Umpires

WASHINGTON -- Umpire Kerwin Danley still has headaches, five days after he was hit in the mask by a pitch from the Dodgers' Brad Penny. Danley's condition is being monitored by Major League Baseball and he is not yet scheduled to return to work, the World Umpires Assn. said Thursday. He was briefly knocked unconscious by the fastball to the right side of his jaw and was hospitalized briefly after Saturday night's game. CT scans were negative, the union said.

So who are you going to believe, the umpire or your lying eyes? This baseball postseason has been a real eye-opener for television viewers who, time and again, have seen a home-plate umpire make a call on a pitch only to be contradicted by a computer-generated graphic. Balls are strikes and strikes are balls. Do we need an optometrist to stand behind the ump? It's called Fox Trax on Fox broadcasts and Pitchtrax on TBS games, but the look is the same.

Put on your workout clothes and sensible shoes. Grab a whistle and a yellow flag. Now, try straddling lanes on the Golden State Freeway while looking for expired registration tags on cars as they race past. Welcome to the life of a football umpire. Of the seven officiating positions, none is more in the line of fire than the umpire, who stands unprotected in the middle of the defense, just behind the linebackers.

Ed Manning never saw it coming. He was a 58-year-old umpire in the Arena Football League, working a game between the Iowa Barnstormers and Orlando Predators on May 1, 1999, when he was accidentally blindsided by an Iowa player. Two more players tripped over Manning as he lay unconscious. "When he hit me from the side, it catapulted me backward," Manning said. "I was actually out on my feet when he hit me, so I couldn't reach back to break my fall. My head hit off the turf."

There's a plaque in front of the house where Alfonso Marquez was born. "Obviously," said friend and colleague Larry Barrett, "he's a celebrity." But not for anything he did. Rather, the 1,800 people in Marquez's poor, dusty hometown of La Encarnacion, Zacatecas, in central Mexico, remember him for what he didn't do. He didn't forget them. It would have been easy to do just that, of course.

Pam Postema shed the machismo. She banished the bluster. "I don't need all that ego," says the Ohio native who fell short in her well-chronicled attempt to become major league baseball's first female umpire, settled a sexual-discrimination lawsuit out of court, wrote a 1992 book about her experience and never looked back. "You had to go out there and be \o7the one.\f7 Now I don't use my ego when I think and talk. I try to use my heart. I don't need an ego.

Major League Baseball suspended umpire Mike Winters without pay for the remainder of the regular season Wednesday for the umpire's conduct during a heated Sunday confrontation with San Diego Padres outfielder Milton Bradley that closed with the volatile player suffering a season-ending knee injury.

Rich Gonzalez has everything he needs to fulfill his dream of becoming a major league umpire. He has the skills, the character, the intelligence, the passion. "It's what I want to do with my life," he says. What he may never get, however, is the opportunity. That's because the big league umpire roster has only slightly more turnover than the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, between 2004 and last season the Supreme Court actually got more new justices (two) than baseball did new umpires (one).

Shortly after 7 o'clock tonight, a square man dressed in gray, chest protector and mask in place, will squat down behind the catcher and they will play ball at Dodger Stadium. His name is Bruce Froemming, and he has done this thousands of times in a career that is in its 36th year. He is an umpire. Actually, he is the prototype. If Hollywood did a movie, they'd send 27 yuppies to study him. Quickly, they would figure out that umpires aren't tall and lanky.

It was not that Brian Fuentes criticized the umpires. He didn't get that called third strike, the Angels lost, and he aired out his frustrations after the game. Nothing unusual about that. It was the way Fuentes criticized the umpires. He spoke in a calm and measured voice, yet he leveled a sensational charge: In Fenway Park, umpires can be too intimidated to make a crucial call against the home team. "They seem a little timid," Fuentes said after a wrenching defeat here last month.