* “I can see clearly now…”

Umpires have beengetting a lot of bad press lately, and deservedly so. Sports pundits are calling for wider use of instant replay in an effort to make the right calls, primarily on fair and foul balls and other on-base issues.

One area they pretty much agree should not be touched is balls and strikes. Sure, technology exists that could determine the location of a pitch (kind of like lines on a tennis court), adjusted to each batter’s stance, but you have to have some sort of human element involved. Otherwise the game might as well be played by robots, and you know that’s coming at some point, as any reader of science fiction could tell you.

TV broadcasts are always trying to shove their new toys down viewers’ throats. The latest are those home plate grids that would seem to show how many pitches the home plate umpire gets wrong: balls that should be strikes, strikes that should be balls, etc.

At the risk of straying from my sworn topic, I found this video from slate.com on the quality of that home plate technology quite educational.

I guess I could stretch and say you cuould watch this on your laptop…from your bookshelf. So we’re good?

* Judges are like umpires, except when they’re not

William Fisher takes umbrage with the anaology in his Aug. 10 Huffington Post column:

But Republican Senators, evidently chagrined at being unable to hit a home run based on the nominee’s judicial record, turned to The Nation’s Pastime.

The baseball analogy has become widely used by nominees ever since now-Chief Justice John Roberts famously stated at his own confirmation hearings in 2005: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.”

But a number of legal scholars we contacted expressed dismay at the use of a baseball analogy to define a jurist. To many, this represents the ultimate dumbing down of jurisprudential thinking. They ask why, if judging were only about balls and strikes, why would we need nine Justices, why would we so often have cases decided in five to four decisions, and why would so many Supreme Court rulings be reversed by later courts?

Nonetheless, the baseball analogy persisted throughout the hearings and in the vote on the Senate floor. SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) Blog, a widely respected online report about the High Court’s decisions, wrote that the Senators used the phrase “balls and strikes” at least 11 times, and “umpire” or “umpires” 16 times.

For example, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the highest ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that if a judge had a personal or political agenda, “Such an approach to judging means that the umpire calling the game is not neutral, but instead feels empowered to favor one team over the other.”

But Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island countered with, “I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an ‘umpire’ who merely calls ‘balls and strikes’. If judging were that mechanical, we would not need nine Supreme Court Justices.”

His conclusion is borne out by two centuries of Supreme Court rulings reaching different conclusions in the same cases and of majority decisions later being reversed.

* * *

A number of prominent legal experts have weighed in with us on the “balls and strikes” analogy.

Chip Pitts, A Lecturer at Stanford University Law School and president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told us, “Notwithstanding the current public triumph of the ‘umpire’ metaphor, judging usually isn’t a matter of objectively and passively applying a simple rule from a single rulebook to a specific set of facts. Judging real cases at this time of great social and technological change — especially cases of the sort that make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, involving complex disputes over meaning, sources of legal authority, and application to facts — cannot possibly be crammed into such a formalistic box without doing great damage to both truth and justice.” ….

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told us, “Since he was confirmed to the Court, Roberts has behaved more like a radical right fielder than an umpire. He routinely favors corporations over individuals, and prosecutors over criminal defendants. Roberts is doing his best – quite effectively – to shape the Court into a reliable tool to further the right-wing agenda.”

Prof. Peter M. Shane of the Ohio State University law school told us, “The ideas that Supreme Court Justices are mere umpires, or that constitutional interpretation bears any authentic resemblance to following a baseball rule book, are ludicrous.”….

An arguably even more dire view was expressed to us by Prof. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school. Here’s what he said:

“Roberts’ analogy to a baseball umpire was sheer propaganda designed to mask his hard-line movement commitment to accomplishing the agenda of the Federalist Society, of which he was a member despite the misrepresentation he made to the Senate Judiciary Committee to the contrary, which was illegal. The Federalist Society is a gang of lawyers and judges who are right- wing, racist, reactionary, bigoted, sexist, war-mongering, elitist and totalitarian. For example, Feddie lawyers were responsible for the Bush Administration’s torture scandal. Right now, there are four die-hard Feddies on the U.S. Supreme Court: Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”….

Boyle sums up: “Supreme Court nominations and confirmation hearings are all about politics and economics, not calling balls and strikes. And Supreme Court Nominees are by nature political animals: Indeed it was 5 Republican Justices who unconstitutionally installed George Bush Jr. as President of the United States in 2000, thus giving America the most disastrous Presidency since the dawn of the nineteenth century.”

I almost think the injustice (pardon the phrase), is done to the umpires. After all, they have to make snap decisions, without the benefit of precedent or research or time. You appreciate this more when you go to a game, as opposed to watching it on TV, where questionable calls are replayed ad nauseum. They have one chance to get it right — increasingly it seems they don’t — whereas the Supreme Court can take its time and deliberate a case…or ignore it altogether.

* Review: As They See ‘Em

from the aptly-named New-Books-Review.com, this collection of reviews on Bruce Weber’s gem.

* Here come de judge?

Bruce Weber, author of As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (one of my top three books of the year), published this piece in The New York Times’ Week in review section, comapring the roles of arbiters in the legal system and on the baseball diamond.

“Have you read Roe v. Wade?” Tim Tschida was saying to me. “It’s very clear.”

This was three years ago. It was an unexpected moment to bring up the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion. Mr. Tschida is a major-league umpire and we were on our way to the ballpark. I had just asked him why the strike zone, an entity seemingly well defined by the baseball rulebook, was such a bone of contention in the game. And in a flash Mr. Tschida made the instinctive comparison between an umpire’s conundrum and a high court justice’s.

“What it says is very clear. And we’ve still been fighting for 25 or 30 years over what it means.”

An argument for judicial activism? Well, no.

But as President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, heads to the Senate this week for confirmation hearings, Mr. Tschida’s assertion that umpires are like judges is especially pertinent because the analogy most famously goes the other way around.

* A matter of interpretation

This entry on Officiating.com refers George F. Will’s column on Bruce Weber’s new book, As They See ‘Em. Strictly speaking, it is not, as the title asserts, a paean for umpires, but rather dap for the book.

* Review: As They See ‘Em

From George Will, syndicated in the Seattle Times.

Upshot:

Forests are felled to produce baseball books, about 600 a year, most of them not worth the paper they should never have been printed on. Weber’s, however, is a terrific introduction to, among much else, the rule book’s Talmudic subtleties…

* Bruce Weber offers a safe bet for an outstanding look at umpiring

Would baseball fans want a world in which all the calls on the field could be made by Questec-type devices or the Cyclops machines used in tennis? Are umpires part of the game or outside it? Are they, as one baseball personality suggested, pieces of human equipment, like bases: necessary but not thought about that much.

Bruce Weber took more than a year to look for the answers in his new book As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (Scribner). He enrolled in umpire’s school and conducted scores of interviews, discovering that the life is not a happy one, at least not on the way up. The training is stressful, as they learn not only the rules and the myriad interpretations, but also the mundane but essential practice of how to position themselves to make the call. The handful who graduate into the professional ranks have a long, arduous journey ahead of them, hoping to one day land one of less than 80 spots in the majors. In the meantime, they have to deal with low pay, poor working conditions, and a decided lack of respect which comes not from he layers, but from their own employers.

Weber spoke to the Bookshelf recently about the process of putting his project together.

The book came out of an assignment he did at the behest of the education editor for The New York Times. “I didn’t even know there was such as thing as umpire’s school,” he said. A long-time fan of the game, he quickly he learned he didn’t know much about the men who maintain order on the diamond.”I thought, if I’m surprised by this, a lot of other people will be, too.”

I was watching the Cubs-Astros game the other night. There was a bang-bang play at first base and the umpire called the runner out. The replay, however, clearly showed he was safe. Before I read As They See ‘Em, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought (after all, it’s not as though the call came against the Mets), but now, I don’t think I’ll ever watch a game quite the same. Weber’s is one of the best baseball titles of 2009 so far, and one of the best about the lot of an umpire, period.

Here’s the interview:

* Bruce Weber on National Pastime Radio

Bruce Weber is making the rounds for his new book on umpires. This week, it’s Fresh Air.

As an added bonus (like a box of cereal), the page comes with an excerpt from his book, As They See ‘Em, which was selected for NPR’s “Books We Like.”

More recent baseball items from NPR:

Secret Dirt’s Pivotal Role in Baseball, All Things Considered

Ballparks should be built for fans, not architects, Sweetness and Light, by Frank Deford

* Review: As They See ‘Em

Another review of Bruce Weber’s book on umpires? This one is by Jim Bouton, and the author of the seminal Ball Four, who does his usual witty job. But as interesting as it is to get different takes, one wonders why the publication that employs Weber would publish more than one critique just over a week later.

I’m just sayin’…

* Let’s hear it for the boys in blue

Dodger Blue and umpires, that is.

The Leonard Lopate Show on NPR today featured two baseball segments.

In the first,

Although Walter O’Malley has been dead for nearly 30 years his, the former Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers owner is still one of the most controversial persons ever associated with the sport. Michael D’Antonio’s exhaustive biography of O’Malley is called Forever Blue.

Event: Michael D’Antonio will be in conversation with Walter O’Malley’s son Peter, moderated by Richard Sandomir of the New York Times
Saturday, March 21, at 1:00 pm
Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn

You can hear it here:

D’Antonio was also the subject of a Q&A for The New York Times‘ Bats’ blog today. And here’s a review of his book from the New York Post.

In the other baseball segment on the Lopate show, and speaking of the Times,

New York Times reporter Bruce Weber gives you an insider’s look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America’s favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true. Weber not only interviewed dozens of professional umpires, but entered their world and trained to become an umpire for his book As They See ‘Em.

You can listen to that one here.

Thanks to my mother-in-law for bringing this one to my attention so quickly.