As They See ’Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires by Bruce Weber

Bruce Weber’s portrait of the umpiring life is “the best baseball book I’ve read in a long time,” said Michael Silverman in the Boston Herald.

(Scribner’s, 352 pages, $26)

No boy ever dreams of growing up to be a professional umpire, says New York Times writer Bruce Weber. A baseball fan has to have given up on headier fantasies before appreciating the attraction of a job that pays 68 unionized employees “upwards of $200,000” each to watch big-league ball at field level for seven months of the year. When Weber himself joined 120 such dreamers at a five-week umpiring camp recently, he was seeking an understanding of the profession, not a new career. But what he learned—besides the skills that allowed him to eventually call a few youth league games and even a major league spring-training tuneup—was that he didn’t like the work at all. “You wouldn’t believe the aggravation,” he writes.

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