ST. PAUL — The left-handed batter tried to
check his swing in the first inning. In a reflex honed through thousands
of innings behind the plate, Dwight Childs, a catcher for the St. Paul Saints of the independent American Association, pointed up the third-base line, appealing for a swinging strike call.
But there was no umpire there — or at second, or at first or even behind the plate at Midway Stadium. The game’s final arbiter, a man in a flowing black robe that flapped in the breeze, stood with his arms folded behind the mound. He pumped a fist, signaling a strike.
In the lightly attended exhibition game on May 11 at a creaky old stadium on a cold, blustery night, the Saints and the Gary SouthShore RailCats experimented with a revolutionary idea: a game without umpires. That the Saints were involved should not surprise anyone who knows that the team’s part-owner is Mike Veeck, a third-generation baseball executive and the son of Bill Veeck, the Hall of Fame owner and impresario.
Veeck, 62, inherited his father’s imagination and knack for inventive promotions. In more than 20 years running the Saints and other independent teams, Veeck has relied on off-the-wall gags and a festive atmosphere to create a new baseball genre outside the affiliated minor leagues. Independent leagues now operate coast to coast.
The
Umpireless Game was almost two years in the making, suggested by a
graduate student at the Citadel, where Veeck teaches marketing. The
student, Thomas McQueeney, a South Carolina real estate agent and author
of two books, sent Veeck a lengthy, detailed e-mail about staging such a
game. He proposed having fans behind the plate raise placards to call
balls and strikes, and others along the baselines to call plays in the
field, with a majority ruling.
“I recognized it was a great idea,” Veeck said. “I kept looking at that thing and kept it for the longest time.”
It reminded Veeck of one of his father’s best-known and most frequently copied promotions, Grandstand Managers Day, when fans voted on lineups and game strategy.
More than six decades ago, Bill Veeck owned the St. Louis Browns, one of the American League’s worst teams and draws. In the most famous stunt of his career, Bill Veeck sent a dwarf, Eddie Gaedel, to the plate.
Five days later, on Aug. 24, 1951, fans managed the Browns against the Philadelphia Athletics at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. In anticipation of the event, The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had published a ballot in which fans picked the Browns’ starting lineup; all the voters got free tickets to the game.
As they entered the stadium, those 1,115 “managers,” among a crowd announced as 7,185, received placards with “yes” in green letters on one side and “no” in red on the other. At pertinent times, Bob Fishel, Veeck’s public relations official, held up signs asking the fans questions like “Steal?” and “Infield Back?” The fans voted by holding up their signs. A circuit court judge tabulated the results, which were relayed to a coach in the dugout via walkie-talkie. Manager Zack Taylor, with nothing to do, sat in street clothes in a rocking chair on top of the dugout.
The Browns, who had lost of four of five, won the game, 5-3, behind the 20-game winner Ned Garver. A five-game losing streak followed. The Browns finished last at 52-102, 46 games behind the pennant-winning Yankees, and moved to Baltimore for the 1954 season.
In the Umpireless Game, Mike Veeck tried to meld fan participation with a modern twist.
“There are two promotions that I’ve been fooling with,” Veeck said. “I was trying to combine one based with technology, where you can call balls and strikes without an umpire, but do it with lasers and stuff.”
That proved unworkable because of the cost and the technological limitations of Midway Stadium.
“To pull that off, you need to be set up like a Fox World Series broadcast,” said Derek Sharrer, the Saints’ executive vice president and general manager.
So the team settled on a legal theme, with nearby Hamline University, whose baseball team also uses Midway, signing on as a sponsor to publicize its law school.
“They approached us with a couple of different ideas, and we latched on to this one right away,” said Collette Litzinger, the university’s brand marketing director. “We thought it sounded like a fun, new twist.”
Instead of umpires, one robed judge settled disputes. In a nod to Grandstand Managers Day, players from the East Tonka Little League of Minnetonka, Minn., were enlisted to sit in “jury boxes” along the first- and third-base lines, 12 in each, to decide close plays by raising “Safe” or “Out” signs. The teams’ catchers called balls and strikes.
Veeck envisioned having an actual judge, Alan Page, the former Minnesota Vikings great and longtime associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. The club instead chose a local umpire, Mike Neubeck, in case any rules interpretation was required. An American Association official suggested positioning the “judge” on the infield grass as a better visual.
It was a coincidence that the promotion happened the same week Major League Baseball acknowledged two major mistakes by its umpires — a botched call on a home run and a mistake involving a pitching change.
“Since there have been umpires,” Veeck said, “it’s a great American art to bait umpires and to have fun with it. But along the flip side of that, pound for pound, they don’t get their due. They do a pretty good job. I think you can walk that line and have fun both ways without demeaning the job or denigrating what umpires have been doing for 125 or 135 years.”
The May 11 game went smoothly. The Saints won, 4-3, in 2 hours 58 minutes. The first-base jury correctly called Gary’s Adam Klein safe on a high throw from the second baseman, allowing a run to score in the second inning. The catchers, Childs and Gary’s Ryan Babineau, called out seven batters on strikes, including each other. No one argued.
“There’s always so much talk about what slows the game down,” Gary Manager Greg Tagert said. “What slows the game down is the constant arguing about balls and strikes. I think we took that element away, actually, tonight.”
Childs said: “We’ve all played baseball a long time. Getting an at-bat taken away from you is the worst thing ever. That was kind of the pregame concern. As we got into the game, it was just kind of like, you know what? If it’s there it’s there, if it’s close it’s there, and if it’s off, it’s off.”
The restless “jurors” abandoned their boxes by the sixth inning, leaving Neubeck to decide a play at the plate in the bottom of the ninth. A throw from the first baseman sailed off target as the winning run scored, eliminating a potential controversy.
“I have to say I’m a little disappointed the jury left a few innings too soon,” Babineau said. “I don’t know how we would have gone there. We would have had to have some competition between teams, maybe a dance-off, to determine who was the winner.”
But there was no umpire there — or at second, or at first or even behind the plate at Midway Stadium. The game’s final arbiter, a man in a flowing black robe that flapped in the breeze, stood with his arms folded behind the mound. He pumped a fist, signaling a strike.
In the lightly attended exhibition game on May 11 at a creaky old stadium on a cold, blustery night, the Saints and the Gary SouthShore RailCats experimented with a revolutionary idea: a game without umpires. That the Saints were involved should not surprise anyone who knows that the team’s part-owner is Mike Veeck, a third-generation baseball executive and the son of Bill Veeck, the Hall of Fame owner and impresario.
Veeck, 62, inherited his father’s imagination and knack for inventive promotions. In more than 20 years running the Saints and other independent teams, Veeck has relied on off-the-wall gags and a festive atmosphere to create a new baseball genre outside the affiliated minor leagues. Independent leagues now operate coast to coast.
Bill Veeck’s St. Louis Browns had fans pick a lineup and manage the team for a night in 1951.
Bettmann / Corbis
“I recognized it was a great idea,” Veeck said. “I kept looking at that thing and kept it for the longest time.”
It reminded Veeck of one of his father’s best-known and most frequently copied promotions, Grandstand Managers Day, when fans voted on lineups and game strategy.
More than six decades ago, Bill Veeck owned the St. Louis Browns, one of the American League’s worst teams and draws. In the most famous stunt of his career, Bill Veeck sent a dwarf, Eddie Gaedel, to the plate.
Five days later, on Aug. 24, 1951, fans managed the Browns against the Philadelphia Athletics at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. In anticipation of the event, The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had published a ballot in which fans picked the Browns’ starting lineup; all the voters got free tickets to the game.
As they entered the stadium, those 1,115 “managers,” among a crowd announced as 7,185, received placards with “yes” in green letters on one side and “no” in red on the other. At pertinent times, Bob Fishel, Veeck’s public relations official, held up signs asking the fans questions like “Steal?” and “Infield Back?” The fans voted by holding up their signs. A circuit court judge tabulated the results, which were relayed to a coach in the dugout via walkie-talkie. Manager Zack Taylor, with nothing to do, sat in street clothes in a rocking chair on top of the dugout.
The Browns, who had lost of four of five, won the game, 5-3, behind the 20-game winner Ned Garver. A five-game losing streak followed. The Browns finished last at 52-102, 46 games behind the pennant-winning Yankees, and moved to Baltimore for the 1954 season.
In the Umpireless Game, Mike Veeck tried to meld fan participation with a modern twist.
“There are two promotions that I’ve been fooling with,” Veeck said. “I was trying to combine one based with technology, where you can call balls and strikes without an umpire, but do it with lasers and stuff.”
That proved unworkable because of the cost and the technological limitations of Midway Stadium.
“To pull that off, you need to be set up like a Fox World Series broadcast,” said Derek Sharrer, the Saints’ executive vice president and general manager.
So the team settled on a legal theme, with nearby Hamline University, whose baseball team also uses Midway, signing on as a sponsor to publicize its law school.
“They approached us with a couple of different ideas, and we latched on to this one right away,” said Collette Litzinger, the university’s brand marketing director. “We thought it sounded like a fun, new twist.”
Instead of umpires, one robed judge settled disputes. In a nod to Grandstand Managers Day, players from the East Tonka Little League of Minnetonka, Minn., were enlisted to sit in “jury boxes” along the first- and third-base lines, 12 in each, to decide close plays by raising “Safe” or “Out” signs. The teams’ catchers called balls and strikes.
Veeck envisioned having an actual judge, Alan Page, the former Minnesota Vikings great and longtime associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. The club instead chose a local umpire, Mike Neubeck, in case any rules interpretation was required. An American Association official suggested positioning the “judge” on the infield grass as a better visual.
It was a coincidence that the promotion happened the same week Major League Baseball acknowledged two major mistakes by its umpires — a botched call on a home run and a mistake involving a pitching change.
“Since there have been umpires,” Veeck said, “it’s a great American art to bait umpires and to have fun with it. But along the flip side of that, pound for pound, they don’t get their due. They do a pretty good job. I think you can walk that line and have fun both ways without demeaning the job or denigrating what umpires have been doing for 125 or 135 years.”
The May 11 game went smoothly. The Saints won, 4-3, in 2 hours 58 minutes. The first-base jury correctly called Gary’s Adam Klein safe on a high throw from the second baseman, allowing a run to score in the second inning. The catchers, Childs and Gary’s Ryan Babineau, called out seven batters on strikes, including each other. No one argued.
“There’s always so much talk about what slows the game down,” Gary Manager Greg Tagert said. “What slows the game down is the constant arguing about balls and strikes. I think we took that element away, actually, tonight.”
Childs said: “We’ve all played baseball a long time. Getting an at-bat taken away from you is the worst thing ever. That was kind of the pregame concern. As we got into the game, it was just kind of like, you know what? If it’s there it’s there, if it’s close it’s there, and if it’s off, it’s off.”
The restless “jurors” abandoned their boxes by the sixth inning, leaving Neubeck to decide a play at the plate in the bottom of the ninth. A throw from the first baseman sailed off target as the winning run scored, eliminating a potential controversy.
“I have to say I’m a little disappointed the jury left a few innings too soon,” Babineau said. “I don’t know how we would have gone there. We would have had to have some competition between teams, maybe a dance-off, to determine who was the winner.”
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