I've been reading a lot lately about former Major League umpire Ed Hickox. I'm not entirely sure why I fell down that particular rabbit hole, but umpiring has fascinated me for most of my life, and Hickox has one of the more interesting career trajectories I can remember.
Hickox was already an established American League umpire when, in 1999, he became one of the umpires caught up in what has to rank among the most disastrous labor strategies in sports history. Under the leadership of their union chief, Richie Phillips, a large group of Major League umpires submitted resignations in an attempt to force baseball's hand. The theory was that MLB couldn't possibly afford to lose that many experienced umpires at once.
MLB called their bluff.
Hickox was one of the umpires whose resignation was accepted, and suddenly a man who had been a Major League umpire for nearly a decade wasn't a Major League umpire anymore.
What fascinates me about Hickox is what happened afterward. He eventually went back to the minor leagues and started climbing the ladder again. Think about the humility that must have required. He had already made it. He had worked in Major League stadiums, umpired Major League players and established himself at the highest level of his profession. Then he found himself back in the minors, trying to prove that he belonged all over again.
And he did.
Hickox eventually earned his way back to the Major Leagues and stayed there until 2022. Ironically, the latter part of his career coincided with the development of increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring an umpire's performance behind the plate, and the numbers aren't particularly kind to him. His ball-and-strike accuracy was, at times, among the worst in baseball.
That doesn't diminish the comeback for me. If anything, it makes his story more interesting. Calling balls and strikes is obviously an enormous part of being a Major League umpire, but it isn't the only part. MLB evaluates positioning, rules knowledge, mechanics, game management, handling players and managers, working with a crew and a dozen other things that don't show up on an Umpire Scorecard. Whatever his deficiencies behind the plate, Hickox convinced professional baseball that he belonged in the Major Leagues twice.
The other umpire whose story fascinates me is Bob Davidson.
Davidson's comeback may be even more remarkable because he was considerably older than Hickox. He had been a National League umpire since 1982 and was already 47 years old when the 1999 resignation disaster cost him his job. He had worked a World Series. He had been a Major League umpire for the better part of two decades. By any reasonable standard, he could have concluded that his umpiring career was over.
Instead, in his 50s, Bob Davidson went back to the minor leagues.
There is something about that which I find incredibly admirable. Imagine having worked at the absolute pinnacle of your profession and then finding yourself riding buses and working minor-league games alongside young umpires who could practically be your children. Davidson swallowed his pride and did it. Eventually, he made it all the way back to the Major Leagues and remained there until 2016.
The third member of this unusual little club is Tom Hallion, who also lost his Major League job in the 1999 mess, returned to the minors and eventually made his way back. Hallion lasted until 2022 and became a crew chief. I always liked the cut of Hallion's jib. There was something about the way he carried himself that reminded me very much of the professional umpires I encountered when I was young.
And that brings me to why I probably find all of this considerably more interesting than the average baseball fan does.
In 1991, when I was barely 20 years old, I attended the Brinkman-Froemming Umpire School in Florida. At the time, I was seriously considering the possibility of becoming a professional umpire. I was young enough to think it sounded like a perfectly reasonable way to spend my life, and I loved baseball and umpiring enough to give it a legitimate shot.
It remains one of the great experiences of my young life.
My lead instructor was Gary Davis. Baseball fans of a certain age will immediately recognize the name. Gary was still relatively early in his Major League career at the time and had a tremendous career ahead of him. He would eventually become a crew chief, work multiple World Series and umpire thousands of Major League games.
Gary was awesome.
I remember him as being kind to me, although "kind" is probably a relative term when describing professional umpire instructors of that era. These guys weren't running summer camp. They were trying to identify people who might actually survive professional baseball, and their teaching style reflected that. There was a certain amount of intentional intimidation involved. They wanted to see what happened when you were tired, confused, challenged or confronted.
Still, I always felt that Gary treated me well, and I admired him enormously.
I also had the opportunity to meet and learn from some extraordinary people. Bruce Froemming and Joe Brinkman themselves were there, obviously. Tim Tschida was among the Major League instructors. As was Steve Rippley, the head field instructor, affectionately known as "Sgt. Rippley." Jeff Nelson and Fieldin Culbreth were minor-league umpires at the time, years before either would become established Major League umpires and eventually crew chiefs.
We also had some remarkable guest speakers. Steve Palermo spoke to us only months before the terrible incident in Dallas in which he was shot while intervening in a robbery, an act of courage that ultimately ended his umpiring career. Richie Garcia spoke to us as well, eight years before he would become the involved in the mass-resignation catastrophe that would cost him, Hickox, Davidson, Hallion and so many others their jobs.
At the time, of course, none of us had any idea what was coming.
I did pretty well at Brinkman-Froemming. In fact, I finished in roughly the top 10 percent of my class, which earned me an invitation to the Major League Baseball development program, essentially the finishing school for the top students selected from the Brinkman-Froemming, Harry Wendelstedt and Jim Evans schools — programs of the era.
Suddenly I wasn't competing against everybody who thought they might like to become an umpire. I was competing against the people those schools had already identified as their better prospects.
That's where things got considerably tougher for me.
I was a good umpire mechanically. I was solid calling balls and strikes. I was good on safes and outs. I knew the rules well. The actual baseball part of umpiring came pretty naturally to me.
What I wasn't particularly good at, at age 20, was dealing with angry grown men.
That was a much bigger part of umpiring in those days than younger baseball fans might realize. The instructors would play the roles of managers and coaches, deliberately arguing with us, challenging us and trying to knock us off balance. They weren't merely interested in whether you had made the correct call. They wanted to know whether you could maintain control after making it.
One particular exercise has remained vivid in my memory for 35 years.
Dick Nelson, who was the head instructor at the development program, played the role of a coach arguing with me over a complicated line-drive/infield-fly situation. I knew the rule. That wasn't really the problem. The problem was that Nelson was much, much better at arguing than 20-year-old me was at being argued with.
He started challenging me. I started explaining. He challenged the explanation. I explained some more. He moved. I followed him. Before long, he had literally led me around in circles while continuing the argument.
I'm sure he knew exactly what he was doing.
The lesson, which I understand much better at 55 than I did at 20, was that at some point an umpire has to stop explaining. You make the call. You give the manager a reasonable opportunity to ask what you saw. You explain it. And then the conversation is over.
Dick Nelson controlled that entire encounter. I didn't.
I ended up finishing near the bottom of that development class, and that was effectively the end of my professional umpiring aspirations. I went back to college, which I had promised my mother I would do, finished my degree and ultimately went in an entirely different professional direction.
I've never regretted it.
More importantly, I've never looked back on the experience as a failure. I was barely 20 years old. I went to one of the premier professional umpire schools in the country, finished in the top 10 percent and advanced to the next level. When I got there, I discovered that I was good at some aspects of the profession and not yet particularly good at another very important one. I could have gone back, worked amateur baseball, matured a little and tried again. I simply didn't feel compelled to do it.
I had gotten enough of a taste to know what the profession required, and I went on with my life.
What I did take with me was a lifelong admiration for professional umpires.
That doesn't mean I think they're always right. Obviously they're not. I don't even think they're all equally good. Modern pitch-tracking data has conclusively demonstrated that some Major League umpires are substantially better at calling balls and strikes than others.
But I do think my experience gave me a different perspective than the average fan who sees a missed strike call on television and concludes that the umpire is an idiot.
I've stood behind the plate and tried to track a pitch. I've worked the bases and tried to get into exactly the right position. I've studied the rules. More importantly, I've experienced, albeit at a vastly lower level, what it's like to make a decision and immediately have somebody get in your face and tell you that you're wrong.
And the world in which I learned to umpire was fundamentally different from the one today's young professional umpires inhabit.
In 1991, the umpire was the final word.
If I called a runner out and the runner was safe, he was out.
If I called a pitch a strike and television replay showed that it was six inches outside, it was still a strike.
If an umpire missed a call in the ninth inning of a pennant-race game and that call changed the outcome, everybody watching television could see that he'd blown it. The broadcasters could replay it from five different angles. The newspapers could write about it the next morning. The manager could scream himself hoarse.
The call still stood.
There was something almost frightening about that authority, because it came with enormous responsibility. You couldn't tell the manager to challenge it. You couldn't put on a headset and let somebody in New York clean up the mess. There was no automated system waiting to tell everyone whether the pitch actually clipped the strike zone.
You made the call and you lived with it.
That reality also created far more confrontation. If a manager believed an umpire had just cost his team a game, his only recourse was the umpire himself. So he came out of the dugout and argued.
Sometimes spectacularly.
That was why our instructors spent so much time teaching us how to handle those situations. A Major League umpire needed more than excellent eyesight and a thorough understanding of the rulebook. He needed presence. He needed confidence. He needed to know when to listen, when to explain, when to stop explaining and, occasionally, when to eject somebody.
The umpire had to control the game because there wasn't anybody else coming to rescue him.
That is one reason I always enjoyed Tom Hallion. He had that old-school professional-umpire quality. He looked comfortable when somebody was angry with him. He could listen, respond and give a little back when necessary. Most importantly, there was usually a point at which his body language made it abundantly clear that the conversation was finished.
That's a skill.
Today's umpires operate in a radically different environment.
First came increasingly sophisticated television replay. Then pitch-tracking technology allowed us to evaluate strike zones in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I attended umpire school. Then came expanded replay review.
Now baseball is moving further into the ABS era, where technology can directly participate in determining whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.
There are benefits to all of this. I'm not some nostalgic crank who believes baseball was better because an obviously incorrect call couldn't be fixed. If a runner is clearly safe and the umpire calls him out, I would rather get the call right.
But something undeniably changes when the umpire is no longer the absolute final authority.
Today's umpire can make a close call and know that replay may correct it. A manager can disagree without necessarily needing to turn the disagreement into a five-minute confrontation. On balls and strikes, the umpire is increasingly working alongside technology rather than standing as the sole arbiter of an invisible strike zone.
I find this new generation of umpires fascinating for precisely that reason. They're learning a different profession than the one I briefly trained to enter.
They still need judgment, positioning, mechanics, rules knowledge and game-management skills. They still have to stand behind a catcher while 95-mph pitches are moving all over the place. They still have to make split-second decisions with tens of thousands of people watching.
But they also have technological backstops that Bruce Froemming, Joe Brinkman, Steve Palermo and the other umpires of my era could never have imagined.
In some respects that makes their job easier. In others, I think it makes it harder.
Every plate umpire today can have his performance quantified. We can know exactly how many pitches he missed, where he missed them and how his accuracy compares with every other umpire in baseball. A mistake that once disappeared into the flow of a nine-inning game can now become a red box on an Umpire Scorecard circulating on social media before the umpire has even left the stadium.
Ed Hickox experienced both worlds.
He began umpiring in the Major Leagues in 1990, essentially the world I was introduced to at umpire school a year later. The umpire's judgment was final. By the end of Hickox's career in 2022, fans could pull up data documenting precisely how good—or, in his case, sometimes how bad—his strike zone had been.
That's an incredible transformation within one man's career.
Maybe that's why I've found myself reading so much about Hickox, Davidson and Hallion lately. They represent a bridge between two completely different eras of umpiring, and I have a small personal connection to the world they came from.
I never became a professional umpire. Instead, I got an experience at 20 years old that I've appreciated more and more as I've gotten older. I learned from men I admired. I discovered that I was pretty good at something extremely difficult. I also discovered a weakness in myself that, at that age, I wasn't particularly equipped to overcome.
And somewhere along the way, Dick Nelson walked me around in a circle while arguing about an infield fly.
Thirty-five years later, I can laugh about that.
I can also appreciate what he was trying to teach me.
The rulebook can tell you what the correct call is. Technology can now tell you whether you got it right.
But neither one can teach a 20-year-old kid how to stand his ground while an experienced baseball man is doing everything he can to make him doubt himself.
That part of umpiring hasn't completely disappeared.
And I hope it never does.
