Sports
Getting My Kicks
How I learned that the toughest job in sports is umpiring girls’ kickball.
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Between the plate and the pitcher were two chalk arcs that cut across the diamond. One, close to the plate, marked the minimum distance that a kick had to travel before it was fair. The second, about two-thirds of the way to the pitcher, designated how close the fielders could play. In rookie kickball, the only defensive positions that matter are the pitcher and the two short fielders, who position themselves on that line. Proper strategy dictates allowing the opposing team to load the bases. The hope is that a short fielder or the pitcher can grab the next kick and race to the plate for a force-out. This strategy has two advantages: It avoids the perilous act of throwing the ball, and it also eliminates the need for judgment, which most rookies do not have. A team with three good athletes on the front lines is almost unbeatable. Last year Janet’s team had twelve ordinary players and a little Ozzette Smith as left short. They won every game but one. This year we didn’t have an Ozzette, and we were not unbeatable.
STEEE-rike. The call of the first pitch was hardly out of my mouth when the coach of the opposing team emerged from the dugout. She formed a T with her hands to call time and approached the plate.
“That should have been a ball,” she said. “The pitcher used two hands. She has to pitch one-handed.”
“Not in rookie league,” I said, grateful to have remembered something from the rule book.
“It’s the second half of the season,” she corrected me. “You can only pitch with two hands in the first half.”
The crisis came in the second inning. Our team, sponsored by a flower shop called the Purple Iris, was in the field, trailing by one run. Janet tried to tag a runner heading home from third, and the runner tried to dodge the tag. Frozen, I was out of position; the runner’s body screened me from the tag. I hesitated an instant, just long enough for the base umpire from the other team to usurp my jurisdiction. Safe, he signaled. In the next moment, I realized that the distance between the two players was so scant that Janet had to have touched the runner. But it was too late.
“Let’s see the video replay,” a woman shouted from the stands. Could it have been Janet’s mother?
Every game seemed filled with close plays. Once I was umping at first base—normally an uneventful assignment because most of the action is at the plate—when one of our girls kicked a slow roller between the pitcher and the right short fielder. It was the left short fielder, however, who cut off the ball and ran swiftly toward first. It was a certain out until our runner put on a burst of speed. Bodies collided at first base, but not before I had seen the fielder’s foot touch the bag a nanosecond before the runner’s. Out! From our stands came the bitter comment, “Why do our umpires have to be the fair ones?”
Plays kept occurring that the umpiring test had failed to prepare me for. Once a girl ran home from third base on a pop-up without waiting to see if someone on our team would catch it. Surprisingly, someone did. The runner crossed the plate and headed for her dugout; then, alerted by the screams of her teammates, she tried to go back to third. Of course, the pitcher, who could have run over and stepped on third at any time, remained blissfully oblivious to all this. Out, I signaled at the runner. This brought her coach out of the dugout.
“Why is she out?”
“Because she left the field of play.”
“Where does it say in the rules that she can’t?”
“Where does it say in the rules that she can?”
During another game an opposing kicker reached down to intercept a pitch that had drifted wide of the plate. She stopped the ball and tapped it with her foot back to the catcher. Instantly our coach was on the field. The kicker had interfered with the ball, she said, and therefore should be out. The opposition’s home plate ump wasn’t about to call some mother’s child out for such a minor infraction. He summoned the base umpires to a conference and asked the dreaded question: Did anyone know the rule? We produced the perfect committee decision: The kicker was not out, and the ball was changed to a strike.
Every time I umpired, Janet’s team lost—a parallel that was not lost on the parents and coaches. Once Janet came in to pitch with two runners on base and the Purple Iris trailing 11-7. (The tally is kept by the scorekeeper and passed through the stands by word of mouth.) Janet allowed no runs, making the third out herself by picking up a grounder and running over to tag the runner going to first. Then her team rallied for four runs in their last at bat to tie the game. After the final girl had kicked, I went to perform the required act of signing the score book. It said that we had lost, 12-11.
“I can’t sign this,” I told the woman who had kept score. “This is wrong.”
“You’re just the umpire,” she said. “You don’t have to agree with it.”
I knew what had happened. When Janet was pitching, a runner had crossed the plate on the third out. Because the opposing team had continued to kick, the scorer had counted the run. I looked at the score book for confirmation. Montezuma himself could not have deciphered the glyph marks. I signed.
The Purple Iris ended the season with two wins and eight losses, three of which were by a single run. This bothered the players less than it bothered the parents and the coaches. The only time the defeats seemed to matter was during the postgame hand-slap ritual with the other team. “Good game,” our girls would say, and their opponents would respond with something like, “Yeah, nice try.”
I had time to reflect on this during the last game, our team’s worst of the season. Our players forgot everything they had been taught. The final score was 20-6, and even our head coach—probably the least cutthroat in the league—looked disconsolate. From my station at third base, I had nothing to do but watch an unending procession of opposition runners pass me on their way to score. I felt superfluous, and the feeling applied not just to this game but to the whole season of umpiring. The tee ball league had the right idea: Why burden kids this young with rules and scores and umpires? As I left the field to hang up my whisk broom for good, I worried that Janet would be as crushed by the defeat as I was. She came out of the dugout to meet me. “Daddy,” she asked earnestly, “did we tie?”
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