Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 125: The Umpire-Manager Relationship

Episode Date: January 24, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the ins and outs of umpire-manager arguments.

You're out! how's the weather in long beach uh it's fine nobody nobody i've learned nobody likes hearing californians talk about weather in the winter it's just not it's like trying to talk about politics on the internet it just it does not go the way you think it's going to go yes that's why i asked i wanted you to to regale our listeners, with stories of your 70 degree weather or whatever it is. They're probably not that warm, but maybe it is. So did you, um,

with our site down almost all day today, did you read anything anywhere else? Uh, yeah, probably more than I would have otherwise. That's my point. Oh, I see.

Um, yes, yes, I did. What did you read? I don't Yes. Yes, I did. What did you read? I don't know. Lots of stuff. Derek Jeter is worried about climate change, I read. Yeah. Well, geez, if he were in California right now, he sure would be. It's so warm here. Yeah. I don't know. I read things.

Nothing I want to talk about particularly. Have you read the Terry Francona book excerpt yet? Was there a whole chapter or something? I didn't read a whole chapter. I've read, I think Chad Finn did something at the Globe where he reproduced some of the interesting parts. I read that. Yeah, Sports Illustrated about, well, I don't know if it's a current episode, but it was a current issue. But about a week ago, they excerpted a chapter about basically his final year and about the dysfunctional – well, the point of the chapter was that ownership is fairly dysfunctional and that they were kind of weird and off the tracks or in the last year

or two and so it just sort of goes through the drama between francona uh and john henry etc but then everybody involved kind of walked it back even francona that he said that that wasn't really the point of the book yeah which i mean like, that's a very delicate line to say that you're misquoted in your book, which he wrote. Did he say misquoted or did he say that that wasn't representative of the book as a whole? Right, he didn't, that's what I'm saying. He didn't say misquoted because it's such a fine line to basically get that, to try to use that as an excuse. basically get that to try to use that as an excuse so he basically said that the excerpt is like taken out of context or that the excerpt is yeah like that there's a whole lot more and you should read the whole book because it's not all interesting things that you would actually want

to read about there's also boring stuff right it was very interesting though the the um i don't know it's it's it's weird because you know he wrote it it with Dan Shaughnessy, but it's written in the third person and he's a character in it, which is kind of weird because it creates this distance where you're like, wow, how did Shaughnessy get all this dirt on the Red Sox? And then you're like, oh, well, obviously Francona wrote it. He just isn't saying I all the time. There's no personal pronoun I. Obviously, Francona wrote it. He just isn't saying I all the time. There's no personal pronoun I. So, yeah, it was interesting. Theo Epstein says that one of his quotes was taken out of context.

There's a part where the marketing department or something says that Dustin Pedroia is the kind of sexy player that they need more of. Yeah, I read a reference to that somewhere. He's a regular pin-up. Yeah. Do you read a lot of baseball books? I buy a lot of baseball books. I don't get to as many of them as I'd like to. I did get Dollar Sign on the Muscle for Christmas.

Yeah, that's a good one. I'm really looking forward to reading it. That thing costs a fortune. Yeah, we got ours. It wasn't too bad. It was like $50 or so. Yeah, I got mine a long time ago, which was, I guess, before the dollar sign and the muscle bubble happened. It's a pretty expensive used book now.

It's hard to find. You know what? Yeah. of used book now it's hard to find um you know what yeah i just i got a book that's about maybe seven or eight years ago by josh lewin on the winter meetings and i've never heard it mentioned i i had never i didn't realize that it existed but i'm actually really looking forward to that because i always thought that would be a fun book to write and i really like josh lewin a lot though i've never read him i've only heard him is it about finding a job there or just part part of it is it's just the whole the whole culture of the winter meetings and so partly it's uh you know about the the the nobodies who show up with resumes and partly it's about the

you know scott boris so okay well that concludes ben and sam's book corner. Yeah, so you wrote a piece that came out on Wednesday about umpires and managers' confrontations and about what they're actually saying. And you actually went so far as to get somebody who can lip read and to actually transcribe those conversations. I went so far because I couldn't have gone anywhere without doing that, really, because I'm a terrible lip reader and usually cannot tell anything that anyone is saying on TV. Inspiration. I'm guessing the inspiration for the piece was fairly modest,

right? I assume that this came out of the, you know, the minor news story about maybe two weeks ago about how sometimes managers go out there and look all fired up, but really they're just going, how are the kids? How's little Judy's play coming along? And they're just trying to look agitated so that they'll get ejected and fire up their team. Is that, that's the, I think so. I forget when that article came out, we've been working on this kind of off and on for a few weeks now. But yeah, I think that was the thing that made me think of it. So since nobody could actually read the story today. Yeah, hopefully by the time you are listening to this, this site will be fully functioning.

And actually, probably it would have to be or you wouldn't be able to listen to this. So if you are listening to this, then you can probably go read this article so yeah i loved the article i thought it was one of the one of the very coolest things that we've ever had on the site i think the significance of it is you know maybe will reveal itself in time but you rarely get to see i mean i think that this is a thing that's been in plain sight all of our lives, and we've never actually known what is being said. And so do you kind of want to just describe what kind of stuff, like what your conclusions were or what you learned? Yeah, I mean, it was much of the transcriptions were cursing, swearing, however you want to express that. And I should, of course, say that I had a huge hand from Evan Brunel, who runs Firebrand of the American League, a Boston Red Sox blog and has been a longtime baseball blogger.

And he is deaf and lip reads. And so he was very willing and able to help me out with this. I mean, I guess you can kind of tell often that managers are cursing at umpires when they are arguing, and that certainly is something that they do based on what we found. that they do based on what we found. I guess the takeaway really was that there's kind of a line that you can walk right up to, and I think most managers are probably very adept at going right up to that line but not quite crossing it

unless they want to cross it. Some managers want to get thrown out. It's not as if it comes as a complete surprise that they are about to be thrown out of the game. Often they are warned that they're going to be thrown out of the game, which is something you can see in some of the transcripts that the umpire will say something like, are you going to keep going? You know, that's enough. And the manager will keep pushing, knowing that that's going to result in an ejection. And often that can be kind of an intentional thing, whether it's to rally the crowd or just to show support for your players.

But the line basically seems to be that you can't really criticize the umpire directly or you can't make it personal. You can curse all you want and that will rarely get you thrown out of a game just all on its own. But when you kind of cross that line to criticizing the umpire's performance or his abilities as an umpire and you start bringing you into it and say how could you miss it how could you do that you screwed that up you made a mistake you missed the call that seems to be where the line is and i think most umpires know that uh and i'm i'm trying to find the document on my computer since I can't look it up online at the moment so I can read some quotes from it. Were you surprised by anything that you read in it? I don't know if surprises would be the right word because I don't think I'd ever really thought

all that much about it. But I mean, I guess the question that I would have had going into this is some of the question that I think Bruce Weber gets at in his book on umpiring as they see him. But it's the question of whether managers and umpires, whether managers actually hate the umpires, whether they go out there as kind of like peers and co-equals and they argue about things, but sometimes the manager just has to go, or whether the manager thinks of the umpire as a little bug that they have to put up with and has true disdain for the umpires. has true disdain uh for the umpires and i think i got a i think that what i uh i think that my impression of it was that there is disdain uh from the manager to the umpire but that there is not a feeling of uh inferiority on the umpires part the i i feel like the umpires feel like they're

co-equals on the field and the managers do not feel like the umpires are co-equals on the field. Which I guess is where the tension comes from, right? I mean that seems to be kind of – that might be where a lot of these breaking points are. The manager goes out there and thinks, you know, this guy works for me. He's being paid with my tax dollars and I'm going to tell him what's on my mind. And the umpire just thinks you're on my turf, get off my turf kind of a thing. Yeah, there was one argument and ejection that I didn't include, I think because the replay didn't show the actual ejection

or maybe because the exchange wasn't able to be transcribed fully, where Brad Mills was arguing with Jim Joyce about something and he was pretty respectful about it. He said, I think you got it wrong, Jim. I think you got it wrong. I have a lot of respect for you as anybody else, but you're wrong. So I think, I don't know, I think there's some mutual respect. Not in every case.

I think there are some managers who have a reputation, or some umpires who have a reputation for kind of grandstanding or trying to make themselves the story. And I think maybe you saw that spill over in the Joe Girardi, Joe West argument where it got very personal and Joe Girardi said something about how you think you're above this, but you're not. And West was kind of smirking at him while he was all up in his face. I couldn't tell how much actual animosity it is, because as I said at the end, it is sort of this performance for other people's benefit, I think, because it rarely results in a change call. By the time you get to this, I mean, occasionally you will see an overturned call, but rarely after the point at which it becomes a heated argument. By that point, it's pretty much set

in stone and it's just either trying to support your team or inspire people or show the, I don't know, ownership or the media or the fans that you actually care about the outcome of games. See, that's the exact opposite sense that I got from these. I did not get the feeling that it was theater for the sake of other people. I really got the feeling that these managers are really angry and they go out there and yell at the umpire because they're mad and they get thrown out because they express their anger. I did not get the kabuki element and that's what was surprising to me. There must be, I mean, there's some of that. I mean, I'm sure it's genuine

frustration many times. There are, I think there were a couple transcripts I included where many times there are I think there were a couple transcripts I included where the manager referred to the score uh and said you know it's a close game and we need this game and we're trying to win the division yes and so when that comes up and and a guy's job could be on the line based on whether he wins that game or or has a successful season uh So at that point, yeah, I think certainly there's genuine frustration and maybe anger. I guess there's more likely to be anger if the manager felt that the umpire had done something wrong as opposed to just missing the call, which I think people understand is inevitable. Sometimes that will happen. But as long as the empire was sort of in the right position to make the call, or at least conferred

with the other empires or made some apparent attempt to get the call right. I think that kind of mollifies the managers to some extent. But yeah, I guess, I don't know. I think it's a mix of both. I think a lot of times it is kind of a performance thing where the umpire is just upholding his authority and the manager is just sticking up for his guys. And neither of them, I mean, the manager doesn't expect anything is going to change. But yeah, certainly there are times when it spills over into genuine emotion. So the myth, or I guess maybe not a myth, but the premise that you kind of somewhat started with, the idea that managers... I'm imagining that you went in hoping that you were going to find some manager whose words did not match up with his body language at all.

Yes, I didn't really expect, but I hoped. Well, having watched a number of these, now knowing the words and seeing what, in my opinion, was a very close connection between words and body language, do you believe this folklore about the manager who runs out and agitatedly screams nice things at the umpire, or do you think that that is a baseball lie? I'm sure it started with truth. I don't know that anyone claims that that happens often. I think it's such a funny story that it can be retold. And even if you hear that it happens just once, it sticks with you that it has happened. And I believe that it has happened. That article that I linked to and that sort of inspired this name names basically and mentioned actual managers

who had done this and umpires who had heard it. And in some cases, those umpires claimed to have heard it. And in some cases, even sort of specified timeframes when it happened. So I assume it has happened, but I didn't really go into it expecting to find that. I doubt it happens often. As I recall from Weber's book, there are other stories that umpires sort of share among each other that like, you know, this thing happened once, but like 30 guys claim that it happened to them or it happened while they were, you know, on the crew. And my kind of belief after this is that that's sort of what we're talking about with this story as well,

that maybe it happened once or maybe even like a manager said that it would be funny if you did do that or something like that, like that somehow it became, it generated from either one instance or one near instance or something like that, and that it has simply been co-opted by many people since then. So I'm calling BS on it and saying that it is not a thing. Never.

Not a thing beyond maybe once, and that nobody knows who the once was. beyond maybe once and that nobody knows who the once was that anytime i'll go so far as to say that anytime you hear an umpire or a manager uh describe the time it happened to them they are lying wow like i know on people out yeah sure i have no idea whatever but i mean i just thought that i mean the premise behind that is this idea that um a manager can go out there and be in the umpire's face and that the body language is all that matters for public image and that the words don't matter. And what I saw was that consistently every word matched up with the body language. It was just, you know, it was completely honest. All the expression out there was completely honest and accurate. Yeah, I think you could probably get away with it, though, unless you have some crazy people like me and Evan watching these things and actually trying to transcribe them, which I haven't really seen anyone do before.

get away with the body language and, and not having your words match up, especially in the past where you didn't have high def cameras and so many cameras from so many different angles. Um, it probably wasn't, wasn't ever possible for the audience watching at home to tell what you were saying. Yeah, probably. All right. That's the umpire episode okay uh yeah we'll be back tomorrow probably with more emails probably our last email episode right yeah i think so should we should we tease our our plans after that i guess so sure uh we are going to be doing a series of Sure. per episode and we will be interviewing a baseball prospectus author who wrote about that team for the annual which will be out in a month or so and that author will talk about that team and and take us through that team's off season and kind of give us a snapshot of where it stands and and what its season will be like and And then we also hope to incorporate some,

uh, interviews with non baseball perspectives, authors. We have a, a new intern at BP, Pete Barrett, who has lined up some, some beat writers and reporters,

uh, from papers who cover teams. So we're hoping to kind of combine those, those two perspectives in each episode and, and have Sam and I talk to a BP person and Pete talk to a non-BP person and hopefully cover some different ground and

tell you some things that you didn't know. So that's the preview of that. What did you just click on? I just heard a click. That was a totally out of place mouse click uh yeah that was my mouse i clicked what were you clicking what what could you possibly have to click at the end of that speech i don't know i guess it was like an emphasis

added just click that mouse after i finished my thought all right good night ben okay