In the majors, umpires can make as much as $300,000 a season but only seven men have made that jump since 2000. And going into last season, 37 of the big leagues' 68 full-time umpires had worked at least 10 seasons in the majors.
"I don't fault minor league baseball for the pay structure," Jones says. "Minor league baseball shouldn't be a place you retire from. It's a place to keep a dream alive to go to the major leagues.
"But it's tough. Because you have to start from scratch at such a prime age."
As he talks, Jones is sitting in the third base dugout of an auxiliary field at baseball's Urban Youth Academy in Compton. Behind him nine big league umpires are drilling 44 amateur arbiters on everything from foul balls to footwork.
For 51 weeks each year the academy develops players. But last week the fields were turned over to Little League, high school and college umpires.
Among those who came out was Kevin Danley, the older brother of major league umpire Kerwin Danley and an overseer of officials for the L.A. City Section. He applauds the efforts of Rieker and Jones because the lack of qualified minority umpires isn't only an issue for professional baseball. It's a crisis for urban high schools and junior colleges too.
"Just to get young minorities to come out, that's a big problem," Danley says. "It's very important to see other minorities out doing the job. They figure they can do it too."
But recruitment, he says, "is getting worse, it's not getting better."
Wendelstedt agrees. He has been teaching umpires for more than four decades and says the number of talented minority students is as low as it has been in years. But Rieker's decision to come to Compton and focus on grass-roots development, he says, will help.
"We have an obligation wherever we're teaching players to play and coaches to coach to teach people how to umpire those games," says Rieker, whose two-year-old camp concluded its second session Sunday. "What we want to try to do on a broad basis is just try to make umpiring better for all levels.
"It's a good strategy for us to develop talent and it's also a great way to find talent. We should have been doing this a long time ago."
Developing minority umpiring talent is an area in which baseball is clearly struggling. Although more than 40% of the players in the major leagues are Hispanic, African American or Asian, there are only three blacks and three Latinos among the 70 full-time major league umpires.
