Report Card

Well, it’s over. I’ve been planning this expedition since I was 21 years old, and now I’ve done it. I’ll never know how things might have worked out had I come here at 21… but, based on my report card and my own self-evaluation, it’s good that I went the physics teaching route.

Today began with a rather lame student game. I neither umpired nor played. Nothing particularly exciting happened. The game was called in the fourth inning when the sprinkler system mysteriously came to life. The rulebook states that if a game is called due to the malfunction of a mechanical device under the control of the home team, that game shall be suspended, and replayed from the point of suspension. However, the “commissioner” declared a winner since this was the last meeting of the season between the two teams. Ho-hum.

This afternoon marked the school banquet, at which everyone dressed up in coat-and-tie, we heard speeches, awarded awards, and that kind of stuff. Immediately thereafter, we had evaluations. The atmosphere in the “waiting room” was tense: nervous folks, rumors floating everywhere of who did and did not make it, and so on. Only 25 students will continue on to the Professional Baseball Umpiring Corporation evaluation course in March.[1] That leaves 95 students who will not be progressing. Sure, about 10 of us, including me, were not looking for a minor league job; others will work independent leagues and hope to try again next year. But that sure leaves a lot of crushed dreams.

My evaluation was short and cordial. I sat down across from Harry Wendelstedt and Paul Nauert, who each shook my hand. They handed me my report card, which indicated that I was NOT in the top 25. Paul pointed particularly to the “attitude” and “test score” categories as strengths. They encouraged me to umpire locally, and to umpire the way I was taught here. I thanked them for their work, told them that the Wendelstedt name had already helped me make contact with my local association, and assured them that I would work high school games. And that was that.

My official report card gave me letter grades in about ten categories. I have some idea of the curve, now that I’ve hung out in the bar with my classmates for a few hours after evaluations were complete. It looks like students with B’s and B+’s across the board are good enough to work independent leagues; you need a solid mix of A’s and B’s to be considered for the top 25. I earned four A’s: attitude, hustle, voice, and test score.[2] I also earned three C’s: instinct, judgment (?!?) and positioning. All other categories earned B’s.[3] I would not have been considered for professional baseball, nor for the independent leagues, even had I been interested.

Umpire School is over. Sigh. It was fun, I’m sad that it’s all done… and I count my blessings now even more than I did before. Last night I saw so many friends who have lost direction in their lives now that they know they won’t be professional umpires. They talked about going back to jobs that they don’t like but that pay the bills. They brainstormed randomly about what to do now, where they’re going to go, how they’re gonna pay the rent, who might hire them… I don’t feel TOO sad for them, knowing that all are good, hardworking folks who will be successful at whatever they pursue. But the long faces, the attempts to remain cheerful in the face of adversity, made me as thankful as can be for my loving family, my rewarding job, the full (VERY full) life that I will return to shortly.

I’ll never forget my time here. It’s been wonderful. I’m glad I came.

But I'm glad to be coming home.

P.S. Please return to this site in late March for the in-season version of “Nachoman’s Baseball.” Until then, please send questions, stories, or comments to the Nachoman via email at greg_jacobs@woodberry.org .

[1] And, not all of those 25 will be offered jobs in the minor leagues.

[2] I got 247 questions right out of 250, tied with two others for best in the class.

[3] As with so many report cards, a couple of the grades seemed lower than they should have been… but (also as with so many report cards) a few grades were probably higher than I deserved. It all averages out.

What do we call that play?

Many of this blog's readers just saw one of the most memorable plays in NFL history. On third and long in the Giant [sic] game winning drive, Eli manning scrambled, somehow avoided something like 30 Patriot rushers, and threw downfield to David Tyree, who amazingly caught the ball against his helmet.

Every famous NFL play has a pithy name: "The Catch," "The Fumble," "The Music City Miracle," and so on. What do we call this one? I'm taking nominations.

Self-Evaluation

Years ago I taught physics and Latin at a three-week summer academic program. The fluffy bunny education professor in charge of the faculty attempted to mandate all sorts of her pet philosophies. One of them was the student self-evaluation. The idea was, students should take ownership of their own learning. Through the process of deep reflection and then careful writing about their own strengths and weaknesses, they become better receptive and more responsive to the teacher’s evaluation.[1] This professor even had evidence that requiring self-evaluations was beneficial.[2]

I rebelled.[3] I mean, forget about the fact that not one teacher took the self-evaluation exercise seriously, or that it’s a worthless endeavor anyway unless the students truly wrack the depths of their souls to discover and share their innermost vulnerabilities with the person who assigns grades. Sure, if I were teaching a creative writing course, self- and peer- evaluations might be worthwhile. But in physics? You either know it or you don’t. What good does it do for a student to write an essay that boils down to “I understand kinematics pretty well, but I’m struggling with electric fields,” when he just took a test on which he did well on the kinematics questions and struggled with the electric fields questions? And if it does do some marginal good for the student to acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses in writing, that good is offset by the time it takes for him to write and for me to grade the assignment – we could have spent that time actually addressing his difficulty with electric fields! And I won’t even get into the issue of an educational administrator mandating teaching methods rather than letting presumed professionals do things the way that works for them. (Can you imagine if the baseball players’ union had mandated that Dan Quisenberry stop using his signature sidearm delivery, effectiveness be danged, because that’s not how players are supposed to pitch?)

Okay. Now my rant is over. Ahem. I decided to, um, write a self-evaluation of my progress at Umpire School. Not required or even suggested by the staff, just a useful exercise. For me, in this case. Yeah. I want to see how my own thoughts jibe with what I will hear on Tuesday night at my formal evaluation.

Strengths:

(1) I know the rules backwards and forwards, and I can explain and enforce them.
(2) I’m loud, and (when I’m comfortable) I have a strong field presence.

Other students regularly ask me about rules situations, because they know that I know what I’m talking about. I’ve never misapplied a rule on the field. And I’m the second-loudest student at the school, to the point where I’ve been the butt of several jokes.[4]

Weaknesses:

(1) The timing of my calls is still too quick.
(2) Though I know my responsibilities, in fulfilling them I often don’t react quickly enough.
(3) Unusual situations puncture my strong field presence.

All three of these weaknesses boil down to, “I need game experience.” Meaning:

TIMING: Way too often I see something happen, and then render an immediate decision. That’s good, right? Wrong. I’ve been burned several times by making a call before I’ve seen everything, or before my brain has processed what it saw. For example, I was the base umpire on a fly ball to center field. I knew in this particular drill that I would be asked whether the runners on first and second base tagged up legally after the catch. So, I signaled for the catch, and quickly turned to look at both bases. Both runners tagged up properly. When I looked back to find the ball in center field, it was on the ground. Oops! “NO CATCH! NO CATCH! I frantically waved… an umpire whose timing is good would not have made that catch call, even on a routine fly out, for two or three more seconds. I have to learn to slow down.

REACTIONS: Though my brain knows my responsibilities and positioning, my body doesn’t. Too often the body takes off one way, and the brain has to make a correction. For example, as the base umpire on Saturday, my legs read a ground ball, so they started to move off the line to get in position for the play at first base. Then – only half a second later, but still too late – my brain reminded my legs that if the grounder is to the right side, I’m supposed to wait for it to be fielded before I move. The same kind of thing frequently happens to me as a plate umpire: my legs might keep me camped out by home plate until the brain tells them to get their butt down to third base because a play there would be my responsibility.

Have you ever watched kids learning to play baseball for the first time? Often you’ll see someone who is a good athlete, but who doesn’t know the game yet: the infielder who has to think for a moment before deciding which base to throw to, the baserunner who stops and stares for a moment before he knows whether or not to tag up on a fly ball… well, that’s me as an umpire. Once I can react quickly to plays without thinking about them, I’ll be pretty danged good. But I need game experience, and lots of it, so my movements become routine and instinctive.

UNUSUAL SITUATIONS: Two or three times I’ve been flummoxed on the field by something that wasn’t supposed to happen, but did. One more strange thing happened on Friday when the instructor was evaluating my pitch calling in the batting cage. For this drill, a “batter” dons a helmet and hoists a whiffle bat. He’s never supposed to try to hit the ball, but he’s supposed to give occasional full and check swings so that the umpire can show that he knows what to do. Well, on the second-to-last pitch, the batter made almost a full swing, I saw the ball miss the catcher’s glove… and I was pushed backwards by a thump. The ball hit me. It didn’t hurt – I was, of course, wearing a high quality chest protector – but I couldn’t think for a moment. I wasn’t mentally prepared for a foul ball in the batting cage! I made the wrong signal (I should have called “foul ball”) and looked momentarily meek. (On the final pitch, I gave the emphatic and dramatic “strike three” call with extra fist pumps, which we were not supposed to do, but I did anyway.)

The point is, something strange happened, and I lost my field presence – I “broke character,” if you will. I suppose my reactions have been developed poorly by teaching for twelve years. I’m not afraid of looking weak momentarily in my classroom, because everyone knows that I’m in charge and that I know what I’m doing; if I need a few minutes or a day to decide a knotty, unusual problem, or if I truly was thrown for a loop by an incident, I do better by acting genuinely meek than disingenuously bold. Not so for an umpire, though.

Now, for all of you smart-arses who might want to use these self-criticisms as ammunition when you have a chance to heckle me on the field, recognize that I’m aware of my weaknesses, and I’m working to improve them. I will be better by the time you watch me. My strong suspicion is that, had I been eligible, I would not have progressed this year to the minor leagues. However, I think that with a full summer of work, say, in an independent league, I could have come back to be one of the top students NEXT year.

I won’t be asking for another sabbatical next year, though. Sigh.

[1] I think she must have also used the terms “actualize” and “paradigm” in there somewhere.
[2] The evidence was, she got herself a stack of paper to read that justified her salary.
[3] “You don’t say!?!” is the sarcastic response of those who know the Nachoman personally.
[4] “You don’t say!?!” is the sarcastic response of those who know the Nachoman personally.