The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand: The Game as Umpires See It (Writing Baseball) - Softcover

Gutkind, Professor Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809321955 ISBN 13: 9780809321957

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Synopsis

To provide this unique—if controversial—look at major league baseball as umpires see it, Lee Gutkind spent the 1974 season traveling with the umpiring crew of Doug Harvey (crew chief), Nick Colosi, Harry Wendelstedt, and Art Williams, the first black umpire in the National League. The result is an honest, realistic, insightful study of the private and professional world of major league umpires: their prejudices and petty biases, their unbending pride in their performance, their inside perspectives on the game, and their bitter criticism of the abuse often directed at their profession and at their conduct. As relevant today as it was in 1974, this illustrated chronicle shows how little has changed in the lives and duties of umpires in the last quarter century.

Guided by his passionate love for the game as he wrote The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand!, Gutkind attempted to present the umpires in a positive but realistic light: "I portrayed them as real people, honorable, hard-working and dedicated, but with warts and flaws like the rest of us. But they didn't want to be compared with real people; they wanted to be umpires—on a plateau above most everyone else." Since the publication of this book in 1975, neither Harvey nor Wendelstedt have communicated with Gutkind, with Wendelstedt even denying that Gutkind traveled with the crew.

About this title

About the Author:

Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, has performed as a clown, scrubbed with heart and liver transplant surgeons, wandered the country on a motorcycle, and experienced psychotherapy with a distressed family—all as research for eight books and numerous profiles and essays. He is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Review:

"Instruction manuals (which is what the umpiring crew assumed Gutkind was writing) need no dramatic arc, but other books do, and it is that arc that makes The Best Seat in Baseball a compelling read twenty-five years after its original publication, leading the reader to contemplate what remains the same and what has changed."—Eric Rolfe Greenberg, author of The Celebrant, from the Foreword

"[Gutkind is] superb in conveying the difficulties of the umpiring profession, as well as both the umpires' keen sense of multifaceted aggrievement and their counter-balancing pride in their profession. [He] lets the subjects tell their own story, and he does a fabulous job of getting their mannerisms, appearances, actions, and speech down on paper in a very convincing way."—Mike Shannon,
editor of Spitball

"An umpire's lot is not a happy one, and this dramatic account of a season spent with a National League team of four shows exactly how unhappy it is. . . . [A]s a whole the book will intrigue any baseball fan."—Publishers Weekly

When Lee Gutkind arranged to spend the 1974 baseball season following a team of National League umpires from spring to fall and coast to coast, he may have contemplated writing a book that would do for officials what Jim Bouton's Ball Four did for players. And perhaps he did, at a similar cost; in his 1999 preface. Gutkind writes that two members of that crew, the respected Harry Wendelstedt and the revered Doug Harvey "have never once communicated with me" since the book's 1975 publication. "Wendelstedt even denied that I had traveled with him and his crew" (p. xviii).
Umpires, Gutkind tells us, hate double headers, since they must stand through every inning. Then again, they're not too fond of most players, managers, league officials or fans, not to mention writers. Nevertheless, like reporters, they are supposed to be objective. Like judges, they must rule on what they see. Like policemen, they are asked to keep order. Metaphorically, like military scouts, they are on a continuing reconnaissance of enemy territory, never on friendly ground. They must work as a team if they are to succeed, which may simply mean getting through another game. And yet, they may not even be too fond of each other.
Considering all this, it may be understandable why I kept feeling I was re-reading Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead with a baseball twist. Gutkind describes the tensions within Harvey's crew as they slogged through their season-long campaign. They joke, they tease, they bitch, they scream at one another. The book moves between moments the crew shares before and after games and moments from the private lives of its members--Harvey, Wendelstedt, Nick Colosi and Art Williams. The turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not leave baseball untouched, not even the world of the men in blue. Art Williams was the National League's first black umpire and the only African-American official in the Majors in 1974. He was also, Gutkind writes, "the man the National League owners and coaches had last year called the worst umpire in the league," or were there racial overtones in this judgment, as far as [Doug] Harvey could make out. Pure and simple, Williams was not a very good umpire and Harvey and Wendelstedt, the two best in the league, had been teamed specifically to work with Williams and help him improve" (p. 33).
The dilemma is that Williams was rushed to the Majors to satisfy government demands only to be faulted for his lack of experience and confidence. Harvey and Wendelstedt, committed to their jobs, to being as good as they can be, and to being respected for what they do, worry endlessly over Williams' continuing lapses in concentration. His performance reflects on all of them. At one point, depressed over the long season and Williams' lack of progress, Wendelstedt frets, in Gutkind's words, that the "high standards necessary for superior accomplishment in his profession" were to be sacrificed or temporarily set aside for the sake of racial equality" (pp. 151-52). It is with some relief that we read how by season's end Williams improves and earns his colleagues' grudging praise. In fact, everyone is relieved. However, this fitting conclusion does not erase the memory of the pressures brought to bear on the crew. Harvey's obsessive need for perfection, Wendelstedt's enormous appetites and emotions, Williams' peculiar mixture of frustration and quiet dignity all stand out in retrospect. So, too, do the little rituals of dressing, preparing baseballs, gossiping about players and managers, killing time. A pension plan and salary increases have improved the umpire's lot considerably over the last twenty-five years. But this worthwhile reprint of Lee Gutkind's The Best Seat In Baseball, But You Have to Stand! reminds us how slowly some things move, how some things do not change. Umpires go on doing much the same things that they always have done, keeping order, rendering judgment. Then again, Harvey and his crew would probably be delighted to know that these days there are very few double headers.

(Daniel R. Bronson H-Arete 2008-09-23)

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809321955
• ISBN 13: 9780809321957
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240