39 min to read

On Being an Umpire

⚾ What 231 games taught me about work, judgment, loyalty, and letting go.

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First, How I Ended Up Coaching

Although I played baseball my whole life, I didn’t exactly set out to become a coach. I sort of fell into it. Then that led to umpiring later on.

It all began during the pandemic era, when college had become Zoom University. I was in my room, staring at my computer all day. I had a Microsoft Surface Pro and that model was part of flickergate where the screen would flicker and cause a headache. After a while, the experience of school online became decorporealizing, so I started going to the park where I had grown up playing baseball just to break up the monotony.

I would sit in my car and listen to podcasts, read, and write. I was very precocious, introspective, calculating, thoughtful, deliberate, assiduous, and admittedly pedantic. I was writing my own book at the time. The park gave me a change of scenery. More importantly, it gave me quiet, solitude, and focus.

There was a guy who would regularly come to the park and practice his golf wedge and iron work. One day, I was walking a lap around the field just to stretch my legs, and I said hi to him. Another time, I was on the baseball field hitting cherry bombs just for some practice and fun—to get outside and actually be active—and we started talking. It turned out that he had been the bus driver when I played golf in high school. Another day, he pulled up near my car and we started chatting again. Before long, a baseball team began arriving for practice.

One of the coaches walked over and started talking to my former bus driver. Apparently they had known each other somehow through the neighborhood while growing up. So my former bus driver introduced me. He told the coach that I had played baseball in high school and knew how to hit cherry bombs.

I was completely put on the spot.

I basically said, “Yeah, if you guys need any help, I’m here.” The coach said something like: “Yeah man, we can use the help. Come on over.” So while the two of them kept talking, I walked over to the field by myself and introduced myself to the other coaches. They welcomed me right in. They were really nice. Honestly, just a bunch of dads. And that was how it started.

I slowly worked my way up and into the organization. The kids took a huge liking to me because I wasn’t one of their dads. I was much closer to their age, and I could resonate and connect with them differently. Coach Shady knew what was up. Eventually, I coached for three years and worked my way up to head coach during my final season.

It’s crazy to think about those kids now. They were middle-school kids just beginning high school when I met them. Now they’re almost 21. That’s basically the same age I was when I started coaching them. They could start coaching like I did. It’s hard to believe how quickly time moves. Eventually, though, coaching started to feel more like a chore or a job than something fun—and I wasn’t even getting paid. I was a volunteer.

So I stepped away.

How I Ended Up Umpiring

I became an umpire after coaching for two reasons.

First, one umpire had pissed me off because I thought he involved himself in the game far more than he needed to.

Second, I came to the conclusion that the best way to avenge yourself is to not be like the person who wronged you.

So I decided to become an umpire—a better umpire.

There was another benefit: I would finally know what it was actually like to be one, and I’d get paid at the same time. Before umpiring, I had always been pretty quiet toward officials. As a player and coach, I was never particularly argumentative. My mentality was basically:

you do your job, I’ll do mine.

Once I became an umpire, though, I had skin in the game. If I had something to say about umpiring afterward, my comments carried more weight because I actually knew what it was like to stand back there and make the calls. And, interestingly enough, becoming an umpire didn’t necessarily make me like umpires more.

My First Game: Classic Frank

My umpiring career began in perhaps the most Frank way possible.

It was a Saturday morning. I was still in bed when Frank called me at around 10:10am. He asked if I could umpire three games that day. I said yeah. That was it.

Welcome to umpiring.

Frank worked me really hard. Anybody who knew him—or knew me during those seasons—could attest to that.

And it became one of the defining features of our relationship. It was classic Frank fashion to call and say something like:

“Hey Mike, I messed up and I got a game at 10am. Can you be there?”

Meanwhile it would be 9:45.

“Yes, Frank. I’ll be there.”

Then I’d look over and see my girlfriend—now my fiancée—staring through my soul because she had already heard Frank’s booming voice coming through the phone. I’d say yes. She’d roll her eyes. And off I’d go to put my gear on.

You could never really block time off from Frank. I was once on the phone with him for over an hour trying to explain why Taco Tuesday with my grandmom needed to remain Taco Tuesday instead of becoming Taco Sunday Morning. He never relented, so I umpired on Taco Tuesdays.

My girlfriend didn’t particularly like Frank because he was constantly stealing me away to umpire. She developed a very good Frank impersonation. On the other hand, all that umpire cash paid for her Dunkin’ Donuts, among other things. So she just had to deal with it.

The Rookie Season

My first season was brutal.

At the time, I was working full-time at CHOP doing CAR-T cell therapy research. I’d work all day, sometimes with my head and brain already hurting from everything I had done, and then come home only to head right back out for baseball. There were stretches where I worked something like thirteen straight days of doubleheaders.

Doubleheader after doubleheader after doubleheader.

Combined with the summer heat and humidity, it was miserable. You would literally sweat, except the sweat wouldn’t evaporate, so you would just stay wet while becoming progressively more dehydrated. The fields were notorious hot. Umpires had suffered heat strokes some days.

I remember one tripleheader when my internal organs legitimately ached. Like I was actually hit by a car. Between innings I went into the clubhouse just to cool myself down. The coaches were actually very kind and understanding. And that’s worth noting because, believe it or not, I really didn’t have that much trouble with coaches, kids, or parents over the more than 200 games I eventually umpired. There were incidents, obviously, but nowhere near as many as I had anticipated when I first put on the uniform.

During that first season, I actually drafted a professional resignation letter to Frank. I never gave it to him. That’s how close I was to quitting. I still have that letter in my desk. Then I just kept going. By the end of the 2024 season, my rookie year, I had umpired 116 games and made $8,488.

Not too bad for a rookie season.

Learning the Craft

I took umpiring seriously.

I passed the umpire group’s baseball test to earn my patch, although I failed the first time and passed the second. I still maintain that it was an oddly designed test. Too many questions felt like “aha, gotcha” questions rather than tests of actual fundamentals. It also contributed to something I came to believe about amateur umpiring: these aren’t professional umpires.

Most are regular people trying to do their best.

I can’t imagine that the average person was studying umpiring nearly as intensely as I was. So, strangely enough, becoming an umpire made me more sympathetic toward umpires while simultaneously making me understand why umpires sometimes have such a bad reputation. I’m generalizing, obviously. There’s much more nuance than that. But the criticism isn’t entirely undue. I wanted to be good:

I hustled.

I paid attention.

I got myself into position.

I made my calls confidently.

I tried to maintain good relationships with coaches without becoming part of the game.

Behind the plate, I really committed to working the slot. I would get low into my stance and squat for essentially every pitch. My quads grew enormously from doing that every day. I could call a better zone from there. And despite being behind the plate so often, I very rarely got hit badly. There were probably only a couple dozen pitches over my entire umpiring career that I distinctly remember actually hurting. Nothing life altering, but enough to leave a distinct bruise. What was crazier were the ones that looked like they should have hurt but didn’t. I’d get absolutely beamed in the mask by a foul ball, hard enough that the mask would fall right off my head, and somehow I wouldn’t feel a thing. That was one of the stranger physical experiences of umpiring.

Funniest times were when my gear would get hit and coaches would ask their catcher if they were okay, and the catcher looks confusedly at their coach. I was the one who got hit. And you could never tell because I didn’t react theatrically. I was cool, calm, and composed. Unphased. Just looking forward to the next pitch. I also wore a long throat guard. At some point—I don’t even remember the actual pitch—I apparently got hit there hard enough that the blue ink from the lettering on the baseball smeared onto the throat guard and became stained into it. It stayed there.

I loved that.

It felt like a little badge of honor. I always wondered whether anybody else ever noticed it. To me, it said:

I’ve been through shit. I know how to get hit, and I know how to take it.

By my second season, coaches began recognizing me, and sometimes I recognized them too. The good coaches noticed when an umpire was working. I think that’s one reason I didn’t catch nearly as much shit as I could have.

I ran a tight game.

The Full-Circle Games

One of the coolest parts of umpiring was how often baseball folded back onto itself.

I umpired games involving my nephew. In one, he played shortstop and later pitched. In another, he pitched and caught while I umpired.

I umpired for an old youth coach whose son I had grown up playing baseball with. Years later, that same coach was now coaching his younger son—a kid who had basically been a baby when I was playing.

I umpired for a coach I had previously coached alongside—the same person who originally helped get me into coaching.

I even ended up umpiring some of the kids I had once coached.

I umpired my old senior men’s league team. That one was especially strange because the catcher had played high school baseball with me. I remembered him throwing down to second base while I covered the bag on steals. Years later, I was standing behind him as the umpire. During the game, at one point I called a pitch a little inside. He politely held the ball for a second, waiting for the strike call, then threw it back and calmly asked:

“Where was that at?”

“A little in,” I told him.

I probably should’ve given it to him.

I also umpired a game involving my former elementary-school teacher’s daughter, another involving my high school math teacher’s son’s team, and one involving a coworker’s son.

All of those moments gave umpiring an odd sense of continuity. Baseball had been there throughout my life, but now I was seeing the same people from an entirely different position on the field.

The Kids

The kids were often the best part.

One morning, I was umpiring a game before having to race about 40 minutes to another field for a tripleheader. The first game ran long, so I was already getting irritated about how late I was going to be. Then one player sitting in the dugout told me I had a really good strike zone. That was a first—especially coming from a young player. He caught the final inning and told me he was going to give me gum. I was basically like, sure, okay. After the final out, without missing a beat, he turned around and handed me a wrapped piece of Bazooka gum. I was so happy. It was such a small thing, but it became one of my favorite umpiring memories. Very good kid.

I still have the Bazooka gum.

Another different kid, about a month after I’d first met him, a young player approached me at a field and asked if I was Mike. I was shocked he even remembered me. The first time we met, he had asked me for a baseball after a game, but I don’t carry game balls once I finished. So jokingly, I asked if he wanted my autograph instead. He actually said yes. I signed one of the sticky notes I carried in my front shirt pocket. When I saw him about a month later, he told me he still had the note. That made my night.

There was also a new player on one team who had recently moved from the Dominican Republic and spoke very little English. I started talking to him in Spanish between innings. You could see his face light up knowing that someone could finally understand him and speak his language. It was another small interaction, but a really cool umpire moment.

Those experiences reminded me that, underneath all the arguing and logistics and adults taking things way too seriously, I was there for the kids.

Wearing the Uniform

Being an umpire was probably the first experience in my life that made me understand, on an emotional level, what it feels like to be stereotyped solely because of the role you’re occupying.

I’m a really good guy. I’m nice, kind, polite—whatever.

None of that matters once you put an umpire uniform on. People don’t know anything about you, but the blue collared shirt seemingly gives some of them permission to treat you like shit. I wouldn’t equate that experience literally with racism; the histories and consequences are obviously different. But umpiring gave me a visceral understanding of one particular psychological mechanism behind prejudice:

someone sees the category before they see the person.

They don’t know me. They don’t know whether I’m kind, whether I’m trying, whether I care about the kids, whether I’m exhausted from working all day and still showed up because somebody needed an umpire.

They just see umpire.

And sometimes they immediately hate you for it. That was one of the most psychologically interesting—and emotionally difficult—things umpiring taught me.

My First Ejection

One championship game pushed that lesson further than almost any other.

Both teams’ coaches were completely friendly before the game. One coach and I were even joking around. We talked about his work, his family, and my research. Although we never talked, we even took the same morning train together on our commute to work. Everything was cordial. Then the game started turning against his team.

There was a pulled-foot play at first base that I couldn’t definitively see from my angle that worked against him.

Then there was a balk situation.

Then there was a tag play at home that happened directly in front of me and that I watched clearly. That was a confident call I made. It worked against him.

His complaining escalated.

Eventually the coach came barreling down from first base arguing a call even though, from where he had been standing, his view of the tag was obstructed.

That was enough. I had to do it.

I ejected him.

That was my first ejection as an umpire. And it wasn’t anything to write home about. Honestly, I was indifferent about the whole situation, but I was the umpire there; his behavior warranted ejection. It’s just what I had to do. As I watched to make sure he actually left the field, he snapped:

“What, are you gonna watch my ass?”

Not jokingly, but spitefully.

Just pure stupid, ignorant, and classless Delco trash.

What struck me wasn’t just his childish bitching. It was the complete transition I had watched happen. At the beginning of the game, we were two normal people having a friendly conversation. By the end, I had become an object for his anger.

I was polite.

I was kind.

It didn’t matter.

You cannot get through to everybody. That’s simply a fact of life. Some people, once they’re angry enough and feel they have nothing left to lose, simply stop responding to reason. What bothered me most was that the kids themselves were great. Both teams had nice kids and talented players. It was the adults who were creating the culture.

Coaches and parents can create an environment that is not conducive to respect. Umpires can do the same thing.

Why It Got Under My Skin

I’m a nice person. I really am. I try my absolute best to be a good person.

That’s why umpiring could affect me so deeply. When people were outright mean to me despite me doing nothing to deserve it, it struck an old chord. It reminded me of being younger and trying everything to be nice, kind, and do the right thing, then being punished or treated badly anyway. It used to fuck with my head because I couldn’t reconcile the treatment with my behavior.

That feeling is deeply rooted. It’s probably part of why I have such high standards. It’s part of why I am the way I am and why I’ve gotten to where I am. Intellectually, I understand that other people’s behavior is beyond my control. It’s easier said than done to be completely undisturbed by it.

I think I’m farther along than I once was. But umpiring found exactly the nerve that could still provoke me. You can read my book for a historical-fiction foreword built around an umpiring experience.

That’s how deeply I tend to process things: I don’t just experience something and move on. I dissect it, contextualize it, contemplate it, turn it around in my head, and eventually try to put it into words. And eventually I reached an uncomfortable conclusion:

because of umpiring, I had started to hate baseball.

I’d go even further now.

I don’t really like baseball anymore.

I know too much about the game to simply have fun with it. In a sense, the game was ruined by becoming a job—but not merely because it became work. It was the demand to do the job perfectly.

An umpire is expected to walk onto the field on Opening Day already operating at 100%. Then you’re somehow supposed to get even better as the season progresses. Mathematically, that’s an impossible expectation. Yet paradoxically, that’s the reality of the position.

Nobody cares that it’s your first game of the year.

Nobody cares that you haven’t seen live pitching in months.

Nobody cares that you’re adjusting.

The pitch happens. You have to call it. And you have to be right.

If you’re a player, you’re allowed to go 0-for-4. If you’re an umpire, missing four pitches can become the story of the game. That kind of hypervigilance changes how you experience baseball.

After enough games, I stopped watching pitches like a fan and started evaluating them. I stopped seeing plays and started positioning myself mentally for calls:

Runners on first and second and/or third with less than two outs: you have an infield fly situation. And that’s infield fly—if fair.

I had to anticipate these scenarios. You have to stay sharp. I knew too much about what could go wrong. Baseball stopped being something I simply enjoyed and became something I analyzed.

Eventually, the innocence of the game disappeared for me.

Frank’s System

A completely different category of stress came from scheduling.

Frank was the umpire assignor.

He was the middleman between leagues, coaches, commissioners, and umpires. And Frank was a man prone to mistakes, like us all. There were multiple occasions where I arrived at a field and either Frank hadn’t gotten the message, the coaches hadn’t communicated with Frank, or something simply hadn’t made it into Frank’s “system.”

Once, I showed up expecting a 7:45 game. A coach told me it didn’t start until 8:15 because players were returning from another tournament. Frank had told me 7:45 and had confirmed it twice.

Classic Frank.

Another time I showed up expecting to umpire two games and found kids on the field who weren’t even in uniform. The coaches looked at me like, why are you here?

“I’m umpiring two games.”

I called Frank. Frank contacted the league. Turns out the coach had screwed up the schedule. There were no games. So I went to Frank’s house so he could give me the $80 I was owed for showing up to the field and the coach would reimburse him later. Then we sat and talked for about an hour and a half.

That mistake became one of my most meaningful memories of Frank.

Getting to Know Frank

That night at his house, Frank introduced me to his wife, and the three of us talked.

He told me about his stage IV pancreatic cancer diagnosis, his treatment, his family, and his life. Because I worked in biomedical research, Frank apparently decided I was his resident medical expert. I could follow what he was talking about, obviously, but I was by no means a pancreatic-cancer expert. Still, I liked that he thought of me that way. He and his wife reminded me of my own grandparents:

just a simple, sweet older couple.

That was the Frank you didn’t necessarily see through the umpire group.

Frank could be cantankerous.

Often extremely cantankerous.

I understand why some members shrugged him off. But it also pissed me off because if you knew him personally, there was more to him than that.

Frank had principles. Frank had your back. If you were loyal to him, he was loyal to you. If you were willing to work, he gave you games.

That’s increasingly rare as people will commonly screw you over because they simply don’t give a shit about you. Frank could drive me absolutely insane, but I never felt that he didn’t value somebody who showed up for him. He stuck to his principles in a world increasingly absent of principles.

He didn’t get to where he was, builidng up an umpire monopoly, without those principles.

The Absurdity of Frank’s Operation

That doesn’t mean the operation itself wasn’t antiquated.

It absolutely was.

Frank was assigning somewhere around 3,000 games over the course of a season, essentially by hand.

He used printed block schedules.

Paper.

Phone calls.

Manual assignments.

Manual changes.

Manual replacements.

Everything flowed through Frank.

When you actually think about the number of teams, leagues, dates, fields, cancellations, rainouts, doubleheaders, tournaments, last-minute scratches, and individual umpire availability involved, it’s insane that one person was doing it that way.

Thousands of games.

All manually assigned.

It wasn’t until after Frank’s death that the organization finally adopted modern scheduling software; it should have been doing that years earlier. I used to imagine what it would look like if I took the whole thing over.

During one conversation, a friend jokingly coined the title “umpire overlord” for me. The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. With my research background, data analysis experience, automation, scheduling optimization, and ability to code in R, I could imagine scaling the organization and eventually making it far more efficient and relatively hands-off.

There would obviously be enormous operational headaches at first. And Arbiter essentially covers this already, so no need to recreate the wheel.

Frank had floated something around $100,000 for the rights and ownership at one point to me, which honestly wasn’t insane considering the potential revenue.

Maybe I would have bought it. Maybe I would have built a competing organization. Maybe nothing would ever come of it.

But for a while I was on an imagination tirade generating a ridiculous number of ideas that were actually fairly realistic.

Money, Labor, and Perspective

At one mandatory early-season umpire meeting, I looked around and realized how many older men were in the room. Many were retirees.

I started thinking about how they might genuinely be ecstatic for baseball season because umpiring represented discretionary income on top of Social Security or retirement.

And there I was—young, employed full-time, financially okay, doing this as supplemental income. It made me appreciate how lucky I was.

I had time on my side.

I had youth on my side.

I had another income.

For me, umpiring money could buy something extra. For somebody else in that room, it might matter considerably more. It put things into perspective.

At the same time, umpiring taught me my own labor value. I once talked to someone from a baseball academy about a possible position. As soon as he asked about hourly pay, I said something like $35–$40. He immediately started steering the conversation toward an ending and mentioned that their starting rate was around $18.

Yeah, right.

I told him, pretty plainly:

you’d be competing against umpire pay.

He understood.

And that experience reinforced something for me:

I know what my time is worth.

The Good Strangers

Umpiring also produced these random little encounters that I never would have experienced otherwise.

Once, while running late between games, my GPS took me to the wrong side of the field. Rather than circle around and try to find parking—which I later realized probably would have been impossible anyway because it was opening day—I parked near someone’s apartment and spent my tripleheader hoping I wouldn’t come back to a towed car.

After the games, I noticed the door of the apartment I had parked in front of was open, so I decided the right thing to do was walk over and apologize for taking the spot. The man who lived there was older and retired, having spent decades working in maintenance at a university.

He had never owned a car. He walked or took the bus everywhere.

In fact, he told me I was lucky to have parked in front of his place because his neighbors aren’t as easygoing as he was. His neighbors are actually the ones notorious for calling towtrucks on cars that park in front of their apartments. So as we started talking, he told me he felt bad about “the note.”

“What note?”

Apparently he had taped a note to my driver-side window. I hadn’t seen it yet. He gave it to me, and I deliberately didn’t read it because I could tell he now regretted writing it.

We kept talking for two hours.

I wasn’t anticipating this kind of evening after a triple-header day. Later, I met one of his older neighbors, a former drummer who loved jazz and had lost his wife to a neurodegenerative illness. We were all chatting and getting along late into the night. Just standing and chatting on the stoop. Both men seemed incredibly content. Peaceful. Blissful, almost. The thing I took from that experience was very simple:

I hope I’m as happy and at peace as those two men when I’m their age.

Rain: The Only Defense Against Frank

I loved rainy days.

Not because I particularly loved rain, but because soaked fields meant cancelled baseball. And rain was literally the only valid reason Frank couldn’t work you.

One evening, another umpire and I arrived for a doubleheader with severe weather moving in. Coaches were lining the field and grooming everything like a major tournament was about to begin, while ominous clouds were rolling toward us. My phone had already received a tornado warning. The other umpire and I were looking around like:

does nobody else see what’s happening?

The tournament director came over and paid both of us $160 for the two games. Not even two minutes later, the rain started hammering down. We got into the other umpire’s car.

Frank called.

I put him on speaker.

He basically said:

“I don’t care what the coaches say. Games are cancelled.”

Then he asked whether we had already been paid. I said yeah.

“Good. Now take the money and go home.”

And then, in quintessential Frank fashion:

“See ya. Bye.”

I got paid $160 for showing up and umpiring absolutely nothing. The base umpire got paid the same amount.

I was extremely thankful.

When My Body Started Saying No

There were points when the combination of my job, commuting, umpiring, summer heat, lack of sleep, and general overwork became ridiculous.

One day at work had already been particularly stressful. I had handled dozens of research mice, dealt with complications, had experiments running, and hadn’t eaten anything all day.

Good ol’ consistently inconsistent SEPTA was badly delayed, and it was around 96°F with high humidity. Earlier that morning, Frank had called asking me to umpire that night and the next. I remember sitting at the station drenched in sweat, lightheaded, not having eaten, knowing I still had to go home and umpire. I eventually waited roughly an hour in the heat. When I finally got home, I was so exhausted and miserable that I didn’t even feel hungry anymore.

I knew I needed food.

I had leftovers waiting for me.

I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

I wanted to lie down, watch something, sleep, and disappear for a while.

The silver lining was that the game that night was one of the easiest and quickest games I ever umpired. Fortunately, things ended on a good note that night.

Another time, what I initially assumed were horrific mosquito bites turned out to be hives. They spread across areas exposed to heat, sweat, and tight clothing, eventually including my one eyelid swelling. The timing wasn’t subtle. I was emotionally stressed, physically exhausted, overheated, and overworked. Then Frank called because he needed somebody for another game.

Of course he did.

I asked if there was anybody else.

“No.”

So I reluctantly accepted.

At the time it felt like:

death by overwork—karoshi.

Dramatic? No.

That’s genuinely how exhausted I felt.

But you know what: I still went.

Game 99

During my second season, somebody texted asking whether I could umpire an 8pm game because I was apparently “the last guy.”

Yeah, right. Sure. Whatever.

It would be my 99th game and coincidentally the last of my second season.

Unfortunately, before leaving, I ate beef stew and drank soda—apparently a terrible combination. On the drive to the field, my stomach staged a revolt. I desperately pulled into Chipotle along the way looking for a bathroom, only to discover the door required a passcode. A very kind employee gave it to me. Then I discovered the bathroom had no toilet paper. So I brought over toilet paper from the adjacent “closed” restroom. During this unfortunate frantic frenzy, I hate to admit that I had already shit my pants a little. I cleaned myself up, ditched the underwear, and went to umpire. Business as usual. Got there on time. Nobody having a clue the battle I just went through.

The game lasted about two and a half hours and I didn’t get home until 11pm. I made $100.

Not worth it.

There were $80 Little League games that took less than two hours.

Then I understood why I was supposedly “the last guy.”

The Moments That Made It Worthwhile

There were little moments of luck that could completely change my mood.

One evening, during a game, a kid from the snack bar happened to be walking around handing out leftover pretzels for free. I took one. Then I noticed four mozzarella sticks sitting in the basket.

“Can I take those too?”

“Yeah.”

Perfect timing.

Another evening, I showed up early because Frank had given me the wrong start time. Instead of being annoyed, the game turned out to be one of the fastest I ever umpired.

Six complete innings in about an hour.

Sometimes the silver lining really was enough.

Outside Baseball

Umpiring also existed inside the rest of my life.

One afternoon before a doubleheader, I smoked my first cigar—a Nicaraguan H. Upmann by AJ Fernandez Toro. A stranger at the tobacco shop helped me choose it. I went home, poured some Scotch, sat outside, and smoked the thing for nearly three hours. It was pleasant. Not remotely as life-changing as I had imagined, but relaxing. Then I had to go umpire.

That contrast basically summarizes the era.

There were also days when my nephew would come over and spend several hours in my room. We’d watch TV, play GTA V on the Xbox, and mess around. I remember realizing how much time I’d spent thinking, earlier in the year, that I wanted to be more present for him—but I had always been exhausted from working and umpiring. That day I finally was present for him. It reminded me to get off my phone.

I’d become so consumed with work, umpiring, school, and everything else that I hadn’t had much opportunity to simply be. I hope he stays a kid as long as possible.

What Frank’s Games Actually Gave Me

The money from umpiring eventually became about much more than Dunkin’ Donuts for my fiancée or spending cash.

Umpiring helped me save enough money for a trip to Scotland, where I proposed to my girlfriend at the top of the Wallace Monument in Stirling. She said yes. Umpiring helped me afford that trip. Umpiring helped me afford that ring.

The extra income also helped me attack my student debt aggressively. I paid off $52,000 in student loans (plus $7,000 of accumulated interest) in only three years. That’s insane to think about. Frank gave me those opportunities.

I worked the games.

I stood in the heat.

I did the double- and triple-headers.

I accepted all the last-minute calls.

I sacrificed evenings and weekends.

I worked hard.

And the hard work paid off.

Frank kept giving me the opportunity to work. There was a reciprocal loyalty to it. Frank knew that if he called me, I would show up. And I knew that if I was willing to work, Frank would give me games.

Those games became money.

That money became freedom.

It became a ring.

It became an engagement in Scotland.

It became private student loan debt disappearing in three years.

That’s difficult for me to separate from Frank now.

Frank’s Death

On September 5, 2025, Frank died peacefully at around 3pm.

He was 75.

I learned about it through an umpire group chat two days later. Someone wrote:

“RIP. May the Lord take him to the Umpire Lounge in the sky.”

Not long before his death, I had texted him a holiday card. But it wasn’t just any holiday card. It was the card announcing Mackenzie and I’s engagement:

she said yes!

The message showed “as read” fairly quickly. I hope Frank was the one who saw it. I really do. That would’ve been my last contact with him. Because, in a strange indirect way, Frank helped make that picture possible.

The umpiring money helped pay for the Scotland trip where I proposed at the top of the Wallace Monument. It helped pay for the ring. Frank had given me the opportunities. I worked hard, and the hard work paid off. I wanted him to see where some of that work had ultimately led.

I had also called him shortly before his death and left a voicemail. He never called back. I had no idea his health had deteriorated that rapidly. When I got the message that Frank was gone, I happened to be at a VFW, so I didn’t really process it immediately. Later, while driving, I started thinking about something I’ve often believed about death:

The death itself almost isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is imagining the world afterward—the world in which that person simply no longer exists.

I hadn’t yet imagined the umpiring world without Frank. And, even now, as I write, it fucks me up inside that he’s gone. What will Tri-County Umpire Group become without him? It’s still too early to know. All these thoughts kept coming back to me:

“Hey Mike, I messed up…“

And then fifteen minutes later I’d be wearing umpire pants.

Now he’s dead.

Nobody can call me and say:

“Can you do a 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock, and 2 o’clock today?”

Nobody can completely vouch for exactly how much I did for him—or how much he did for me.

Nobody can completely explain the relationship.

Frank could drive me absolutely fucking insane.

But look at what came out of those phone calls.

Stories I will probably tell for the rest of my life. At the time, I journaled:

I guess the lives of the dead really are entrusted to the living.

That may be the most important reason I want these stories preserved.

After Frank

The organization changed after Frank died.

Some of those changes were necessary like how modern scheduling software was finally adopted. But something else disappeared with him. The next season, I started noticing assignments I once would have received going elsewhere.

I went to watch my nephew play at a field where I had worked countless games, and the umpire looked completely unprofessional—wrong equipment, wrong clothing, basically everything you weren’t supposed to wear.

Maintaining a proper, respectable appearance is elementary; we learn this shit day one during new umpire trainings.

It irritated me more than it probably should have. I had put serious effort into doing the job correctly. If Frank were alive, I thought, I would’ve had these games.

Whenever questions came up about why things were different, the answer seemed to be some variation of:

“Frank’s gone.”

True. But that wasn’t enough of an explanation for me. This also made stepping away easier.

Why I Eventually Left

By then, I was doing a PhD.

And a PhD is legitimately difficult.

My first academic year required a lot of adjustment. There was no realistic way I could maintain the pace I had under Frank.

Even with fewer assignments, going out to umpire one game every night wasn’t financially lucrative enough to justify the disruption. The economics were simple.

If I’m sacrificing an evening, two games makes more sense than one. But then two games means more exhaustion.

Eventually I gave my umpire cleats to a friend.

That was a deliberate decision because I needed to physically sever something. Giving away the cleats made stepping away real.

What Umpiring Gave Me

It’s strange to reconcile how much I disliked umpiring by the end with how much it gave me.

I completed the whole baseball trifecta, and each role taught me something different.

Coaching taught me to take responsibility for development—to embrace the struggle and to teach kids the difference between earning a triple and simply being born on third base. It showed me that consistent hard work and discipline can outperform raw talent. Playing taught me what it feels like to be the one expected to perform—to be clutch, dependable, and consistent when it matters. Umpiring taught me what it feels like to make decisions that everyone can see but not everyone will accept. It showed me how quickly people judge a uniform rather than the person wearing it, and it taught me composure under pressure. It also taught me the value of labor: that difficult work still has dignity, and that I could endure things I deeply did not want to do and come out stronger for having done them.

It gave me hundreds of interactions with kids, coaches, strangers, old teammates, teachers, family members, coworkers, and people from earlier periods of my life.

It gave me money. It gave me stories. It gave me material worth writing about. It introduced me to versions of people I never would have otherwise known. And it materially changed my life.

Most importantly, it gave me Frank.

Frank could annoy the absolute hell out of me. He could call at the worst possible time. He could completely destroy a plan I had for the evening. His scheduling system belonged in another century. He manually assigned thousands of baseball games with printed block schedules and a telephone. He worked me harder than I thought was reasonable.

And yet Frank had my back. He knew I would work. I knew he would give me work.

There was loyalty there.

That’s why, when I think about umpiring now, the numbers almost aren’t the point. But the numbers are pretty damn good anyway.

Career statistics

I became an umpire partly because an umpire once pissed me off.

I wanted to prove that I could do it better.

I think I did.