Copyright 2002 Susanne M. Alexander
The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, June 4, 2002

A VIEW FROM BEHIND THE PLATE
Who Is That Masked Man?
For the Love of the Game

By Susanne M. Alexander

Thwump. A ball meets a glove. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Balls soar toward the outfield as young ballplayers warm up around the ball field. Nearby, the umpires get ready to enter the field.

Umpires are as superstitious as ballplayers, and ritual is important. Umpire Steve Traina is working behind home plate today, and he and the three other umpires hold a serious pre-game discussion--what do they know about these teams and their coaches, any history of trouble with these players, what are field conditions likely to be like, and of course, who is dating someone special or driving new wheels. His fellow umpires teasingly go through the checklist on him and the contents of his ball bag to make sure he's all set: shin guards, mask, hat, athletic cup, ball/strike/out indicator, plate brush and pencil, and, perhaps most important, his original 14-year old chest protector and his father's high school ring off his hand and in his ball bag for luck.

Everything present and accounted for, the crew strides authoritatively onto the field. Their safety shoes are shining, gray pants creased and navy blue jackets tailored to fit--a professional appearance is key for respect. These jackets, or in warm weather their blue knit shirts, are what has earned amateur umpires the nickname "Blue." Traina waves and says "hi, how are ya" to each player and coach as he walks by. They smile back at this particular "Mr. Blue" and relax, confident the game will be both fair and fun.

This college game will have four umpires, but leagues carefully watch their expenses, and often use only two or three. It's common to see only one umpire at a youth game, who really has to hustle to make calls accurately. In spite of these economy moves, umpires are in short supply. "There's an explosion of baseball being played in Northeast Ohio," says Traina, a resident of Olmsted Falls. "There are thousands of games each summer that didn't exist a few years ago, and they all need umpires. There's a tremendous shortage of qualified ones."

Most amateur umpires don't last more than five years, so Traina's tenure of 14 years is unusual. The pay is low and the working conditions often challenging, so he says the ones that stay in it like him, do it for the love of baseball. The ones that stick around often stand out for their excellence. Traina has also spent the last 11 years increasing the number of area umpires by running training sessions and umpire clinics through his Baseball Official Academy.

Most umpires are clean-shaven, so Traina also stands out for the dark goatee he sports. Many players recognize him that way. "I've been behind the plate with a lot of different umpires," says Scott Bryson, catcher for John Carroll's Blue Streak NCAA Division III team. "We are out here to have fun, and Steve adds to that atmosphere. He's having fun when he's behind the plate, and he's having fun when he's in the field. He shows up smiling with his goatee every time. We're always glad to see him."

"It's a thrill to walk out onto the ball field," Traina says with his characteristic grin. "You have the best seat in the house -- except you have to stand. Every player's at-bat is precious to them, and it's precious to me too. Every pitch that pitcher throws is precious to him, and it's precious to me, too. When they see how much you enjoy the game and see how important you believe it is, they can start believing it too. I know lots of players whose memories end up not including whether they won or lost."

The game doesn't begin until Traina bends down and brushes the dirt from warm-up practice off home plate, moves behind the catcher, points his finger at the pitcher and yells, "Play ball!" Once the game starts, the action shifts toward the pitcher and batter. They go through their own rituals of grinding their feet into the dirt and finding the "right" ways to hold their bodies before the routines of warm-up, windup and play. The ump's job is to be invisible until he makes a call. As the game progresses, Traina gets into his own rhythm. Before each pitch he signals to the other umpires, balls shown with fingers on the left hand, strikes on the right. He quickly spits around his Bazooka Joe bubble gum. He hates gum chewing off the field or in his classes, but he claims he's very wired and doing back handsprings in his mind during games, so the chewing keeps his body calm and focused.

Traina stands straight above the crouched catcher and signals with a pointed finger to the pitcher to throw his pitch. At the instant the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, Traina spreads his feet apart, bends his knees and looks straight over the catcher's shoulder directly "in the slot," ready to make a call. With a right-handed batter, he's looking over the left shoulder, with a lefty, he's eagle-eyed over the right one, always placing himself in the slot between the catcher and the batter. The view is clear, even through the black metal cage of his umpire's mask. The batter's ready and the ball swishes by, thwumping into the catcher's mitt. At the instant Traina's sure of the call, he yells ball or strike with conviction, clicks the ball/strike/out indicator in his left hand and stands back up straight. If the batter is out, his arms move sharply back and forth as he yells, "You're out!" This is umpire calisthenics, the flow from up straight to down crouched, over and over, hundreds times every game.

The rhythm changes, however, when with a thwack, the ball is hit into the field. Then, every time, he's running onto the field and pulling his mask off to clearly see the play, an action he takes whether there's no other umpire on the field or another three of them. Watch an umpire do this carefully sometime. They practice it over and over so their hats never come off with the mask. Keep an eye as well on how often a player chases a ball, or if the umpire always has spare balls in his bag and speeds the game up by throwing one out when needed.

At 5'10" and 175 pounds, Traina is often smaller than the catchers he hovers inches above. Size, though, has nothing to do with authority. "You're hired to be the boss," says Traina, "but the best umpires never show that. If there's a bad disagreement though, somebody's leaving, and it's not the ump."

On the ball field, in the coaches' dugouts or in the stands, the one umpiring quality prized above any other is consistency. "I always like umps that I can talk to, that are consistent," says Ryan McClarnon, a pitcher with the Cleveland State University Vikings, who played right field at Archbishop Hogan High School in Akron. "If I throw a pitch in one spot, I want it to be either a ball or strike every time. I like to know where the umpire's strike zone is. Steve is consistent and keeps a level head when people argue with him, and doesn't let it affect how the rest of the game goes," continues the Monroe Falls resident.

Even when consistent in the calls, every umpire has a slightly different strike zone. Traina says one of the keys is keeping it fair by not penalizing the pitcher by squeezing them into a narrow tin can size strike zone or penalizing the batter by making it too broad. Catcher Bryson reflects on Traina's performance throughout the sunny spring double-header games John Carroll played against the Otterbein Cardinals, which has over 700 pitches and no "gross misses" on calls and only about three marginal calls disputed. "He was very consistent and gave the same pitches to both sides," said Bryson. "The pitchers didn't complain at all -- what was a strike in the first inning was a strike in the seventh inning for both teams, and that's really all you can ask from an umpire."

It's difficult to find Traina, on or off the field, without a twinkle in his eye. His view of umpiring is that "it's cool as hell." "You become so fully absorbed by the drama in front of you that nothing else is in your consciousness," he explains. "It doesn't matter what name they are calling your mother. The essence of umpiring is total absorption." Traina says his Dad, who died in 1994, and his mother, who died in 1979, are with him as long-time baseball fans on every game, and he winks and says they agree with most of his calls. At times when there's a loud female heckler in the stands, he'll tell the catcher that he wishes his Mom would stop coming to the games.

Traina fell in love with baseball as a six-year-old, butch-cut Parma boy with stringy muscles, self-described as "a little no. 2 pencil poking out of a white T-shirt." "I played everywhere and anywhere with from two kids to everyone in the neighborhood, and as many ball games a day as I could fit in. It could be in the back yard, the front yard, the street, a nearby tennis court -- once in awhile luxuriously on an actual ball field. We just altered the rules to fit the field. One moment we could be sliding through gravel in the street to be safe or out, and the next game we might be jumping a tennis net to flag down the other guy's base hit."

The little t-shirt hit the ragbag long ago. Traina, now 47, retired from competitive play last year, after five years as shortstop with the over-30 Northeast Ohio Roy Hobbs League. He coached his six children, now grown, through baseball and softball. Traina's hair is going silver, and daily workouts have strengthened his muscles, but at heart he's still the little boy who carried his mother's first explanatory diagram of a ball field around in his pocket until it was ragged.

Traina's ongoing passion for being close to baseball on the field continues with umpiring, or training the latest group of umpires at his umpire school, the Baseball Official Academy. Sometimes the school goes on the road for youth baseball clinics as well. "Everybody always yells at the ump, and I say to them, 'If it's so bad, you be one!'" says Traina.

Umpire students come as young as 12, and as old as 60. Traina's version of home runs are taking stockbrokers, electricians, insurance agents, schoolteachers and ministers and transforming them into effective umpires. Most trainees have played or coached amateur softball or baseball, so they are at least familiar with the game, but umpiring is very different from playing.

Mike Chmielecki, 44, a resident of Cleveland and a master mechanic for the city of Parma, took Traina at his word and went through the academy, then called North Coast Umpires, in 1995. "I took what he gave us in the course at face value and tried to apply it when I got on the diamond, not exactly knowing whether it was good information," says Chmielecki, who now spends every spare minute behind the plate. "As time and experience have gone on, everything that he said has either been proven true or at one time or another proved useful. Anybody that took the course and took what he had to say to heart and applied it, has risen very rapidly through the ranks of amateur umpiring, and they are becoming recognized as good officials."

Training and influencing youth to be excellent umpires for summer games is perhaps closest to Traina's heart, however. At a Medina Youth Baseball Association training this spring, he and fellow umpire Pat Smock coach 50 youth to make sure they are confident and knowledgeable about what they will be doing on the ball field. Their "prepared schtick" as Smock calls it, helps them engage the group of largely 12-year-olds for the full 6 hours of the clinic. They walk into the gymnasium in full uniform and ask the youth in the filled bleachers what kind of first impression they are making, instead of if they had showed up in cutoffs and flip-flops. When the reply is positive, Traina quips that he just looks great, but he's never done a game in his life. He poses another question to the boys, and demonstrates his throwing arm by getting a candy into the hands of the first to answer. Every hand goes up for the next question, and they are riveted to their instructors.

Bases are laid out on the shiny wooden floor, and Traina and Smock are soon simulating real and stressful situations and pulling the students in to role play coaches, players and umpires along with them. "Are you blind, Blue, that kid was safe by a mile!" "You wouldn't know a balk [pitcher action that illegally deceives the runner] if it kicked you in the rear end." "Walked? Are you nuts? That was a strike!" Over and over they give them pointers and critique to prevent them from being overly sensitive "rabbit ears" umpires, remain in control and respond appropriately to angry comments. They are taught to evaluate the criticism for merit and growth and otherwise deflect it and let it go. "It's no good to know the rules if you fall to pieces the first time someone yells at you," says Traina.

Umpire signals can be critical during games for communication between umpires scattered through out the field. The classes teach such things as the home plate umpire touching his watch when timing on an upcoming call is going to be critical or the rim of his hat to signal an infield fly. Traina and Smock, both acting not much older than their audience members, aren't above a little horseplay though and try and convince the would-be umpires that they have to make flying motions with their hands for this signal instead.

"Steve was very animated, with his hands flying and all kinds of facial expressions. He was all over the gym and never the same for 30 second at a time," says Bob Galloway, president of Medina Youth Baseball Association. "Steve never appeared like he was talking down to them. He had them learn by answering the questions themselves and just giving them little bits of information so they would start to think. I'm very impressed with him. I'll have him around as long as he wants to come. He also tries to help the association, which to a certain degree is only as strong as its umpires. If those umpires are doing a poor job on the field, it can create havoc off of the field. We had a lot of kids show up for training last year, and they were our best umpires ever. This year we made the training mandatory. If you wanted to do any umpiring, you had to have had one of Steve's clinics, because we knew how much good it would do the kids." Medina has already hired Traina for the 2001 season.

Smock, 33, lives in Fairview Park. Tall and athletically built, he frequently uses his quick tongue to poke fun at the fellow umpires he considers close friends. He and Traina both have other jobs. Smock works as a fulfillment manager for Malley's Chocolates, Inc. in Brook Park. Traina sells books to teachers and staff at schools as a representative for Books Are Fun, a division of Reader's Digest. "We all have real lives outside umpiring," says Smock.

"Steve's being in sales gives him the skills to communicate well in a classroom situation," Smock continues. "It's important to have someone who can keep people entertained and impart their knowledge at the same time. He relates it back to playing the game. Most of the youth never officiated before and certainly have never coached before, and we relate everything back to how they feel as players. Kids love to talk about baseball, so that helps quite a bit. Steve is very well received because he works a lot of the real life reasons why people want to be officials into the clinic itself." They let the kids know that learning to manage themselves on a ball field will help them interact with teachers and bosses for the rest of their lives.

Why would someone want to be an umpire? Even though there are times of great weather and fun, working conditions can be lousy. Many schools don't have changing facilities (Traina often changes in the back of his van). Spring temperatures can be chilly and winds brisk. The heat from summer sun beating down on layers of protective gear can be almost unbearable. Fans are often verbally brutal, particularly at the lower levels of play where umpires and players are less experienced, and parents are less familiar with the rules.

"For 'older' folks, being an umpire is a way to stay close to the game," says Smock. "It's the only opportunity to get in between the white lines at a really high level, often at a level they were never able to reach as athletes. It's also another area of competition -- if you love anything, you want to be near it as much as you can. If you love the game of baseball, you'll be near it in any way that you can. Umpires know that they're going to have to put up with a certain amount of disinterest, abuse and misunderstanding, but they do so because they enjoy the game and like being on the baseball field. My favorite place in the world is a baseball field anywhere."

Umpires also recognize that the on-the-field experiences prepare them for all the rest of their lives. Handling conflict tops a list that Farnsworth says includes intestinal fortitude, judgment, ethics, courage and communication. Traina throws in the ability to admit when you're wrong, fair-mindedness, confidence, self-assessment, careful listening, cooperation, teamwork and mentoring.

Marc Thibeault, 24, the new head baseball coach of the John Carroll University Blue Streaks, admired Traina's control of the game, consistency and great knowledge of baseball rules, when he was a pitcher and outfielder on the team. When he took the coaching position and was a bit concerned about his inexperience, Traina was one of the first people he called for mentoring. "He came in, shut the door, sat me down, and said what to look for, how to handle situations, how to speak to an umpire, how to approach them even when you are frustrated and upset and you want to express your opinion," says Thibeault. "He was very helpful in educating me about where the umpire stands with a runner on first, what bag he has, who's responsible and how to approach an umpire about a call I felt went the wrong way. I'm very grateful to Steve for doing that.

"One of the reasons Steve and I get along well and have a good working relationship, is we both feel the same way about the game of baseball," says Thibeault, who is hard to distinguish from his players on the field. "We're not in it for the flashiness or the glamour. We both feel that college baseball is important but not the most important thing. It's one of the things that makes [players] overall college experience that much better. We both believe that you have to play the game as hard as you can, you have to have a winning attitude, but you have to have a lot of class as far as the way you represent yourself on the field. As coaches, we're not bigger than the game. Even though he's an umpire and has some say as far as judgment and decisions about the game, he knows that he's not bigger than the game, and he represents himself with a lot of class. And if he blows a call on the bottom of the ninth on Saturday, I'll wring his neck!" he jokes.

If Coach Thibeault had gone after Traina though, it's unlikely that the encounter would have turned ugly. Traina's specialty is his non-confrontational style on the field. Umpire training in Cleveland has a long history of teaching this style of "preventive officiating." Long-time amateur umpire Harry Farnsworth, 69, of Strongsville, mentored Traina and ran umpiring schools in this area for 46 years until his retirement in 1995. During the 1979 umpire strike, he was asked to work the plate for the Indians, where he earned the nickname, "Home Plate Harry." He is currently chairman of the Rules Committee for the International Softball Association. Farnsworth is proud of Traina as his protégé. "He's a tremendous talent. It takes a better umpire to keep them in a game than to throw them out," says Farnsworth. "It doesn't take much skill to throw somebody out -- you have all the authority in the world."

"People misbehave, get excited, cuss, yell at you, call you a name," says Traina. "Well, you can throw them out and have a lot of bad feelings, a game that's not very pleasant from that point on, and there's more heckling and arguing, not less. "Baseball doesn't have a 5-yard penalty or a technical foul. All you have is the A-bomb. There are no half measures -- you either don't eject them or eject them. Once you eject them, there's very little more you can do to them. There's not much to prevent them from standing and yelling for the next five minutes. If you did it to save time, you've lost.

If you did it to restore order, you've lost. It's helpful to acquire the kinds of interpersonal skills that restore calm and order to the game."

Smock works with Traina to teach those skills in the classroom. An umpire for nine years, Smock also crews regularly with Traina on the field. He says the umpire crew considers themselves the third team on the field besides the two ball teams, also striving to do their best. The level of mixed feelings that occur at ball games towards umpires contributes to a tight feeling of camaraderie between the members of the umpiring crew. "There are times when things get stressful, and your crewmates are the only people you can rely on 100 percent of the time," explains Smock. "Every umpire goes through training on how to handle stressful situations. We enter and exit the field together as a safety thing -- you don't know who your enemies and who your friends are at any given time."

Jay Murphy, coach for the last four years of the Cleveland State University Vikings baseball team, which competes at the NCAA Division I level, hires Traina regularly as an umpire for CSU games. "He has the type of personality that he can control a volatile situation, and at the same time, smile and make light of something if it does occur that actually is funny. What happens sometimes with umpiring is you run across an umpire who believes they are the law, and there seems to be no gray area. That's unfortunate, because there are a lot of gray areas in baseball."

Umpire Chmielecki says misconduct seems to be on the increase, as he threw more people out in the 1999 season for arguing, cussing, illegal actions, throwing bats and so on. He says parents who want to see their boys chasing the dream of professional baseball can be a pain when he strikes their sons out.

To deal with that very issue, Galloway says Medina Youth Baseball ensures that their umpires of all ages are well trained. They have instituted a zero tolerance policy with coaches and parents in their relationship with umpires and their decisions. Rules are laminated and posted at the fields. Coaches are responsible for backing up the umpires. Communications have to be civil. People can be asked to leave the game, or banned from city sports altogether.

Lest anyone get benched by all the talk about stress and lose sight of the long fly ball up in the sun, it's important to remember that they umpire because it's fun. When Smock talks about working on the field with Traina, enjoyment is a key word. "He enjoys the game, getting into the game, enjoys the emotion of the game without being extraordinarily flamboyant," says Smock. "He knows the show is not him, he knows the show is the players on the field."

Enjoyment, however, does not a successful umpire make. It's confidence. Knowing the rules so calls are made with certainty. Carrying yourself with appropriate authority. "Folks know they're going to get a quality game and hard work out of him every time," said Smock about Traina. "There's a certain relaxed confidence about him, he works hard, and does a good job every time he's on the field. I think that translates well -- players and coaches feel that he's very at ease and very relaxed about all that he's doing. That helps to foster that feeling of respect they have towards him."

Beginning umpires often struggle with confidence. When an umpire appears to question his own judgment, however, it can open him up to negative feedback from the stands and the dugouts. "I believe that umpires handle situations if they have an understanding of the rules of the game, and they are in the right position to make the call," says Coach Murphy. "Then they make the call and umpire the game with a level of confidence. You can usually tell when an umpire questions his own judgment.

"Whether it's the right call or the wrong call, they've got to come across like they believe in what they are doing. That's vitally important to both ball clubs." If the umpire hustles and is in the right position to make an accurate call, coaches and fans rarely have a conflict with the officiating on the field. "I'm a big believer that if the umpire is in the right position to make the call, then they eliminate the doubt that they did see it," says Coach Murphy. "If they aren't in a position to make the call, if they are willing to discuss it with another umpire, that shows me they have integrity for the game, and they want to make the call right."

Disgruntled fans in the stands sometimes yell "Throw the bum out" and mutter about replacing "Blue" with lasers to ensure more accuracy. Traina disagrees. "You could use laser beams, computers and videotapes, but what good is that? It's not people. A pitching machine could throw a strike every time, but that's not much fun for boys who want to be pitchers. It's about getting sweaty, dirty and scared and still swinging. It's about stress, heat, cold, getting yelled at and still seeing how good we can do. That's the thrill of it."

No matter how hard an umpire tries to get the calls right, however, the standards are impossibly high. "If I call 400 pitches and get 396 right, the fans, players and coaches will remember the 4 I 'kicked'," says Traina. "If a player makes an out 7 out of 10 times, he is an all-star. An umpire with that record has worked his last game. The fans can say anything they want about any umpire. Umpires won't say anything derogatory about fan behavior -- we're not allowed. We are silent, without a voice, and it hurts the public perception of umpires. People never know the good we do, but they remember every perceived blown call."

Traina's record might put him in the upper levels of NCAA umpiring, but he readily admits to occasionally "kicking" or blowing a call. His umpire crew razz him after a spring game where the Cleveland State Vikings play against the Akron Zips in front of a lost-in-Jacobs Field audience of a few hundred. "A left-handed batter was up, and the runner on first steals," said Traina. "The batter swings at the ball, but I don't see it because the catcher jumps up, gets the ball and throws it to second base. I check with the catcher, and he didn't see it either. Next pitch I called 2 balls and 0 strikes. I got the call wrong and the count wrong, and nobody said a word. Good thing the player didn't walk!"

One of the little recognized and appreciated contributions of umpires to baseball is informal player coaching, especially at the younger levels of play. Traina says the kids will often "do goofy things," and he'll explain the rules, help them with positioning their bodies and improve their understanding of the game. As for umpiring youth games, Traina shakes his head ruefully at often abusive parent behavior, and says the game is supposed to be for the kids to have fun. About umpiring youth games, Traina says, "It's not for the faint of heart, but it is for the big of heart."

Informal coaching and assistance lessens, but goes on at the college level too. "Don't you think that strike was a little far on the outside, ump?" might be a mid-game question from a catcher, careful to not turn around and give the coach or fans a clue he's questioning the umpire's call. "Nope, right in the strike zone, son, you were positioned just a little too far to the right," might be the response. When a player at the John Carroll game hits his foot with the ball, and being tough demands he not react to the pain in front of everyone, Traina slowly circles the almost-clean plate and brushes it off so the player has an extra minute to recover.

With a mask over the catcher's face and one over the umpires face as well, they can banter with each other non-stop and the players in the dugouts and fans in the stands don't have a clue. "There's constant chatter, talk and interplay between the players, coaches, opponents and the umpires," says Traina, who often asks them how school or the baseball season is going. "You don't hear that from the stands, and you certainly don't hear it on the TV or radio. The batter comes up in this hard-fought tooth-and-nail game, where everyone sees the sweat and blood, and says to the catcher, 'Was that you and your girlfriend in town last night?' and he responds with enthusiasm, 'Yeah, we were dancing until two.'" "There's a vocal part of the game that is unheard from the fans' point of view," says Traina. "It's one of the most enjoyable parts of it."

Traina keeps his love for the game ever present. He says, "Anybody who can do this -- stand behind the plate with nothing in your hands while the ball comes whizzing at your face, and you can't blink, yet alone move a muscle, and you really don't know if a 12-year old kid's going to catch the ball or not, and then you get yelled at and rise above all that for a few dollars, and you get the joy of breathing that wonderful dust -- once you experience that, you are changed forever in a good way."

Tagline:
Euclid free-lance journalist Susanne M. Alexander has been known to lose her voice from yelling at ballgames, although never at the ump, of course.

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