Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em Takes You Behind the Plate for an Inside Look at Umpiring

MITCHELL BLATT

After reading Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em, I now know more than I ever wanted to know about MLB umpires.

Weber had the idea to write a book about umpiring when he was doing a story on Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring for the New York Times in January, 2005. In 2006, he attended the school and learned to umpire then followed umpires around the minor leagues and major leagues and umpired himself for the next few years, culminating when he worked two exhibition games for MLB teams. The book is chalk full of anecdotes from umpires and players, history, rules of umpiring, and more. As a casual fan, it became too much for me at some points.

Weber recalled in detail how when he was umpiring in an intersquad exhibition game, he would make some sort of mistake like not covering the bag from the right position or not moving to chase down a hit into the outfield. There was also a very in depth chronicling of the attempted umpire strike in 1999 down to the personal politics involved, which–while informative–I did not find very riveting.

The anecdotes about funny things that have happened–or in many cases allegedly happened–during games between umpires and players–for example umpires telling batters, “Yeah, that was a strike, and so is the next one!”–were entertaining, and learning about the general structure of umpiring between the majors and minors was interesting as well, but the details were a little too… detailed… for my taste.

My other criticism is that in defending umpires, Weber becomes a little too defensive. Through the entire book, he is pushing the theme about how umpires are under appreciated and disrespected, which, while probably true, doesn’t show both sides of the profession. Just to show an example of this, Weber quotes an email sent by Mike Port, the VP in charge of umpiring, in which Port “pointed out correctly” that “the ESPN announcers … made more mistakes than the umpires did.”

An unimportant sentence to be sure–he didn’t address the announcers in detail–but just throwing in his own comment that Port was right to criticize the announcers shows, in my view, a predisposition to defend the umpires. Overall it’s not much of a problem that he defends the umpires so much, because he paints a picture of the challenges the umpires face and how they handle them, but you aren’t going to find much criticism and problems that baseball faces due to umpires, which there doubtlessly are some.

Overall it was an interesting book on a topic that has very rarely been covered, so if you want to learn more about umpiring–and baseball in general–As They See ‘Em is a good book to read.

As They See’ Em is available for $17 on Amazon.

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