The Umpire Who Called His Son Out
Jace was ten then, and his whole world was his school, his buddies and the ball diamond behind the Methodist church.
I wasn’t going to be the reason he lost all three. So I signed.
I kept my truck and my retirement account from the mill, which was not much.
I rented a two-bedroom duplex on Pells Street with a washer that walks across the floor on spin cycle. Jace has his own room there every other week.
On top of that I pay Courtney $1,600 a month between child support and maintenance.
The court figured it off my wages at the mill, and I have never been late one time. Not once in two years.
So when I say there wasn’t $450 lying around, I mean it plainly.
After rent and the truck payment and the support, I get by. I don’t get ahead. Nobody I work with does either.
That night, back at the duplex, I sat at the kitchen table with the notebook paper flattened out in front of me and thought about calling Courtney.
I got as far as pulling up her name in my phone.
I put the phone face down. Then I picked up the Paxton paper, which I still get on paper because I like the feel of it, and on page six there was a little box ad from the park district.
Umpires Needed, it said. Spring Rec League, Ages 7 to 14. Training Provided. $40 per game. Call the park district office.
I read it three times. I had played catcher myself through high school, before my knees decided otherwise.
I knew a strike zone. I knew how to take a foul tip off the collarbone without crying in front of people.
Forty dollars a game. Two games a Saturday. I did the arithmetic on the edge of the newspaper with a carpenter’s pencil. Twelve games would cover it, with thirty dollars left over for gas.
The umpire clinic was two Saturday mornings in the community room of the park district building, with folding chairs and a coffee urn that tasted like it had been brewing since Thanksgiving.
A retired mail carrier named Dale taught most of it. He was about seventy, built like a mailbox himself, and he had a voice that could carry from home plate to the concession stand without trying. He said the first rule was simple.
“You call what you see,” Dale said. “Not what you wish you saw. Not what the dad on the fence says he saw. Not what you think is fair. You call what is in front of you, and you live with it.”
The second rule was that you never argue with a parent. You can listen to a coach, briefly, if he asks the right way.
You never talk to the bleachers. Not one word, not even if somebody is telling you to get your eyes checked.
At the end of the second Saturday, Dale pulled me aside by the coffee urn and asked if I had gear.
I told him I had my old catcher’s mitt and a cup and not much else.
He went out to his Buick and came back with a duffel bag.
Inside was a chest protector, a pair of shin guards, a mask with a throat guard, a plate brush and an indicator for counting balls and strikes.
“I bought new last year,” Dale said. “My wife says this stuff smells like a basement, and she’s not wrong. Take it. Bring it back when you quit, or don’t, either way.”