MILWAUKEE — To baseball umpires, timing matters.
By the time registration opened at 8 a.m., more than 100 aspiring professional umpires had already arrived at the Milwaukee Brewers ballpark for Major League Baseball's one-day umpire camp.
These camps are, for a lucky few, the first step toward a career as an MLB umpire. A handful will be invited to a month-long development program in January, followed perhaps by a job in the minor leagues, then, hopefully, a plum Major League job.
In an era in which technology has encroached on every aspect of umpiring — replay review, near-daily lowlight videos of bad calls going viral, and now, MLB's automated-ball-strike system that calculates the location of a pitch to within a fraction of an inch — the pressure on umpires is higher than ever, MLB officials say.
None of this, though, has discouraged the hopefuls. Instead, candidates in Milwaukee said they embraced the technological advances as tools to help their pursuit of every umpire's goal: getting all the calls right.
"You don't want to be up on a big screen and being highlighted from making mistakes," said Reginald Davis, 45, from Racine, Wis. "You make sure to practice your craft. You study every single day. You watch videos to improve yourself. That's the most important thing."
A day at umpire camp
The pool of hopefuls in this camp ran the demographic gamut: mostly — but not all — men, of all ages, skin colors, hometowns and experience levels. Teaching them were a crew of MLB umpiring officials with more than 300 years of professional experience between them, including 16 World Series.
Over three hours one Sunday morning in July, the instructors organized a series of exercises on the very basics of umpiring. They practiced how to hold their fists as they called a batter out. They practiced their home plate stance. They practiced footwork and positioning for a handful of game scenarios, complete with a local youth baseball team standing in as fielders.
Even crouching behind the catcher at home plate came with a series of details for students to master. Widen your stance, MLB umpire instructor Kevin O'Connor directed one. Square your shoulders to the pitch, he told another. Track the ball longer with your eyes, he told a third. "Timing! Slow it down," he said to another.
All of the tips had practical concerns behind them — keeping your outer elbow tucked in, for instance, will protect you from getting hit by a pitch. But more than anything, O'Connor said, getting the little things right can help an umpire project what he called "field presence."
"You got to look like you know what you're doing," O'Connor told them. "Those two dugouts, you've got to prove to them you know what you're doing."
How technology is changing umpiring
Dealing with pressure has always been part of an umpire's job. Complaints to umpires by players and managers who disagree with a call are as old as umpiring itself. And in 2008, MLB began to use replay review to overturn some calls.
In the modern era, advances in technology have made it easier for everyone else to be critics. For fans and commentators, the strike zone superimposed on a TV broadcast allows them to see, seemingly objectively, whether a pitch was in or out of the strike zone. Now, after each game, umpire scorecards and videos of bad calls circulate on social media to thousands of people.
"The umpiring now is better than it ever has been by a mile," said Jim Reynolds, an MLB umpire supervisor who worked the major leagues for 24 years, including two World Series. "But everybody's expectations now have risen and risen and risen and gone through the roof. And it has put our guys in a really, really tough situation mentally."
"To assume that those missed calls don't add up and don't weigh on our umpires' psyche is not right. Our guys care a lot," he added.
Now, what might be the biggest change for major league umpires is on deck: MLB is testing a camera-based system known as ABS, or automated ball-strike, that can tell instantly whether a pitch is in the strike zone.
An ABS challenge system could be coming to the big leagues before long, in which players will be able to challenge balls and strikes when they disagree with the umpire's call. When that happens, an animation showing exactly where the ball crossed the zone appears on the big screen for everyone to see.
"When you walk on a big league field — I don't care if you're a player, an umpire or a coach — confidence is the most important thing. One of the things we're going to have to monitor with our guys, and one of the things they're going to have to overcome, is this eroding of confidence in real time," Reynolds said.
It has already changed MLB's umpire development process, said Cris Jones, who supervises umpires in Triple-A, the highest level of the minor leagues, where ABS has been in testing for several years.
Sometimes calls are overturned because the ball clipped the zone by measurements as small as a tenth of an inch. "I thought I'd be pretty good if I got that right back in the day. But they have to be accurate," Jones said.
Now, Jones and other umpire supervisors have a new attribute to evaluate in deciding whether a minor league umpire is ready for a promotion to the major leagues.
Umpires must already see pitches accurately, move well and handle upset managers and players. Now, they must also recover from getting their calls overturned — especially with the ABS challenge system, where there can sometimes be 10 or more challenges in a single game, because teams can challenge as many calls as they like so long as they are successful in overturning the umpire's calls.
"If they have an overturn early in the game, sometimes it snowballs," Jones said. "The mental part is what I'm afraid of with some of these umpires that get overturned, and the frequency that they get overturned, or the frequency that they get challenged."
At spring training earlier this year, players described to NPR what it was like when that happened. One said "humiliating" for the umpire, another said "awkward."
While anxiety has always been an element of an umpire's experience, "now the technology has made it tenfold," Jones said.
Embracing the tools
None of that deterred those who came to Milwaukee in pursuit of a career as an umpire with MLB. "I think it makes us want to be perfect. But I also think that the goal of this profession is to be perfect, so we should want to be perfect anyway," said Leo Dlatt, 21, who came from the Chicago area to attend the camp.
Stephen Proudfit, 48, of Big Rapids, Mich., said he didn't think ABS would diminish the umpires' role. "It's just going to be another tool for us to get the game right. That's all we want to do," he said. "No umpire really cares who wins the World Series. We just care that it's a good, clean game."
Mistakes are unavoidable, Proudfit added. He alluded to this year's All-Star Game, during which the ABS challenge system was in effect and was used in the first inning to turn a 1-2 ball call into a 0-3 strikeout.
"One of the All-Star officials made a mistake. I mean, they're literally the best of the best," Proudfit said. "But we're in a game where errors happen. You hit .300, fail 70% of the time, and you're in the Hall of Fame. That's the game that we play."
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