Umpire for a day

SI's Tom Verducci writes about it.

I trained long (O.K., two days with Tschida and Culbreth) and hard (kicking back watching games in the Florida sun) for this gig. Ominously, the most important advice given to me by the umpires was to avoid utter disaster. My Umpire 101 syllabus looked like this:

1. Don’t blow out the knee of Baltimore shortstop Miguel Tejada by watching the flight of a pop-up near the third base line.

The fielder, who is also looking up, is likely to plow into the umpire, whose proper course of action is to first look for and avoid the fielders. “You getting hurt is one thing,” Culbreth says. “The player getting hurt? Now there’s a problem.”

2. Beware of balls that explode.

That’s umpire terminology for what happens when you try to track a ball as it ­passes directly over your head, causing you to lose sight of it.

3. Don’t chase down a batted or thrown ball; that’s the players’ job.

Don’t laugh; it’s happened. Former major leaguer Ron LeFlore flunked umpire school in 1988 for his instinctive reaction to play the ball like the outfielder he once was rather than getting into proper position.

4. Don’t get spun around by line drives hit directly at you; you’ll fall on your butt or, worse, get pegged there.

Culbreth recalls the time that no sooner had he remarked that he had never seen Jeromy Burnitz hit a line drive than Burnitz nailed first base umpire Terry Craft in the posterior. “It went up one side of his [butt] and down the other,” Culbreth says.

5. Make sure your fly is zipped.

Basically, the job comes down to this: If I can quit worrying long enough about wiping out Tejada, about baseballs that either explode, tempt me to field them or put me on my can, and about keeping my pants on properly, then all I need to do is nail every single call. Great.

It's a great piece. A reminder that Major League Baseball has no comparisons.