![]() ![]() ![]() “This is right in my wheelhouse, man.”īut even with this step, Scott says, there’s one cliche of umpiring that may stick around no matter what. “I would have loved to have done it,” he says. Scott, for one, couldn’t be more pleased. It has been for a while, but vocal interactions like this are highlighting it a bit more.”īut does it raise the umpire’s profile higher than the game intended? Baseball’s most storied umpire, Bill Klem, who called balls and strikes from 1905 to 1941, had this to say about his craft: “The best-umpired game is the game in which the fans cannot recall the umpires who worked it.”Īs 2022 draws to a close with umpires talking, that notion may be changing. That intimacy of the voice is part of the equation now. “Our culture is really dependent on sound and voices right now - podcasts, voices in your ear. You turn on the sound to find out what happened,” says Shilpa Dave, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. But visually, you can’t always track everything. In a way, this moment in baseball is a miniature version of what watching a movie was like in the late 1920s, when silent films were being replaced by “talkies.” Suddenly an entirely new layer of information became available. “It was a great relief to me that it finally got to the point where they were ready to embrace this opportunity to humanize these umpires but communicate with both the fans at the ballpark and the fans on radio and TV.” “I always wondered: These other sports, why are they able to communicate with their fan base and we can’t? It was so frustrating,” Brown says. ![]() It seems like such a small thing, and then you peel it back,” Brown says.īut it is the clarity that comes when umpires can speak through mics - the information that makes the game more accessible - that impresses him the most. Greg Brown, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ longtime play-by-play announcer, watched with great interest through the season as more and more umpires got amplified. A microphone then would have been very helpful,” says Scott, author of ” The Umpire Is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self.” This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Like next season’s plans for bases getting bigger, shifts getting restricted and the time between pitches - in a game that never had a clock - finally being counted. Like challenges adjudicated in a far-off room by out-of-sight officials. Things like catchers being barred from blocking the plate. They’ll be there on the sport’s biggest stage this month, too, during the playoffs and World Series.Ĭhange in baseball is often measured in big things, loud things, significant things. Please try again Article contentĪ policy change implemented at the beginning of the season, designed to explain on-field call challenges and outcomes, equipped umpires with tiny wireless microphones and - for the first time in baseball history - introduced their amplified voices to ballpark speakers, to the fans in their seats and to the world at home. The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. ![]()
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