No Strikes, But She's Out

During this post-season, the umpires have been as hot a topic of conversation as the players. With memorable blown calls at third [2], at second [3], in left field [4], and at first [5], next-day analysis has often focused on questions of “Who are these umps, and why are they screwing things up?” The question less likely to be asked: “Why are they all men?”

There is not a single woman umpire in professional baseball today—not in the majors, and not in the minors. In March 2007, when it looked like Ria Cortesio might become the first woman ump in the major leagues [6], Slate’s Michelle Tsai wrote about why it had taken so long. Ria didn’t make it; she was fired that November [7].

Perry Barber, who has been umpiring across the country since 1981, has her own theories about the obstacles tripping up women umpires. Barber knew nothing about baseball until she was 28, when a regular trivia competition with a friend prompted her to study up on the category that so frequently stumped her. She read every baseball book she could find and quickly fell in love with the game, spending every in-season night driving with her mom to see Angels and Dodgers games.

In the spring of 1981, Barber’s mother saw her reading a book about umpires and took that to mean that she wanted to be one, which, Barber says “was very far from the truth at the time.” Still, she started umping Little League games in a nearby town. After her first game, there were three letters to the editor in the local paper begging her to stop. That just egged the competitive Barber on. She went to umpiring school in Florida that January (forcing her twin sister to go along so she wouldn’t be the only woman in the class of 200) and has made a career of it since, umping for high school, college, spring-training, and Independent League games.

Although she still loves the game, she’s grown increasingly frustrated with the way baseball treats women. She spoke with DoubleX about why women umpires always get fired, and about the rare good men who have the balls to stand up for them

You went to umpire school four times, but never scored a regular job in professional ball. Why not?

When I started out, I was 28 years old, and in umpiring chronology I was already too old. Women who did get the jobs were basically hung out to dry. One of them, Pam Postema, got promoted all the way up to AAA, but it took her eight years, and she spent the next five years waiting for her call-up, which never came.

I read that she ejected a lot of players, which may be why she didn’t make it to the majors.

You know what, that’s a bunch of bullshit. There’s no reason why she didn’t make it except for the fact that she was a woman and that the one man who had the balls to support her promotion to the major leagues had a heart attack and died before he had a chance to do it. That was Bart Giamatti [8], who was commissioner of Major League Baseball when he died in 1989. After he died, nobody gave a shit about her.

In 1990, a woman named Theresa Cox [9] called me and said, “Guess what, I just went to umpire school and they told me I’m going to get a job in minor league baseball.” And I said, “Guess what, Theresa, that means by the end of the season Pam Postema [10] will be gone.” And it was true. They don’t want more than one woman at a time, because they know that singly and intermittently we don’t have any power; we don’t have any means of redress for our grievances; we don’t have any of the things that are natural and intrinsic to the boys and the men from the time they’re 6 years old. They grow up in the baseball culture. Women are deliberately excluded from that. Even girls who want to play baseball are directed to softball, because baseball is a game that boys play.

Does that happen with umpires also? Did you get asked, “Why don’t you go to softball?”

Oh, yes, all the time. I’ve driven up to security gates at college campuses and said, “I’m here to umpire the varsity baseball game,” and been directed to the softball field, even though I specifically said varsity baseball. It’s sort of a dirty secret of sports that officialdom doesn’t want women. It’s not because women aren’t regarded as assertive and successful and strong-willed and capable of handling pressure and all that stuff. It’s just a holdover from a time that should be long passed.

Is it true of women’s sports, too? In softball, are the officials mostly women?

I very seldom do softball because I’m baseball-trained, but I umpired a softball game a few weekends ago and two of the girls walked up to me and said, “You’re the first woman umpire we’ve ever had.” I was shocked.

Did you have a woman umpire mentor who was helping you figure it all out?

Early on, I made friends with the few women who I knew either were umpiring or had umpired. I became friends with Theresa and Pam and Ria. And, of course, my sister. She umpired for about six years after we got out of umpire school, and then she had a family, and that obviously took priority.

Is that why most of the women stop—to have families?

You know, it may be. Sometimes I think I’m weird because I never wanted to get married and have a family; that was never a goal of mine. Maybe becoming an umpire and having the mindset that has kept me umpiring all these decades has something to do with the fact that I was the kind of young girl who decided early on that I didn’t want to have a family and that I wanted to pursue other means of memorializing myself. [Laughs.] I think that many people try to memorialize themselves through their children, which I think is a big mistake.

What about Thersa and Ria? Did they leave to have a family?

Ria got fired.

Oh, just like Pam?

Yeah, that’s baseball’s pattern. They hire women for a certain period of time, and when they’ve reached a point where it appears it’ll be too difficult to keep them under control, they kick them to the curb.

What does that mean, “keep them under control”? What kind of rising-up are they doing?

Just by being out there, they’re casting a light on a deep, dark, shadowy cellar of baseball that baseball does not want exposed, which is that there is a deliberate attempt to exclude women from umpiring, and from a lot of aspects of professional baseball. Why do you think there are no women coaches or managers in pro baseball? Why are there no women general managers? It’s not because women can’t make trades or do the math or make the decisions. It’s because they don’t want ‘em! Baseball sets itself up as embracing minorities and getting everybody into the fold: “Look, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, and now there are more Hispanics playing, and we get players from all stripes and backgrounds,” and blah blah blah ... and yet, what about women?

It sounds like a lot of the obstacles are of the silent variety, of people not recruiting and promoting. Is there also outright hostility?

Most of the outright hostility comes from the fans, who feel they have free license to spew whatever venom they want from the stands. Most of the time, at this juncture, I don’t get the outright hostility from my umping partners or other people in my milieu because it’s too politically incorrect. But when I do encounter it, it’s always one-on-one. Guys that are abusers, they do it so that nobody else knows, so that when the woman speaks up about it, no one else has witnessed it, so it’s hard to believe her.

How do you deal with the to-your-face insults?

I regard it as a means for me to learn. There’s a lot about self-control and management of one’s emotions that’s very important in umpiring as well as playing baseball. I have seen a pitcher who gets upset with one pitch an inch off the plate that I call a ball that he thought was a strike, and I’ll say, “It’s starting to happen,” and sure enough, he’ll walk that batter. Then he’ll give up a double. The next batter, he’ll hit. I can see he’s starting to blame his deficiencies on me, he’s getting angrier and angrier at me, and he’s letting that anger affect what he does out there on the mound.

So what will it take to improve the situation for women?

There’s nobody out there looking for them, encouraging them, training them, retaining them, and promoting them. There’s nobody out there like Rod Thorn [11]. He was the vice president of operation for the NBA. He told Darrell Garretson, who at the time was the supervisor of officials for the NBA, “Go out and find me some qualified women,” and guess what, he hired two of them, and one of them is still working 11 years later, completely giving lie to the contention that women can’t handle it, that they’re not durable enough or that they’ll go crazy at that time of the month. Rod Thorn had the balls to say, “This is wrong, and I’m going to fix it.” But baseball doesn’t have anybody like Rod Thorn.

At this point, I’m convinced that being nice about it and patient and sending women out now and then, here and there, is not going to do. We’re just going to have to storm the Bastille, baby, and flood the schools with women candidates and shatter what I call the stained-grass ceiling, because they are not cracking it open for us. Baseball has regressed from the time I started umpiring. It’s gone from having one woman to having none. It’s pathetic; it’s really pathetic.