Variations On a Thumb

By Peter Stoler

THE MEN IN BLUE

by Larry R. Gerlach

Viking; 287 pages; $12.95

Despite their importance, umpires are the invisible men of baseball. Players and fans insult them, though never by printable names. Official histories ignore them. The authoritative Baseball Encyclopedia contains profiles of every man who ever played or managed a team in the major leagues; it makes no mention of those who called the plays.

Now, through the efforts of University of Utah History Professor Larry Gerlach, the umpires strike back. The Men in Blue is a series of interviews with twelve umps emeriti, men who, during their working lives, regularly performed trenchant variations on a thumb. Take John Edward ("Beans") Reardon, who came up to the National League in 1926 and called balls and strikes until he retired in 1949. So small that he "had to stand twice in the same spot to make a shadow," Beans compensated for his lack of size with the belligerence of a bantam. "To be a good umpire," he states, "you first of all must have guts because you're going to have trouble ... If the Pope was an umpire, he'd still have trouble with the Catholics."

Joe Rue, who umpired in the American League from 1938 to 1947, agrees. "I've been mobbed, cussed, booed, kicked in the ass, punched in the face, hit with mud balls and whisky bottles, and had everything from shoes to fruits and vegetables thrown at me ... An umpire should hate humanity." Ernie Stewart, a wartime umpire, laments the loneliness that goes with the job: "Every city is a strange city; you don't have a home." Bill McKinley, a 19-year man, thinks of the jeers and catcalls as a kind of minor league tryout: "Some fellows never made it because they couldn't take it." Still, despite these drawbacks, none of the officials ever considered leaving the game; as The Men in Blue amply testifies, all of them seemed to enjoy every minute of their misery.

So will any reader who spends a summer evening with Gerlach's despised dozen. The men profiled in this long-overdue tribute were not infallible, and they knew it. "The toughest call an umpire has to make is not the half swing," admits Veteran Bill Kinnamon. "The toughest call is throwing a guy out of the game after you blew the hell out of the play." But all the officials consider themselves honest; all believe that if they missed an occasional decision, they called every game well and truly. So they did, and collectively they and their colleagues have kept baseball an unsullied sport, from the Black Sox scandal to the coming World Series. May every one of them get home safe.

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