By Kim J. Harmon

Kevin Woessner has been yelled at his whole life and he never minded it so, what the heck, he decided he wouldn’t mind being a professional umpire.

Okay, so it didn’t quite work out like that.

But Kevin, 21, a 2003 graduate of Newtown High School, starting umpiring Babe Ruth games back when he was 13 years old. He was a baseball fan and it was an easy way to pick up some cabbage. Before long, he was umpiring high school and Over-30 League games and, by then, he knew this was the life for him.

“I played football,” he explained. “The coaches yell. Everyone yells in every aspect of life. Baseball is no different.”

Last January, he attended the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School in Daytona Beach, Florida, for a five-week program and finished in the top 35 (of the 115 whom graduated). The top 25 (the number varies from year to year) were sent to the 10-day PBUC (Professional Baseball Umpires Camp) placement camp since there were only 25 jobs in professional baseball affiliated leagues available. Still, instructors put in a word for Kevin with the Texas Collegiate League (with teams strictly from the Lone Star state) and the Northwoods League (with teams in Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota and Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada).

“I had built up a pretty good relationship with some of the instructors,” said Kevin, “and they told me they thought I would blossom a little sooner than I did. But I was real close (to getting a professional job).”

And the Northwoods League called first.

It is an SCBA sanctioned summer baseball league comprised of teams of the top college players from across North America. All players in the league must have NCAA eligibility remaining in order to participate and are not paid so as to preserve that eligibility. Each team is operated similar to a professional minor league team, providing players an opportunity to play under the same conditions using wooden bats, minor league specification baseballs, experiencing overnight road trips, and playing nightly before fans in a stadium.

That gives the players a feel for professional baseball.

The umpires, too.

“After the first pitch in the first game I started to settle in,” said Kevin, who – during the course of the season – had beer thrown on him, had dirt kicked on him, was bumped by a manager, was heckled from the bench on a nightly basis and had a player purposely get himself thrown out of a game. “I wasn’t used to working in front of 4,000 people. It was fun, going to make a call and the crowd going nuts cheering or booing.”

The NWL employs six two-man crews during the regular season, a six-man crew during the mid-season All-Star game, and six umpires for both the divisional playoffs (Kevin was on the field for the North Division playoffs between the Thunder Bay Border Cats and Duluth Huskies) and championship series. Umpires are salaried and are provided hotel accommodations, meals and travel.

Nearly three dozen NWL umpires since 1994 have furthered their careers in professional baseball affiliated leagues, a handful reaching Triple-A ball.

A number of Northwoods League players have reached the major leagues – such as Jay Gibbons of the Baltimore Orioles, Juan Pierre of the Colorado Rockies, Jeff Weaver of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bobby Kielty of the Oakland Athletics, Clint Barmes of the Colorado Rockies and Curtis Granderson of the Detroit Tigers.

Weaver – formerly of the New York Yankees – is the highest paid of the lot, earning $8.3 million this year.

Unlike the players, the umpires do earn a small pittance and the lifestyle can be pretty harsh and unforgiving.

In less than three months, Kevin and his partner put 10,000 miles on a 1999 Dodge Dakota pickup while making 18 hour drives out to Lacrosse, Wisconsin, or umpiring split doubleheaders – a 1:05 pm game in Alexandria, Minnesota, and a 7:05 pm game 70 miles away in St. Cloud, Minnesota – before driving six hours out to Thunder Bay, Ontario, later that night. On top of that, most of the time the umpire rooms they were forced to change in were too small to be considered closets and stifling enough to serve as hot boxes on a prison farm somewhere.

So who could blame the umps if they got a little testy?

“I dumped three guys in one game,” he said, “and my partner dumped two. That’s a lot of paperwork.”

Now that the season is over (the Rochester Honkers of Minnesota won the NWL championship, by the way) Kevin is working at Danbury Hospital, looking into working some Over-30 Baseball League games to stay sharp (“It will be sad if I have to eject people now,” he said, “because my trigger finger has gotten a lot quicker”), and preparing himself for another trip to Daytona Beach and another five weeks at the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School.

And with three years of summer ball under his belt he will have a leg up on most of the other prospective umpires because he knows what it is like to have every single move he makes scrutinized and graded.

“Everyone watches your every move,” he said, “and everything you do (at umpire school) is remembered.”

Umpire school runs six days a week, about 10 hours a day (about 300 total hours of training supervised by 11 major league-level instructors who are veterans of All Star games, playoffs and World Series games). There is on-the-field training in controlled games and in-the-cage training on balls and strikes.

Perhaps nothing is more important than the strike zone. Of course, there is the “strike zone” – defined by the rule book as the area over the plate from the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and top of the uniform pants (roughly chest-high) to the hollow beneath the knee cap – and then there is the strike zone, which is almost a personal preference of each home plate umpire but almost always narrower and more constricted than the rule book would allow.

“When I’m behind the plate,” said Kevin, “the strike zone is from the knees to the belt. If you want to change the strike zone then dig up Abner Doubleday and change the strike zone.”

Another very important aspect of training, of course, is arguing. Arguing is as much a part of the national past time as home runs and hot dogs and instructors want to make sure prospective umpires know how to argue with belligerent managers and players.

“(The instructors) don’t want you to use your hands. They want you to explain things with your mouth,” said Kevin. “If you can’t explain things with your mouth, you can’t explain things with your hands.”

Kevin – who hopes to slim down to 205 pounds – is confident another session at the Wendelstedt School will earn him a job somewhere … hopefully in the New York-Penn League, perhaps the top ‘A’ league in the country.

“Doing Brooklyn Cyclones games would be cool,” he said.

Summer Baseball

The leagues are dotted all over the United States – from the Cape Cod Summer League with the Brewster Whitecaps and Falmouth Commodores to the California Collegiate League with the Santa Barbara Foresters and Monterey Bay Sox.

They are the collegiate summer baseball leagues where top level college players from all across the country play another 50 or 60 games from early days of June right through the dog days of August. From Danbury, Connecticut and Watertown, New York, to Laramie, Wyoming, and Mineral Wells, Texas, dusty diamonds host many future major stars.

Some current collegiate summer leagues include the California Collegiate League, Cape Cod League, New York Collegiate Baseball League, Mountain Collegiate Baseball League, New England Collegiate Baseball League, Southern Collegiate Baseball League and the Texas Collegiate Baseball League.