Baseball umpires always have received the Rodney Dangerfield treatment form some fans, but, back in the 19th century, they were popularly called “Blind Toms”.
Back in the day that even I do not remember from personal experience, fans, or “cranks”, as they were then most often called, were pretty hard on the single umpire who officiated every aspect of the whole game.
As this brief story found by researcher Darrell Pittman so plainly “suggests,” the life of a baseball umpire hasn’t been easy from the very start of the sport as we know it, from the 19th century forward. Several years into the organized professional level of the game, but still the 1888 first year of the Houston Babies and the Texas League in our fair state, feelings already were running high among certain elements of the game’s viewing public against umpires, prompting enough of the fairer minded print media of that period to suggest the need for stronger protection of the unappreciated and underpaid arbiters of the great American Pastime:
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“The prediction is made by several persons, who may or may not be interested in the park, that taunters of the umpire, tantalizers of players and vehement ridiculers of decisions for unenduring periods of time will be conspicuously humiliated by ejection from the grand stand or official assistance through an opening in the fence.”
– Galveston Daily News, June 3, 1888
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Things have gotten better for umpires with rule standardization, the evolution of officiating into a four-person crew at the big league level, the introduction of paper drink cups over bottle drinks that too often once converted into flying weapons in the hands of angry fans who drank the intoxicating contents that helped the anger boil over, and the recent technology which more and more is being used to relieve umpires of visual decision burdens that may often now be confirmed or overturned by instant replay in high definition and slow motion movement.
We simply need to bear in mind that nothing ever will be perfect – and umpires who behave as though they are will never go completely away.
“I don’t give a serious hoot what the dad-gum Galveston Daily News says. – This is 1888 – and I didn’t crawl in here through no hole in the fence. I paid my two-bits like everybody else to git in this here ballpark – and I kin see the plays better than that damn Blind Tom out there on the field can anyway! – Bet your boots I’ll say what I ‘mad as hell’ damn want to say to that ornery skunk! – Hey, Ump! – How much are they paying you to steal this game from our Houston boys? – Is it worth the trip to hell?”
Thank you, Jack Elam! You should get a posthumous Academy Award nomination for that wonderfully credible portrayal of the typically irate Houston baseball fan from those early times. 🙂
The Pecan Park Eagle 
May 26, 2015 at 2:01 pm |
I don’t know who who first made the following observation, but in defense of Blind Toms:
“Umpiring is the only profession in the world where you’re expected to be perfect on opening day and get better as the season progresses.”