A strike for stability

Toward the close of the 2021 US baseball season, the New York Times ran a story by Alan Blinder about the 76 professional umpires who virtually govern major league baseball, although required to keep a distance from the players and managers they supervise.

Blinder described them as among baseball’s most isolated figures as they travel the country in crews of four. Their lives are a blur of airports and fastballs and hotels and brightly lit ballparks, punctuated by calls home to their children and by shouts from dugouts. 

But many of them find stability and shared solace in a phone-call at about 3pm on a Friday when they pray together for divine help in their tasks. 

This is explained by Ted Barrett, a major league umpire for more than twenty years: “God is our Father. He loves to hear from us, so we need never feel like he’s too big or too busy when we bring our little problems to him.”

Barrett mentions some of the familiar menaces including loneliness, family problems they have to leave back home, and one that spectators and TV viewers may not even think of—the agony of imperfection, on and off the field of play.

So it is that small groups of umpires have privately convened every week by phone for about half an hour to find the kind of communal comfort that’s hard to come by when life is spent on the road and under the strain of officiating the national pastime.

Barrett says: “To stand out there in front of 50,000 people and call balls and strikes while you’re getting picked apart on TV, makes it impossible to do this job well, so I rely on God to do it for me.

“We talk about this a lot on our crew,” he adds. “Prepare the best you can, and then go out and do the best you can, and let God take care of the rest.”

The sport closest to US premier league baseball is cricket, which is played in Great Britain, Southern Africa, several sub-Asian countries, Australia, New Zealand, and the West Indies.

One of the highest scoring West Indians in the 1960s was Conrad Hunte, who never hesitated to share the role played in his sports career by his religious beliefs, and especially the way his prayers influenced his relationships on and off the playing field.

He once told me how, after three years as vice-captain of the West Indies cricket team, he was overlooked by the national selectors in their choice of a successor to retiring captain Frank Worrell.

Hunte was widely fancied for the captaincy, but the selectors chose Gary Sobers, under whom Hunte was expected to continue serving as the team's No. 2. He was devastated. In fact, he was so upset that he seriously considered leaving cricket altogether.

He said: "It wasn't until I began to study the Bible and truly understand my relationship with God that I came to appreciate one of life's most important lessons—that in any broken relationship, it’s the injured party that must take the first step towards reconciliation.”

Only then did Hunte find the humility to go to Sobers and ask his forgiveness for the unkind things he had thought and said about him.

“That’s when I committed myself wholeheartedly to supporting Sobers in his new responsibilities, thus putting my country's interests ahead of my own. I now know that I was led to that step by my newfound relationship with God—a change in lifestyle for which I will always be grateful.”

He smiled as he quoted one of his favorite passages of Scripture, "Athletes will take tremendous pains—for a fading crown of leaves. But our contest is for an eternal crown that will never fade" (I Cor. 9:25 ).

And that’s a story (and a quote) I suspect those praying US baseball umpires would love to share on the phone one summer Friday afternoon.