The Umpire is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self by Dale Scott (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Umpire is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self by Dale Scott Tim Wiles Dale Scott with Rob Neyer. The Umpire is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 275 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Nutcutter, polebender, banger, wacker, honeymoon series, strapping it on, and working the stick. Shit series, cockshot, caught the edge, shithouse. Dale Scott's autobiography begins with an entertaining chapter that functions as a preparatory glossary for the rest of the book, which is told in a breezy, entertaining way as though the author is seated with you in a restaurant booth telling (mostly) baseball stories. It is entertaining and readable while also giving you an authentic and revealing tour of life as a major league umpire and as a closeted (until 2014) gay man in American sports. Dale Scott is the first major league umpire to come out as gay during his career and one of only two MLB on-field figures to do so—the other being Billy Bean, who contributes a poignant foreword to this book. Scott gets right to the subject of being gay, mentioning it on page two. Overall, however, this reviewer found the book to be more of a baseball book that a gay memoir. It is both, but Scott and Neyer focus on the game and its rules, personalities, and the details of an umpire's life much more than on Scott's personal life. The book follows the standard chronological structure of an autobiographical memoir. It begins with a chapter about his family and youth in Eugene, Oregon including his early professional development as a local sports official and radio disc jockey. We have umpire school, the minors, winter ball in the Dominican Republic, and his relatively swift rise to the American major leagues. Without ever bogging down in technical detail, the book offers a great glimpse into the hows and whys of umpiring, as in this passage from umpire school, which Scott attended after five years of local umpiring: [End Page 122] Once I got there, I realized I knew nothing. It's so detailed and specific. You're taught everything known to man about the two-man system. You learn to communicate, really communicate, with your partner. You're taught not only the rules inside and out but also why the rule is in the book. In many instances that will help you understand how, coupled with good judgment and common sense, you enforce rules either by the letter of the law or within the context of how the game is played. (26) We keep learning new lingo throughout the book, such as the "mechanic," an umpire's style of physically calling a strike. We learn that "work" and "working" are used to describe umpiring the plate for a given pitcher, such as Jack Morris or Nolan Ryan. In the case of Morris, we learn that he practices "surveying," the process of staring down umpires when he questions their pitch calls. We learn about "umpire slumps," "umpire luck," and the Priesmeyer trunk, an interesting, huge piece of luggage that is as unique as Delaware River mud but not as widely celebrated. We also learn about physical dynamics of umpiring, such as "the wedge," which Scott describes in an excellent description of the amazing fifteen-inning Game Two of the 1995 Yankees-Mariners playoff series: Think of the . . . shape of a triangle. The path of the runner and the flight of the ball represent two sides of the wedge. Using the wedge puts me between those two lines and in position to have a clear view of the point of the triangle, where the tag will be applied." Scott goes on to say that he can't remain stationary, but has to read the throw and adjust, "Staying on (the catcher's) glove-side hip and maintaining my view. (141) This detailed description is fascinating, but the book does not journey into such dynamics often—it's a portrait of umpiring, not a manual. There are insightful analyses of the Derek Jeter–Jeffrey Maier home run call in the 1996 playoffs, the Roberto Alomar...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".