Sometimes a man don’t know
When he’s supposed to walk away.

“Hi, Terry,” said the MLB umpire leading us back to the elevator that would take us back to the seats of Kaufman.

“Hi, Pat.  How are you doing today?” said the coach with a fifth grader’s enthusiasm.

The umpire was Pat Hoberg.  The coach was Terry Francona of the Cleveland Indians.  We were on our way back from the field, where we had just been shoulder to shoulder with their All Star Lindor as he signed autographs for the kids at Kaufman.  It was neat to be close to a player of his caliber.  It was neat to find that caliber coupled with that humility.  But brushing shoulders with Francona, the coach who just been in the World Series without his two top starters and had managed his ass off only to lose in 7 anyway, was more than neat.  It was something a man could get swept up in.

“I enjoy getting a chance to get people down on the field if I can,” Hoberg had explained earlier as he stood along the fence of a press dugout.  His eyes turned from the field, as though he wanted to emphasize the point.  “It always impresses me how they look at it, wide-eyed and all that.  It reminds me to appreciate what it is I do.  I tend to just look at it as my job.  Sometimes I forget just where it is I work.”

The Indian taking BP crushed a ball just then.  By sound alone, Hoberg’s eyes jolted back and found it mid-flight, like he knew exactly where to expect it.  It sailed to center and was gone.

It’s a strange thing.  You know the ball will come down, yet the mid-flight feeling taps in to something eternal.  The presence of all things in a brief instant.

His eyes never strayed from the field of play again.  It was hardly some super-human quality.  It was simply his job.  His job was not to get swept up in it.

A couple of buddies had umped high school and college baseball games with Hoberg.  It was that connection that had brought me along.

“How did you come to ump with Hoberg?”

“We were umping a game, Joe and I, and the third ump hadn’t showed up.  We were needing to get going.  Joe had called Pat’s games when Pat was in high school.  He spotted him in the crowd and told him he was needed on the field.

‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,’ he said.

‘Sure you do.  Will cover you.  We just need the body.’

Turned out, he was pretty fucking good.”

“Do you have a favorite story?”

“Yea.  The three of us were calling a Carroll game.  They’re always good, and going into the bottom of the fifth they were up 8-0.  Two more and they would ten run it and end it early.

The catcher from the other team was a whale of a kid.  I could hardly see around him.  It was a bitch trying to call the plate.

This kid from Carroll was batting with a man on.   All of the sudden I heard that crack, and I knew he had gotten around on one.  Smoked it.  Problem was I had never seen the ball come off the bat.

I looked up and I couldn’t find it.  I had no idea where it had went.  ‘Fuck,’ I thought.

I glanced at Hoberg, and I could tell he hadn’t seen it either.  I looked over at the third base coach, and he had his arm out, pointing fair.  It was all I had to go on.  I put my finger in the air, ran them home, and Hoberg and I trotted off for the locker room.

We were talking about where we were going to get beer on the way home.  I was pulling off my shin guards.  That’s when he asked me where the hell Nelson was.  On cue the door bust open, and Nelson came in, face beet red and his eyes bulging out of his head.

‘What the hell just happened out there, guys?’ he asked, running his fingers through his scalp, exasperated.

Two run homer.  Walk-off.  10 after 5.

‘Walk off, huh?  Did either of you see the fucking ball?’

No.  All I had to go on was the third base coach.

‘Do you know why you didn’t see that ball?  You didn’t see that ball, because it was so far foul it’s sitting in a cornfield in Nebraska right now.  It’s a shit-storm out there.  Where the hell do you think I’ve been for the last twenty minutes?’

The shit storm outside wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part is that we periodically get reviewed, and there was a guy from the state in the stands that night.  Of all the damn nights…I spent the next few days waiting on a phone call.  It never came.

I ran into the guy a few weeks later.  I asked him, ‘Hey uh, did uh, did you hear anything on that Carroll game?’

He smiled.  ‘Yeah, I got a phone call wondering what the hell had happened over there.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him the truth.  Don’t really know what to tell you.  Damnest pole bender I ever saw.'”

The guy umping the umps hadn’t got swept up in it either.

“How did it end with you guys?”

“Joe had been to umpire school.  He mentored me.  When he thought I was ready, he encouraged me to go.  I didn’t make it.  When Pat came along, he followed our same footsteps, and then he just kept going.

The guy that taught Pat had went through school with me.  At night my phone would ring.

‘Man, I just don’t know.  I don’t know if I have what they are looking for.  I can’t tell how I’m doing down here.’

‘Oh my God.  This kid…he’s like no one else down here.’

I’d just listen, never able to tell the other where the other was at.”

“I used to think people knew how good they were.  Maybe everybody wonders.  Do you suppose Francona wonders?”

“I suppose he wonders how he is getting back to The Series again.”

“Maybe that’s the trick.”

“What is?”

“The trick is to keep going, home run or pole bender.  The ball will come down on its own.”