On a perfect summer evening, Mike Planthaber stood behind home plate at Jefferson Park, calling balls and strikes and looking into the sunset of the perfect Chicago sport.
He wasn’t just any old ump. A shirt-sleeve patch identified him as a member of the Umpires Protective Association of Chicago.
For 91 years, the association has back-stopped those who maintain the integrity of softball in the city of its birth. It reflects the passions of an era when players would take their frustrations out physically on the men in blue. Upon the death of one early member, his son said of the group: “It was named that because in a city like Chicago, umpires needed protection.”
The Umpires Protective Association claims to have authored the first softball rule book and, from its inception, claimed moral authority over all diamond sports in Chicago. In 1923, it scotched a rumor that White Sox players who threw a previous World Series planned a comeback on the city’s sandlots, simply by announcing that its umps wouldn’t officiate any such games.
The Umpires Protective Association once numbered 600, Planthaber said. Its members were a fixture on the city’s ball fields and sports pages. Newspapers reported its doings alongside tidbits about the city’s professional teams.
When a police captain of the 1940s claimed he didn’t see the city’s wide-open gambling dens and strip clubs, a columnist suggested he was being scouted by the Umpires Protective Association’s “talent procurement division.”
More recently, the group’s ranks have been thinned by defections to breakaway groups and changing fashions in local sports. The membership list is down to 100 names, but the silver lining is that the remaining umpires rarely need protection.
In Planthaber’s case, it’s because he is 6-foot-5 and solidly built, with an extra measure of proud solidity around the midsection. A beer belly is as much a part of a softball enthusiast’s uniform as a jersey advertising a corner bar.
But the dust-ups also are fewer because the umpires and players sense themselves as mutual keepers of a declining faith: 16-inch softball — long the only real kind to a true Chicagoan.
“I don’t want to blame the younger generation,” said Planthaber, giving the plate a preliminary dusting. “But I do.”
Don Kirch, the second member of the umpiring crew, nodded in agreement. Planthaber had earlier explained that an umpire backs up a fellow umpire, even if he misses a call.
“The way I see kids today, a lot of them are more interested in going to school than playing sports,” said Kirch. “They want to be doctors and lawyers. We wanted to be ballplayers.”
Kirch still does, which is why he umpires at age 62. Like golf and bowling, softball is rare among sports for the length of time players can stay with it. Fifty-year-old infielders and outfielders are common. When playing days are finally over, passionate alums can stay on the field as umpires. Planthaber calls it a chance to “see the game from the other side of the chalk line.” At 51, he is relatively a junior among umps, and he’s been doing it for 27 years. John Wisniewski, who was umpiring another game that evening, is 72. Wisniewski said it would be hard to be an umpire if you haven’t been a player. The Chicago-style game differs even from close relatives, baseball and the form of softball that employs a smaller, 12-inch ball. He cited his Army experience.
“At Ft. Leonard Wood, I saw GIs with this little ball, wearing gloves,” Wisniewski said. “I said, ‘What’s this?'”
Chicago-style softball has unique rules — besides requiring players to go after the ball barehanded and enjoining slow pitching. “There’s no batter’s box,” Planthaber explained. He added that the pitcher’s rubber is more or less advisory. As long as a pitcher is within a foot of the rubber, it’s OK.
Untethered, pitcher and catcher wander around, even as the pitcher sends the ball plate-ward — in a trajectory statisticians call the normal distribution curve. The ball goes sharply up as it’s released, then sharply downward approaching the plate.
Batters have to either swing up at the ball, like a boxer throwing an upper-cut, or bat it down with a stroke like a tennis serve. An umpire has to judge a ball descending like a dive bomber, while measuring its arc against the distance from below the shoulders to above the knees of a batter also in lively motion.
“When you blow a call and it costs a team the championship,” said Kirch, “it stays with you the rest of your life.”
In the short run, Planthaber’s working philosophy is to let aggrieved players vent — up to the point of directing profanities his way.
“That’s when I say, ‘You’re out of here,'” Planthaber said.
The recent game Planthaber officiated was peaceable. The only things he tossed out of the park were a beer bottle indiscreetly revealed on a team bench and Madelynn Rose Hoff. A player’s 11-month-old daughter, she was being carried too close to the field of play.
Her father’s team, the LiverDogs, beat the Wild Turkeys 14-5, to win the park’s Tuesday/Thursday league championship. The winners’ starting pitcher, having built up a solid lead, left the game early to play for another team in another park.
Years back, playing multiple games in a single evening was commonplace.
There is less of that these days. Planthaber blames 16-inch softball’s failure to attract new blood on “youngsters having too many distractions, like computers.”
Stephan Fouche, 28, a physical instructor at Jefferson Park, thinks the higher-ups don’t give the game the support it once enjoyed. They look upon softballers as “overgrown kids,” he said. Wisniewski notes that recent immigrants play soccer.
Indeed, at the other corner of Jefferson Park from where LiverDogs were crowned champions, Nacereddine Bouchama was drilling his sons, Samy, 7, and Walid, 11, in soccer fundamentals. The family is from Algeria. Chicago parks will continue to host sports — just different ones.
Yet that’s less comforting — from a perspective behind home plate. Wisniewski, who lives not far from Shabbona Park, on Addison Street, near Harlem Avenue, sees something troubling when driving by.
“The lights are still on,” he said, “but nobody’s playing softball.”
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rgrossman@tribune.com
