CINCINNATI — The corridor was nearly silent as Mark Carlson and three other major league umpires clopped toward the field last month. For a few more moments, they were out of earshot of almost everyone else at Great American Ball Park.
A microphone, nestled atop Carlson’s chest protector, threatened to change that after the first pitch: It could allow Carlson to address everyone watching the game in the ballpark or on a screen or listening to a broadcast.
Umpire crew chiefs in baseball no longer simply call balls and strikes, safe or out, fair or foul. This season, after hours of training and in-the-shower rehearsals and, for some, more elaborate efforts to limit stage fright, they were asked to explain some of the sport’s trickiest rule interpretations to stadiums thick with rancorous crowds. And now, with the playoffs in full force until early November, they will be doing so for large television audiences of casual fans, who may be more likely to tweet something venomous than to consult, say, Rule 6.01(i)(1).
“You don’t have to speed through the announcement just to get through it,” said Carlson, who joined the major league staff in 1999 and did not envision someday resembling an N.F.L. referee announcing a call. “You take your time. If you have to take that breath before you start speaking, you take that breath, settle in, mentally prepare what you’re going to say and go from there.”
“Over time, your comfortableness makes it easier, I guess,” he added in an interview in the softly lit umpire suite in Cincinnati.
The last officials in North America’s major men’s pro leagues to explain calls to spectators, M.L.B. umpires are facing their most prominent test to date. With tens of millions of people expected to watch baseball in the coming weeks, umpires will rely on the skills they have spent this season refining and the nuances they have been learning: how stadium acoustics can vary as much as how outfields play, the sight lines least likely to yield mid-announcement distractions, the pace of speech.
“The hardest part is working with the crowd noise. Do I stop talking through the crowd noise? Do I power through it?” said Dan Iassogna, who, like Carlson, is leading a crew in a division series this week.
Plus, Iassogna said, “as soon as I say ‘overturned,’ they’re going to start screaming.”
To umpires and baseball executives, the in-game explanations were a predictable, if time uncertain, outgrowth of the replay review system that has become a fixture of the game. Since the current system made its debut in 2014 — it was limited to decisions on home runs when it began in 2008 — officials have reconsidered more than 11,000 calls.
But with umpires generally offering the public no more than hand gestures until this season, even experienced broadcasters were sometimes at a loss to report what the officials were scrutinizing in the first place.
“We were only guessing,” Brian Anderson, a broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers and Turner Sports, said. “Before the announcements, I would lay out, ‘They could be doing A, B or C,’ and that doesn’t really educate the fan. I’m grabbing at straws, and you’d find out after the game: ‘We weren’t challenging that. We were doing this.’ And then you’d feel like an idiot.”
Anderson would like umpires to announce even more decisions, like ejections that come after someone complains too often, too loudly or too profanely from a dugout.
Justin Klemm, M.L.B.’s vice president for replay, said the notion of on-field announcements had long been considered, but gained greater traction after the 2019 season. The pandemic delayed their debut, in part because of the training that umpires received as they prepared for a role that would be more public than ever.
Umpires, no matter their seniority, attended video meetings, and crew chiefs, newly outfitted with hardware, participated in special sessions at M.L.B. parks in Arizona and Florida during spring training. More important, perhaps, were the prepared scripts the umpires would recite, with occasional tinkering rooted in a personality or a moment.
For a review of whether a runner scored before the third out was recorded, for instance, umpires use two of eight possible frameworks, their choice driven by whether a manager or the crew chief initiated the review. Replay reviews, which are handled by umpires who serve rotations in New York and convey their decisions to umpires on the field, may conclude with a call being confirmed, allowed to stand or overturned.
Even if they had been comfortable with public speaking, umpires said, they still had to face the peculiar learning curve that comes with abruptly addressing huge audiences with no notes — especially after generations of public silence. Some umpires sought advice from officials in the N.B.A., N.F.L. and N.H.L., much as baseball executives informally consulted with contacts in those leagues about training and equipment.
Even among umpires, like Carlson, who considered themselves unafraid of the spotlight, a fundamental mission loomed, besides getting the call right: “You don’t want to embarrass yourself.”
“This is a whole new system for all of us,” he said, “and it’s something you want to be successful at.”
The tensions that accompany professional sports all but ensured that training could yield only so much readiness. Iassogna recalled an opening day announcement in Philadelphia as an “out-of-body experience.”
“I heard myself more,” he said. “It wasn’t as great an announcement because I was listening to how I sounded.”
The tweaking has gone on throughout the season as umpires have flown across the country, studied videos that arrived just about daily and sometimes texted one another feedback and wisdom they picked up at one ballpark or another. The press box in Pittsburgh? Tough place to train your eyes since it’s so high. The broadcasters at Camden Yards in Baltimore? Too low. Do not dare make eye contact with a fan. Remember that what you are hearing, weirdly enough, might not be what everyone else is hearing.
“There are certain times I’ll click into the stadium and say, ‘Cincinnati is challenging the out call,’ and all you hear is the echo, like there’s a malfunction. You’re hearing like a screeching noise,” Carlson said. But, he added, “what they hear on TV and what they’re hearing in the broadcast booth is not that.”
And those people listening on TV or the radio? They have plenty of thoughts, too.
“My market research consists of my father, and my father will critique my announcements,” said Iassogna, whose father spent years officiating high school football. “He likes the explanations. He’s very critical of how I present the explanations.”
The announcements have changed relatively little for players and managers, who were often able to elicit more details. That has not always stopped them from scouting the newly observable toastmaster-like talents of the umpire corps.
“They all seem like they’d rather not be doing it,” said Aaron Loup, a reliever for the Los Angeles Angels who said he had noticed small variations in how umpires expressed themselves. “I have to agree with them: I’d rather not be doing it myself.”
The umpires figure that the system will stick around.
“It’s an accepted part of the routine, it’s an accepted part of the game, and as the time has gone on, we’re announcing better,” Carlson said. “It’s obviously here to stay.”
Then, not long before he donned the microphone that could blast his voice far from the banks of the Ohio River, he chuckled nervously.
Scott Miller contributed reporting from Anaheim, Calif.
