Screaming at the Ump (8 page)

I'd earned my freedom.

O
N
Sunday morning, the one day I got to sleep late, Zeke didn't start with
hello
or
whazzup;
he just burst into my room with, “So did you ask your dad yet?”

I was sleeping! “About what?” I realized, too late, that I shouldn't have answered.

“You Suck, Ump! Day. If I can film. Does this not ring even a quiet little bell?”

“Quiet little bell?”

“Tell me you asked. And that he said it was okay for me to shoot.”

“Izzat Zeke?” my father called in a sleepy voice.

“Hi, Ibbit!” Zeke yelled. Then he mouthed at me, “Should I ask him?”

I pictured him marching into my father's room.
I
didn't even go in there. There was something about seeing how little space he took up on that big bed that I didn't like looking at. I shook my head no. And closed my eyes.

Sometimes if you ignored something, it really did go away.

Only not when Zeke was involved. He was all kinds of determined—a not-normal-eleven-year-old-guy way to act determined—to get something, anything, on TV.

He picked up his camera and started shooting video of me. Instead of telling him to cut it out, I smiled. It was better than him running into Dad's room. It was a Zeke fact I had come to accept—sometimes you had to choose which thing would be less bad for him to do.

“So, You Suck, Ump! Day,” he said.

“I don't know, Zeke. He's not going to like it if it seems like you're making fun of his students, you know? And turn that off, okay?”

He put the camera down. “Picture it, okay? BTP has all these students—they've already given photo and video clearance to your dad, right?”

“You know they have, yeah.”

“But it wouldn't even matter, because what if I filmed someone from behind? Like no identifying features of any kind. You don't need any special permission to use someone's likeness if they can't tell it's them.”

“I just don't think he's going to want negative publicity—”

“There's no such thing as negative publicity. Any publicity I can get for your dad's school is going to be a good thing.” Find me another eleven-year-old who says, “There's no such thing as negative publicity.” Only someone who watched people make fools of themselves on TV on a regular basis could use language like that.

“Dude. You're sitting there with a straight face, telling me that getting a clip of a BTP student onto
So
You Think You're the Biggest Idiot?
is going to do wonders for the image of the least successful umpire school in the country? Come on.”

I silenced him. Go, me.

I had to remember, next Saturday night, to lock all the doors so Zeke couldn't do this again.

“Y
OU'RE
back?” Chris Sykes said when I walked into the room after school on Monday. In the same tone of voice he might have used if he had noticed a moth flying out of my ear.

“Good to see you,” I said in a weird and confident-sounding voice. Just selling it with a no-doubt-about-it tone, the key to being a good umpire. I'd never pulled that tool out before. But I'd never been told the odds were stacked against me before either.

Mr. Donovan started the meeting. “Pretty soon we're going to need to know how many ads we'll have so we know how many pages we can afford to print. How's everyone doing with ad sales?”

The whole room turned to look at me. Was I
everyone
? I guess not, because a girl in the front row by the window said, “I got Luigi's Pizza to take a quarter page, and my dad said his store will take a full page.”

“That's fantastic,” Chris Sykes said.

“Nice work,” Mr. Donovan said.

“How'd you do, Snowden?” Sykes said.

“I forgot to take that folder of ad-sales information,” I said, an answer that wasn't really an answer. An answer that sort of said,
I haven't sold a single ad, and I don't intend to. I want to write for the newspaper, not be an ad salesman
.

“You know what? Your attitude's crap. Why don't you just get out?” Chris said.

“I don't think so,” I said.

Shouldn't Mr. Donovan defend me? I wasn't doing anything wrong. I just wanted to write news stories. And this
was
a school newspaper meeting.

Mr. Donovan put up his hands in a let's-have-peace-here kind of way. “The folders are on that desk, Casey,” he said. “Chris, why don't we move on.”

I went to the back of the room and found a folder, and tried to stay there until the conversation resumed. But there was this big pile of silence just sitting in the room.

So I turned around, walked back to the desk, and said, “I still have a question. If I wrote an article that was better than anything anyone else wrote, maybe something that you thought could win that Honorbound Competition, would it even get considered? Or do you really believe that sixth-graders can't write as good as eighth-graders?”

“As well,” Mr. Donovan said.

I sighed.

“Wow, seriously?” Chris Sykes said, all huffy. “You think you're so great. Like you're going to come in here and be better than kids two years older than you? Get over yourself, Snowden.”

“Let's move on to preliminary assignments now,” Mr. Donovan said.

“Excuse me,” I said. Or at least, I thought it was me. I had always been good with following rules. Maybe you picked up on this already, but I grew up at an umpire school. I believed in rules. And here I was, the kid in the classroom who wouldn't shut up, who kept challenging the rules. “What about my question? Would you really turn away a great article only because someone in sixth grade wrote it?”

Mr. Donovan looked like he'd rather be, well, anywhere, I guess. Not here. Not dealing with me.

“I can't speak hypothetically. Until I see an article, I just . . . I don't have any answers for you.”

That was not an option in baseball. Imagine it: The pitcher throws some heat. Did it catch the outside corner? It was close. The pitcher's looking in, waiting for the call. The batter turns around. The ump flips up his mask and shrugs, saying, “I don't have any answers for you.”

Middle school was not like umpire school.

O
N
the late bus home, I read through the Honorbound Competition notes and examples of papers and articles that had won in the past few years. They weren't what I thought they would be. They seemed like they could be in a regular paper, not some school newspaper. They weren't about the lousy food in the cafeteria or the amazing come-from-behind win staged by the boys' track team.

One of the articles was about how all the schools in that district were in violation of the town's fire code. How did a student figure that out? And one was an undercover story, or something like that, where this kid figured out that a company in his town was dumping illegal stuff in a big lake. And one had an interview, a really good one, with an ex-senator, where the senator didn't only talk about all the important things he had done, but also the things he wasn't able to do, and the mistakes he made. That was my favorite article. You didn't usually see important people like that admitting they'd ever done anything wrong. It was sort of doubly cool that it was in a student newspaper.

I told Zeke all about it when I got to BTP. They were doing outside drills, and Zeke was sitting on the low wall that ran behind the batting cages. “I just need a good idea,” I told him, kind of hoping he'd hand me one.

But instead of lingering around like he always did, he said, “Good luck with that. I've gotta go,” and jumped on his skateboard. “History project's due tomorrow.”

Dad saw me and motioned that it was okay to come in and sit with him and the staff behind the judging table.

Instructors were calling out situations that could occur in a game (like man on second, two outs), and other instructors and some students were putting those plays into action on the field. Working in teams of two—one ump behind the plate and the other in the field, plate ump and base ump—students tried to make the right calls on the plays. (Because only the major leagues used four umpires, all schools taught the two-umpire system.)

Just like in a game, students had no idea where or if the ball would be put in play, so they had to be ready to make any call. To watch, read the play the right way, remember which umpire needed to make each call, get into the correct position, and make the right call with all the right body movements, or mechanics.

Billy and Joe, two guys Dad had hired when they were baseball players at Clay Coves Community College and who had come back every September since, were working with Dad and Bobbybo and Soupcan and half the students. Pop had the other half on the rear field, along with some other instructors.

I watched Dad's group. It wasn't pretty. There was a man on first, and instead of covering third on a hard hit to the outfield, the plate ump took off his mask and just kind of stood there, watching the ball. The base ump wasn't much better. He was able to run to the right position to call the play, but he didn't get there in time to position himself at the best angle. And when he got the angle right, he was too far away to make a good call on the throw to first.

Dad and the other instructors watched each student run through about ten different situations, and then the students were called over to the outfield to listen to what they had done right and what they had done wrong. It was one of the things I liked least about BTP—the way students had to stand there and be told that that their feet weren't set far enough apart or they blew a catcher's interference call. I didn't think I could handle that part if I were a student here. I understood they needed feedback to know what they had to work on, but who really wanted to hear about all the things they were lousy at? You had to look the instructors in the eye and nod, like,
Yeah, I want to hear this! What else did I do wrong? Okay, what else? Thank you, sir, may I please have another?

When Dad came back to the table after a face-to-face evaluation, I asked, “Do you know how I can reach Steamboat? I want to talk to him about You Suck, Ump! Day, find out everything I need to do.”

“Check with Mrs. G.,” he said. Which I probably could have figured out for myself.

I reached back behind where Dad was sitting and opened the cooler. He was so predictable. There were three bottles of iced tea and tons of packs of sunflower seeds. I grabbed one of each and headed to the rear field, where Pop was sitting in the bleachers behind home plate.

I climbed up next to him.

He pushed his green hat back and scratched his forehead while pointing with his chin to the plate ump. “What do you think of that one, Casey?”

I watched for a minute. He was kind of clumsy pulling his mask off. That was one of the first lessons they got about their uniforms—how to hold the mask, how to put it on, take it off. They were supposed to always have their heads up, staring out at the field (almost staring down the players) as they put on their masks. No matter what he was doing, an umpire's eyes always had to be up and facing forward.

Pop held a ball and strike indicator as he watched this guy, and he was turning its dials without a break. I had forgotten about that—that was what Pop did when a student was making him crazy.

This guy's crouching position seemed right. His feet were spread wide, he had one hand below his chest protector and the other above his knee, his chin was above the catcher's head, and he was holding his head steady. He was the right distance from the catcher. He was a little slow, though, standing up to make the call once the pitch was made, almost like he had to think about it. It had to be automatic. Pop and Dad were really strict about position and mechanics. This student's voice was a little quiet too.

“A little tentative,” I said.

“A little?” Pop said with a smile.

Umpires need to be convincing. To speak with authority. Everyone on the field—and even in the stands—need to feel like umpires are in charge, like the game is under control. I felt like I was born knowing that, because it was the main thing they preached here, from the first day until the last.

“I've been telling this kid to sell the call. We worked on that yesterday, but this one doesn't seem to have it in him.” Pop put down the ball and strike indicator and scribbled something on the guy's evaluation sheet in one of the big binders.

“Pendrikston! Make the next call as loud as you can, the loudest you can call it.” He picked up the indicator again.

The student looked up at Pop and nodded his head really fast. He turned back and got into position. Once the ball hit the mitt, he called, “Strike!” It was pretty loud.

“Now make the next one louder than that,” Pop said, spinning the dials on the indicator like crazy.

I thought about all the homework I had to do. I was getting up when Pop surprised me with a question. “What do you think you're going to do, years from now, when you're all finished with school?”

The seriousness in his face when he was talking to Pendrikston completely, instantly melted away when he talked to me.

“You know that, Pop,” I told him. “Be a reporter.”

“What about this place? Do you think you'll want to keep on at this place?”

“Of course. That's like asking if I think my blood will always be part of my body.”

Pop smiled, then turned to the field and yelled, “Okay, Pendrikston. You and Turner switch out. Turner, behind the plate!”

“I'll always be here, Pop. And I'll be a reporter too. I don't know how to make that happen, but I'm twelve, right? Not supposed to have all the answers yet, I hope.”

“The future may not give you everything you want,” Pop said, watching as the two students got into position on the field. “But Snowdens are determined. I bet your future gives you everything you need and most of what you want. That's what I hope for you.”