No. 188 – Sara

Performer: Fleetwood Mac

Songwriter: Stevie Nicks

Original Release: Tusk

Year: 1979

Definitive Version: Live, 1980.

When I was a teen-ager, aside from being a lazy-ass, I also was selective when it came to getting a job. I refused anything to do with the food-preparation industry. I don’t recall that I had a specific reason, but I didn’t want a job as a buser or a waiter and certainly not in the fast-food industry.

The only thing that seemed OK was pizza-delivery guy. I wasn’t afraid of being robbed, and the potential that a lonely divorcee would order a pizza with extra pepperoni seemed like the world’s greatest on-the-job perk.

Of course, with the food industry out of consideration, my employment choices were somewhat limited, so I didn’t have a regular part-time gig my junior year of high school. I looked in the want ads regularly but nothing came up.

Then in the spring of 1981, I either saw an ad in the UA News or, as I recall, heard from someone that Cub Scout ball at Northam Park was looking for umpires. Umpire, you say? I could do that.

So I did. The previous spring was when I discovered that my baseball-playing career would go no further than high school junior varsity. Like many an old-time baseball player when he reached the end of the line, I went behind the mask, so I still could go to the park everyday and get paid to do it.

I can’t remember how much we got per game. It couldn’t have been much more than $10 or $20, which was decent money when you made nothing otherwise. The trick was to do as many games as you could to pile up the cash, and I umped pretty much every day that games were played—baseball and T-ball.

A kid roughly my age, Brian, was in charge of the umps. His Dad ran the league, so that made sense. You’d show up before game time—parking somewhere so your car wasn’t in the potential line of fire of foul balls—and meet with Brian to get your assignment before hiking to the diamond in question.

T-ball games were the easiest, because you didn’t have to call balls and strikes. All you had to worry about was getting the rubber T that went over home plate out of the way if a runner might crash into it. I got to be pretty proficient wielding that thing, grabbing it as soon as the ball was struck and either flinging it to the backstop or carrying it with me as I ran out to call the bases.

The drawback to T-ball was that if you got two teams that couldn’t field, you were looking at a long day. Similarly, if you got two pitch-ball teams who couldn’t locate the plate, you were pretty much screwed.

Nothing was worse than being the chump of the only game still going on, with darkness coming fast. I had that happen to me a couple times. I also had one game where the two pitchers couldn’t NOT throw a strike, and I was done in an hour, at least a half-hour before anyone else. I loved being done before everyone else and either hanging out at another game or going home early.

The umpiring crew got to be pretty tight. We’d hang out at each other’s games to chat between innings or head over to the ice cream truck that smartly parked on Ridgeview Road next to the diamonds. Maybe for dinner, I’d hike to the Chef-o-Nette across Tremont Road. It’s a glorious diner from the 1950s—and still looks it—that made awesome hamburgers and cherry Cokes (long before they were premade).

If you ump a little league game of any stripe, at some point you’re going to hear it from the parents. I heard my share of abuse, I suppose, but I tuned it out. I never came close to tossing anyone, although we had the power to run parents if they got out of line. I might have issued a couple warnings, but I never had to pull the trigger. I also never bounced a kid even though I could have if he tossed his helmet or bat. I had too much empathy: I been there, kid. It’s OK.

When I played, there was nothing worse than seeing an ump who was brutal show up to call your game. So it was with pride that by the end of the year, I’d hear murmurings as I walked up along the lines of “Oh, we got THAT guy for our game? Cool.”

I also enjoyed that when the playoffs began in June, I continued along with the league’s best teams, culminating in the league championship pitch-ball game, which was held at Upper Arlington’s high-school field. Brian was behind the plate; I called third base and left field, and Tom called first base and right. Tom was a guy I got to know fairly well that spring. He was in college—some school in Indiana named Walmore or Wolcott or Wabash or something …

Until I worked for the International League decades later, that year of umpiring in 1981 was probably my favorite job. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a lot of fun. Naturally, when spring rolled around again in 1982, I quickly re-upped.

By now, however, I had a “real” job, as a bagger at Food World, so I hardly had any evenings free to ump. I didn’t work anything approaching the regularity of the previous spring, so my skills atrophied. The umpiring crew and coaches were different, too. It wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the same.

Life moves on.