Parenthetical Invisibility; A Reader On The Absence Of Female Umpires

A reader, Perry Barber, made a great comment in response to my interview with NY Times writer Bruce Weber and his book about umpires, As They See 'Em, and a lack of women umpires in baseball. Rather than paraphrase, here's exactly what he wrote: ___________________________________________________________

Submitted by Perry Barber (not verified) on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 07:25.

Bruce Weber's book has been out for well over a year now, and in all the reviews and commentary about it, not once have women umpires been mentioned in anything other than parentheses, as if we are a mere afterthought to any discussion of umpires or umpiring.

The complete absence of women umpires from the professional baseball landscape is as noticeable as it is easily remedied, and yet there's no one in all of baseball with the balls to take a look at the big picture and do something constructive about it other than blathering on about how baseball welcomes and embraces women's participation, which is a lot of hooey.

Baseball has used the very few women umpires who have penetrated its sacrosanct barriers (since 1972 there's been a pathetically grand total of six; eight if you include two others, of which I am one, who have worked independent ball) as camouflage for its total inertia concerning the recruitment, training, hiring, and promoting of women umpires. In many ways, this inertia is even worse than outright prejudice or active discrimination because it's less easily identified for what it actually is, therefore less easily addressed or rectified. That's one reason why there are currently no women umpires in all of pro ball; another reason is the lack of leadership from MLB in this area.

The NBA had Rod Thorn, who charged his supervisor of referees, Darrell Garretson, with actively going out and searching for qualified women refs who could be fairly evaluated by him and his staff. Wonder of wonders, he hired not one but TWO women at the same time, and twelve years later, Violet Palmer is still in the NBA. (Dee Kantner returned to the WNBA, where she's been the supervisor of officials for many years.) Baseball has no one with Rod Thorn's vision or fearlessness, and it certainly has very few scribes willing to write with any degree of ferocity or even curiosity about this issue.

Weber's book addresses the paucity of women umpires with fewer than three pages about Ria Cortesio, who at the time he was writing it was the lone woman umpire in all of pro ball. (She was fired in 2007, and since then there has been no one, not one, nada, zero, zip, zilch, not one single woman hired to umpire for a professional baseball league.)

When baseball wakes up and views women umpires as an asset, not a threat; when writers who delve into the secret universe of umpires open their eyes to the peculiar and inexplicable imbalance on the umpiring staffs of professional baseball leagues that can't be easily explained away; and when bloggers and analysts who articulate their ideas as convincingly and beautifully as Jimmy Scott does most of the time begin to examine the reasons why they persist in placing us in parentheses instead of speaking of us as if we were more than mere afterthoughts, that's when the attitudes that have kept women off the field for far too long will actually begin to change and baseball will become the truly inclusive game it's supposed to be.