Every game in the Little League World Series starts the same way: nine players on the field, another with a bat and an umpire behind the plate, as anxious as anyone else, pointing at the mound and yelling, “Play a ball!”
That, the umpire hopes, is the last thing anyone really notices about the adults on the field.
“If someone says they’re not nervous going there, they’re probably fidgeting a bit,” said Joe Smith, part of the 2016 umpiring crew.
As the crew tries to sneak into the background of this August slice of Americana performed in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fans, viewers, and coaches—even those angry at the latest call—may not appreciate how much the moment means to the volunteer umpires who see the Little League World Series as a once-in-a-lifetime (usually) highlight.
“Aside from getting married, having kids and grandkids, that was the best experience of my life,” said Chet Cooper, 2012 crew member.
The series started on Thursday, a day after the Little League Softball World Series ended in Greenville, NC. The baseball version consists of 16 teams, the players between the ages of 10 and 12, who play 30 games over 11 days.
The tournament is full of kids doing kid stuff, broadcast for national entertainment. Much is made of their route to Williamsport and to the Championship, and players are the stars.
Far less attention is paid to umpires, many of whom dreamed of taking the field at Williamsport long before the players were born.
“You hear kids on baseball fields joke about how great it would be to play in the World Series someday,” said Kelly Dine, the crew chief of the last series finale, in 2019. “Referees are no different.”
The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 World Series and stripped the 2021 one. There are no international teams. There are few fans and less fanfare.
The pandemic also changed this year’s umpire crew. Normally, the umpires chosen to work on the Little League World Series do it once, and never again. There are 12,000 registered umpires in the Little League system, and credit must be spread, it is believed. Little League does not have Bill Klem, who has worked 18 World Series for the major leagues.
Every World Series umpire remembers where they were when they received the one-page invite in the mail last winter. The 16 chosen to work in 2020 were moved to 2021. Given the changed tournament and reduced festivities this year, they were allowed to postpone until 2022. All of them did.
“Suddenly we ran out of umpires,” said Tom Rawlings, director of umpires development at Little League International.
He and others went through memory banks and umpire evaluations to select this year’s crew, all of them World Series veterans. There are only 12, not 16, because part of this year’s protocol has no line umpires, meaning there are four umpires on the field for each game (one on each base), not six. None of them are from other countries, another break from tradition. Referees rarely work on matches with teams from their area to thwart claims of bias.
It can take decades to peak, if at all, and it takes less than two weeks to get there. To get to the Little League World Series, umpires led thousands of games. They must all have refereed every sport under the World Series – district tournaments, state tournaments, regional tournaments.
They are volunteers, including during the World Series. They get some expenses paid, and a fresh uniform, but no salary. Dine is a high school biology teacher in Ohio. Smith owns a landscaping business in Maryland. Cooper teaches microbiology at Youngstown State in Ohio.
This year’s crew consists of a food service manager, a school principal and an architect.
One thing it doesn’t have: a woman. Rawlings said one was selected for this year but postponed to 2022, and part of his goal is to increase gender and racial diversity and lower the median age.
As much as the umpires cherish their ignorance, it can be difficult to hide mistakes from national television audiences. Last week, during a regional tournament to decide who reached the World Series, a questionable strike call got the full meme treatment from ESPN when the batter looked stunned.
“You don’t need anyone to yell at you and say you made the call,” Rawlings said. “You’ll know as soon as you’ve done it.”
Smith said he had three calls that were challenged by video replay in 2016. One, a close play in third place, was destroyed. Another came when the second baseman urged his coach that he had tagged. Smith knew he hadn’t. The call was honored.
“The little second baseman looks at me and says, ‘I missed him, didn’t I, Blue?'” the boy said, according to Smith, with the usual nickname for umpires. ‘I said, ‘Yes, you did.’ The boys all think they’re making the plays.”
It’s those intimate moments that umpires stick to more than the other teams or the results. Cooper was working at home plate when Uganda, the first team from Africa to play in the tournament, debuted in 2012. The first batter got a hit and when the next batter came on the plate, Cooper heard voices behind him amid the noise.
“I turn around and they say, ‘We want that baseball,'” Cooper said. “Well, it’s in my bag somewhere. And I go through the balls and that one ball has some mud on it. I said, well, this must be it. And I give it to them.”
Dine, who also referees high school and college games, especially remembers her first and last time behind the plate at Lamade Stadium, the larger of the two fields. It has a sizeable grandstand and can accommodate over 40,000 people, most of them on the terraced grass behind the perimeter fence. It can feel a bit like a fishbowl, she said.
“Nobody realizes how small a 60-foot base pad is and how good these players are until you get those banging plays,” she said. “I remember walking out there and just feeling like a giant. I wanted to hide somewhere.”
She was rewarded for her performance with an assignment as crew chief and plate umpire in the championship game of 2019. She remembers the time between the innings more than the phone calls.
“It was joy, like ‘I can’t believe it,'” she said. “I remember the wave that went around the stadium. You’re on this little field and there’s like 25,000 people all doing the golf, and it goes round and round and you don’t want it to stop. You want ESPN to make another commercial to keep it going.”
One could argue that the Little League World Series means more to the umpires than to the players.
Cooper recalled arriving in Williamsport before the 2012 World Series, pulling into the parking lot and getting tears in his eyes.
Smith, who referees about 150 games a year, was selected to work on this year’s Little League Softball World Series, but he tore his Achilles tendon — not as a referee, but by stepping into a ditch while mowing grass.
His lasting memory of the 2016 World Series is the introduction of all teams at the opening ceremony.
“The last team to come out is the umpires, and the announcer says, ‘Can we get a round of applause for our volunteer umpires?’” recalls Smith. “We got a standing ovation.”
Then the games started. And the best the umpires could hope for was that no one paid them much attention.
