calls because they’re human.

I’m talking screwing up ball and strike counts. I’m talking about Jerry Meals horribly missed call at home plate in the 19th inning of a Braves-Pirates game last month. I’m talking Phil Cuzzi being out of position and missing calls more often than I go back for seconds.

Meals, to his credit, apologized just as Jim Joyce did last year when he cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game with a blown call at first base that should have ended the game. Meals is a solid umpire and Joyce is a very good one. They aren’t the problem.

Here’s the problem: there are too many umpires like Cuzzi and Tony Randazzo and C.B. Bucknor and Angel Hernandez—those are my big four; I’m sure other people have others guys on their list—who simply aren’t good at what they do. You might throw Bob Davidson on that list because he’s so obsessed with calling balks he misses half the other calls he asked to make in a given night. Joe West’s temperament is less-than-great but he’s a competent umpire.

On most jobs if you aren’t doing it well you get fired. Supreme Court justices—sadly—don’t get fired. Neither do Major League Umpires. Basically, unless you break the law, you’ve got the job for life once you are vested as a big leaguer. Everyone in baseball knows who the bad umpires—the really bad ones—are but no one does anything about it.

Four years ago when I was working on my book, “Living on the Black,” with Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine, Mussina went nuts during a game in Tampa over C.B. Bucknor’s strike zone. Mussina had a reputation among umpires as one of the easiest pitcher in the game to work with (so did Glavine) because he almost never complained.

“I worked games with him for, I think, 13 years and if he walked up behind me and started talking I wouldn’t know who it was,” Rich Garcia, a long-time umpire told me one day. “I don’t think I ever heard him talk. He never complained.”

Garcia, you may remember, was the umpire who blew the Derek Jeter-Jeffrey Maier call in the 1996 playoffs and then came in after seeing a replay and told the media, “I blew it.”

After the game in Tampa I asked Mussina why he’d gotten so angry. He patiently explained that when an umpire consistently misses pitches, especially when you’re older, you become convinced those extra pitches you have to throw will come back and get you sooner or later.

“A lot of guys think C.B. Bucknor should be a Double-A umpire,” I said.

“That,” Mussina said, “would be an insult to Double-A umpires.”

Mussina is now retired; Bucknor is still in the Major Leagues.

I don’t want to pick on any one individual. I’m sure these guys are nice men who work hard at their job. But that’s not enough—not in any job. You need to do the job WELL. Angel Hernandez has had an attitude problem since he first got to the big leagues and still does.

MLB keeps changing the way it administers umpires. The latest guy in charge is Joe Torre, who knows something about the game. But if he doesn’t have the authority to tell umpires they aren’t doing the job; to put them on notice that they might be sent to Triple-A (the same way a player not performing might be sent to Triple-A) if they don’t improve, then all the knowledge in the world doesn’t help.

On Thursday, Torre said that DeMuth had missed the call. He said the problem wasn’t with the angles he saw on replay but with the fact that he DIDN’T KNOW THE GROUND RULE ON WHAT WAS A HOME RUN!

Seriously. The ballpark was re-designed in 2009 so the rule has been there for three years. The umpires go over the ground rules prior to the first game of every series. Was DeMuth getting a cold drink while this conversation took place?

What’s more, DeMuth took the coward’s way out, refusing to talk to reporters after the game. And yet Torre talked about how hard DeMuth works and the fact that he’s a good umpire.

Great. How about a five game suspension without pay for not knowing the ground rules? While you’re at it, you might throw in the rest of the crew. Didn’t SOMEONE know the ground rules? Apparently not. Inexcusable. And yet, no one will be punished and tonight or tomorrow another ‘hard-working,’ umpire will badly botch another call.

Good players make bad plays; we all know that. But if a player makes enough bad plays or fails to perform he’s not going to have a job in The Major Leagues anymore.

No one is saying Jim Joyce should be umpiring anywhere but in the big leagues and he’s a proven class act.

But right now Armando Galarraga is pitching in Reno. That happens to players. It doesn’t happen to umpires.

It should.

More insights on Clemens, the steroids issue; Follow-up on the comments on the PGA Championship

Tom Boswell’s column in this morning’s Washington Post is worth reading because he makes important points about great athletes believing they will always be believed—no matter what they say—and about how often he saw Roger Clemens do good things during his long (too long as it turns out) Major League career.

I didn’t know Clemens as long or as well as Boz did but my experiences with him were similar. The very first time I met him was in the visiting clubhouse at Camden Yards in Baltimore in 1992. I was working on my first baseball book and I was on crutches because I had torn my Achilles heel. A few minutes before Clemens showed up in the clubhouse, I’d been sitting on a chair up against a wall so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way while I waited for Clemens to arrive—I’d been told he was coming on the team bus, unusual in itself for a superstar—with my crutches standing against the wall next to me.

Jody Reed, then the Red Sox second baseman, walked by, glanced at me and the crutches, and said, “You better make sure those things don’t fall and trip someone.”

Feeling fine Jody, thanks for your concern.

A few minutes later Clemens arrived and walked to his locker. I stood up, grabbed the crutches—which somehow had not fallen and created the havoc Reed envisioned—and hobbled over to introduce myself to Clemens.

“What happened to you?” he asked as we shook hands.

I told him it had been one of those fluke old guy injuries—I wasn’t THAT old at the time but what the heck—and he nodded, took a few steps to his right and grabbed an extra chair. “Sit down and tell me what you need,” he said. As I did, he took the crutches and put them behind him in his locker.

When I told him I was doing a book on baseball and wanted to chat with him at some point he shrugged and said, “sure, no problem.”

To make this long story a little shorter, we talked for a couple of hours the next day, then resumed the conversation in Boston a couple of weeks later. On that day, when it was time for the clubhouse to be close to the media, Clemens walked me outside the clubhouse and sat on the back steps for another 45 minutes so we could finish up. (I was off the crutches by then, much to Jody Reed’s relief no doubt).

I never once encountered him over the next 15 years when he wasn’t cordial or available if I asked. When he came back to the Yankees in 2007, I was working on my book on Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina and he jokingly asked if I’d chosen Mussina because he knew so many big words.

In short, like Boswell, I like Roger Clemens.

But I wasn’t the least bit surprised—nor was anyone else in baseball—when his name showed up in The Mitchell Report in 2007. To quote one of his former teammates, “if he’s not taking steroids then he must be from another planet.”

His numbers were just too outrageous to be believed—not unlike Barry Bonds, except for this: Clemens was in decline when he left Boston in 1996 at the age of 34. He’d thrown a lot of innings and dealt with a lot of injuries. That’s one reason the Red Sox let him leave. Then, as we all know, Brian McNamee came into his life and he miraculously turned his year around in 1998. In 1999—without McNamee—he had a mediocre year in New York. After that, McNamee was hired by the Yankees and the miracles began—a 20-3 record in 2001 at the age of 39 and then, most unbelievably an ERA of 1.87 in 2005 in Houston the summer he turned 43.

I watched, like everyone else, in awe and wonder. As usual, there were people who used the, “no one works out like Roger Clemens,” excuse—the same one heard about Bonds and Sosa and McGwire and other miracles of human nature. No one doubts that. But there’s a REASON why players approaching 40 can continue to push their bodies so hard and, unfortunately, it isn’t Gatorade.

The day Clemens testified before Congress along with McNamee in 2008 was painful. As committee chairman Henry Waxman said in conclusion: SOMEONE was lying. And, while you might have chosen Clemens over McNamee given McNamee’s sleazy background and the fact that he’d provided information only to stay out of jail, you weren’t going to choose Clemens over his pal Andy Pettitte. If Pettitte was ever going to lie it would have been to protect Clemens. But he didn’t. He told the committee Clemens had told him he had taken HGH.

Game, set, match.

I don’t believe Clemens will go to jail. Neither will Bonds, who seems to have found his way to a judge in San Francisco who is going to rule out any testimony that might convict him. But in the big picture it doesn’t matter. They’re both disgraced forever in the eyes of the public. In all likelihood, neither will ever be in the Hall of Fame and they will always be looked upon as cheaters. The sad thing is both had Hall of Fame careers before they got involved with steroids. They just wanted more.

In the grand scheme of things, baseball’s nightmare just goes on and on. Bud Selig and the players’ union (and the media—we aren’t innocent in this either) buried their head in the mid and late 90s when it started to become abundantly clear that players were growing at alarming rates and singles hitters were hitting opposite field home runs on a regular basis. It’s smaller ballparks, better workout regimens, better lights, lousy relief pitching. There were enough theories to fill Yankee Stadium.

None were true. Here’s what was true and I know I’ve told this story before but it is so apt it bears repeating. Ron Darling remembers arriving in Oakland after a trade in 1991 and being struck by how different the clubhouse was after games there than it had been during his Mets days in the mid-80s.

“With the Mets we came into the clubhouse after a game and went right to the food,” he said. “Then we showered, got dressed and went out for the night. In Oakland, guys came in, changed into shorts and a T-shirt and went to the weight room. Every night. After a while it occurred to me that it was just about impossible to work out that hard, that often in-season without some kind of help.”

We all know now what kind of help those A’s, led by McGwire and Jose Canseco, were getting.

I like Roger Clemens. I like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro—and no doubt plenty of other steroid users. But they cheated the game. They damaged themselves. And they have left a taint on the sport that won’t go away anytime soon.

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I try to read the posts on the blog at least a couple of times a week because they are often smart, informative and funny. Sometimes I disagree with them but that’s fine too.

That said there were a few posts in response to the blog Tuesday about the fiasco at The PGA Championship that simply made no sense to me. To begin with, some people clearly didn’t READ what I wrote. I didn’t exonerate Dustin Johnson at all, I said he was ultimately responsible (for those of you who need help with vocabulary that means final) for his fate. I also said that AFTER TALKING TO OTHER RULES OFFICIALS it was clear to me that David Price should have said something to Johnson about being in a bunker. His defenders say he was not OBLIGATED to do so. They’re right.

There are two kinds of officials in sports—pro-active ones who try to prevent athletes from committing penalties or violations—simple example as mentioned by one poster when a basketball referee tells a player, “you can’t move,” before an inbounds play. Does the player know that 99 times out of 100? Of course. The official is trying to avoid the 100th time. The same is true when football officials warn players they’re close to getting called for holding. Or even when a good official—unlike short-tempered baseball umpires—says to a coach or manager, “that’s enough,” before he tees him up or tosses him from a game.

Price chose not to be pro-active as every rules official I spoke to told me they would have been: “Dustin, you know under local rule you’re in a bunker.” That simple. As one very experienced official said: “there was nothing bad that could come from him saying that.” Plenty of bad, as we know, could come from not saying it, from saying, ‘I’m not obligated to say anything.’

To the guy who wanted to lecture me on the job of USGA officials: those were PGA of America officials out there. To the guy who has played in ‘high-level,’ competition and thus knows more golf than I do—call me when you’re in the last group of a major. In the meantime, ask real rules officials what they would have done in that situation. They’ve done it in a lot higher competition than you’ve played in. And finally to the guy who says I’m a ‘disgrace to sportswriting,’ for taking Price to task—really? Are you his brother, dad, son—or wife? If thinking David Price screwed up Sunday is the most disgraceful thing I ever do as a sportswriter I will have had one hell of a career.

And for those who want to write in today and say, ‘gee John, aren’t you being sensitive today,’—maybe. I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with me or with pointing out when I’m wrong—which is often. But at least read what I’ve written before you go off.

Baseball continues to have too much bad umpiring, time for changes

Forty-one years ago today Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. You would think by now the sports world would have replay figured out.

Only it doesn’t. In football, replay grinds games to a complete halt at both the NFL level and the college level and there is no guarantee that the call is going to be correct when all is said and done. Basketball is the same way. I was at a game last season where the officials went to replay on four consecutive plays because they didn’t think the clock had been set correctly. The game may still be going on for all I know. Hockey’s closer: Usually replay can determine if a goal has or has not been score fairly quickly or if a player was in the crease or had his stick above his shoulder. Even so, there are times when it takes a lot longer than it should to get the call right.

And then there is baseball. Bud Selig said last week at The All-Star game that there is, “little appetite,” for replay among people in the sport. That may be because baseball people have seen what replay has done to football and basketball and want no part of it. I actually get that although I also think if baseball were to add replay for safe-out calls like the one Phil Cuzzi so clearly blew on Sunday in San Francisco—not to mention the now infamous Jim Joyce blown perfect game call in Detroit earlier this season and for fair/foul calls—like the one Phil Cuzzi so clearly blew in the playoffs last October on Joe Mauer in the 11th inning of game two of Yankees-Twins (anyone see a pattern here?), it would be good for the game.

Actually there is another problem baseball has that has only a little to do with replay: there’s a lot of bad umpiring out there. One thing I do on vacation is watch a LOT of baseball; flipping from game-to-game most nights. Cuzzi was god-awful throughout the Mets-Giants game on Sunday but you can bet both MLB and the umpire’s union will defend him just as both almost always defend bad umpires.

My biggest problem is the strike zone. A few years ago when QuesTec was first used, umpires were virtually forced to start calling the high strike again. Until then, pitches at the belt were routinely being called balls. It now appears to me—and others—that they’ve gone back to squeezing pitchers on an almost nightly basis. I don’t know about you but I sit there all the time and watch a pitch and say, ‘that’s a strike,’ and the umpire never moves. I know those pitchtrax things are fallible but let me ask you a question: how often do you see a pitch outside that box called a strike? Almost never. How often do you see a pitch inside the box called a ball? Often.

On the night that Stephen Strasburg made his debut in Washington, I was sitting in the Pittsburgh dugout with Pirates pitching coach Joe Kerrigan and ESPN’s Jayson Stark (one of ESPN’s good guys). We were talking about pitch counts and the length of games. Kerrigan commented that the average game in 2010 required about 30 more pitches to complete than an average game did 20 years ago. Why, he asked, did we think that was the case.

“A lot of hitters are working counts more,” Stark said.

“Strike zone,” I said.

“Bingo,” Kerrigan said. “NO ONE calls the strike zone that’s in the rulebook. When was the last time you saw a pitch just below the letters called a strike? How about never. Check the rulebook. That’s a strike.”

There are other issues too—batters stepping out on every pitch; pitchers slowing down to an almost complete halt with runners on base—but the strike zone is an issue too. Not only does it mean more pitches are required but it means hitters are working with favorable counts far more often, leading to more hits, more walks and more runs—and more time. The only thing that has balanced some of that the last few years is drug-testing. There’s a lot less power in the game and a lot more warning track fly balls.

The first thing MLB should do is start firing bad umpires and let the union sue if it so desires. Why is Phil Cuzzi still working? He’s a proven incompetent with a bad attitude. So is C.B. Bucknor, who one pitcher described to me a couple of years ago as not being good enough to work in Double-A. There are plenty of others. Players get fired for not doing their job and so do managers. Why not umpires? The easiest game to officiate is baseball. The only serious challenge is balls and strikes about 99 percent of the time. If the other three guys have one tough call in a game, it’s a lot. A basketball official can have five block-charge decisions in the first five minutes of a game. Football officials have to decide what is or is not holding on almost every play. Hockey officials have to be on the move constantly and decide when physical contact is legal and when it’s not.

Umpires have the easiest job and the worst attitudes—generally speaking. It was too bad that Joyce, one of the best umpires and a very good guy, was in the middle of the blown perfect game. At the very least though, that call and that game and Joyce’s response to it should have sent a message to Selig that more replay—competently managed--is needed in the game.

You do NOT send the umpires into their locker room every time a replay is needed—the way they now do on home run calls. You have a replay official—not another umpire—in the press box who can hit a button to tell the home plate umpire he wants to look at a play when something appears blatantly wrong—like Joyce’s call in Detroit or Cuzzi’s call on Sunday. It would have taken under 30 seconds to get those two calls right. If the replay official needs more than 90 seconds to make a decision, the call on the field stands. Move on.

Of course baseball will continue to huff and puff and do nothing about any of this. Bad umpires will continue to umpire and there will be no replay anytime soon. On a different level it is sort of like drug-testing. MLB doesn’t want to wrangle with a union on something that is clearly needed so it will continue to duck the issue and say that all is well and, hey, look at our attendance!

Maybe they should call NASA for help. There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot going on over there these days.




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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

Galarraga-Joyce saga continues – in aftermath, everyone on target except for Bud Selig

It is remarkable how the Armando Galarraga-Jim Joyce saga has continued to dominate the news in the past 48 hours. Remarkable, actually, in a good way because both men have behaved admirably in the wake of Joyce’s blown call on Wednesday. The story has become one of those that transcends sports. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post had stories on the front page of the newspaper this morning and The Post’s editorial page, which generally is completely unaware that sports exists outside the DC beltway, ran an editorial on the story—although it somehow found a way to tie it all back to how it affects Washington.

In the news business we call that the, “Dwight D. Eisenhower, who once flew over Trenton….was elected President last night,” approach to journalism.

Anyway, back to Galarraga and Joyce—and Bud Selig who has now become a major part of the ongoing saga.

The feel good part of this story is the way all of those directly involved have handled it. Joyce not only admitted he had gotten the call wrong once he saw it on replay, he sought out Galarraga to tell him how sorry he was about it. Galarraga accepted the apology and went out of his way to talk about how classy it was of Joyce to come and find him.

On Thursday, the Tigers and Indians wrapped up their series in Detroit with a 1 o’clock game. With Joyce scheduled to work the plate, there was all sorts of potential for disaster and trouble. When Don Denkinger worked the plate in game 7 of the 1985 World Series after his game 6 gaffe at first base, he ended up tossing both Whitey Herzog and Juaquin Andujar. That game was played in Kansas City, not St. Louis. God only knows what would have happened if the Cardinals had been the home team that night.

As has often been the case throughout his career, Tigers manager Jim Leyland did the exact right thing: He sent Galarraga to the plate with the Tigers lineup card. As soon as Galarraga walked up to Joyce and shook his hand, the fans who had been booing the umpires when they walked onto the field stopped. Many stood to applaud Galarraga. Joyce gave him a pat on the back as the meeting broke up and then turned into the Tigers dugout and pointed at Leyland to say, ‘thank-you.’

It was one of those cool sports moments where everyone gets it right. The Tigers won a 12-6 slugfest and there wasn’t any sign of trouble in Comerica Park throughout the afternoon. Kudos to all—including the Detroit fans.

Meanwhile, Selig was doing his best/worst imitation of Hamlet. He had an almost unique opportunity to right a wrong and send everyone home happy and he flat out blew it. All he had to do was say this: “After looking at the replay over and over; after hearing what Jim Joyce and Jason Donald (the Indians baserunner on the blown call) had to say and given the unique circumstances: the game was over if the call was made correctly AND by overruling it I am not changing the result in any way at all—it was 3-0 Tigers when the call was made and the final score was 3-0 Tigers with no further baserunners—I’m invoking my ‘best interests of the game,’ powers to reverse the call. Jason Donald was out. Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game.”

There is NO reasonable argument against this. To those who say Selig is setting a dangerous precedent I say this: fine. Let him declare that at any time in the future if a pitcher gets the first 26 outs of a game and then fails to get the 27th on a clearly blown call by an umpire who instantly says he blew the call, he will do the same thing. There’s your precedent. Now let’s sit back and wait for it to happen again.

Last night, Ken Burns, the noted baseball historian was on Keith Olbermann’s show. He started going on about ‘unraveling the sweater,’ by reversing this call. He brought up Bucky Dent’s home run, asking if it should be taken away because Dent may have used a corked bat. He mentioned the Giants stealing signs prior to the Bobby Thomson home run and Mark McGwire’s steroid induced home runs.

Oh please. Those are ridiculous analogies. For one thing, they involve cheating, not an out-and-out honest mistake that has been confessed to by the person who made the mistake. Second, a million different things could have happened—we’ll never know—if there was no corked bat (maybe Dent doubles; maybe the game is played differently if the Yankees aren’t ahead after Dent’s at bat, WE DON’T KNOW); same thing with Bobby Thomson or any other example like that baseball people might want to bring up.

Here, we know. There are no ‘what-ifs,’ involved. If Joyce makes the right call, the game is over. Even in the case of Denkinger, the Cardinals still had chances to win the game—all Denkinger did was give the Royals a baserunner leading off the ninth. It was a horrible mistake but there is no way you could go back and correct it once the game was over.

This can be corrected. Put simply, it is the right thing to do. Selig already changed the rules on postseason rainouts in the middle of a World Series, so why not do this? It would be the right thing for Galarraga certainly; it would save Joyce, a good umpire and a good man, a lifetime of carrying the label of blowing this call and it would be—wait for it—RIGHT FOR BASEBALL. If Ken Burns or some of the so-called ‘purists,’ want to get into a dither over it, let them. Most people who love the game would be happy that justice was done and there’s no harm done to anyone in the process. As I said, the next time something EXACTLY like this happens, let the commissioner do the same thing. My guess is Bob Costas’s great grandson will be commissioner by the time this exact circumstance comes up again.

Selig was absolutely babbling yesterday when he went on about how great everyone in the game was; how proud he was of Galarraga and Joyce and everyone else who has ever set foot on a baseball field. Remember, I’m not a Bud-basher. I like the guy and I think he’s done a lot of things right as commissioner. This time though the Selig-gyrations need to just stop and he needs to just do the right thing if only to get the governor of Michigan to stop issuing proclamations.

Here’s the scorecard right now: Galarraga—perfect. Leyland—perfect. Joyce—trying desperately to do anything possible to make up for his mistake. Tiger fans—fabulous. The leader of the sport?—hiding under a rock. Come on Bud, crawl out from under there and get this one right. Everyone else involved has brought honor to the game since Wednesday. Now it's your turn.


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