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The Best Seat In Baseball, But You Have to Stand

The Game as Umpires See It

To provide this unique—if controversial—look at major league baseball as umpires see it, Lee Gutkind spent the 1974 season traveling with the umpiring crew of Doug Harvey, Mick Colosi, Harry Wendelstedt, and Art Williams, the first black umpire in the National League. The result is an honest, realistic, insightful study of the private and professional world of major league umpires: their prejudices and petty biases, their unbending pride in their performance, their inside perspectives on the game, and their bitter criticism of the abuse often directed at their profession and their conduct. As relevant today as it was in 1974, this illustrated chronicle shows how little has changed in the lives and duties of umpires.

Reviews

I kept feeling I was re-reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead with a baseball twist. Gutkind describes the tensions within Harvey’s crew as they slogged through their season-long campaign. They joke, they tease, they bitch, they scream at one another. The book moves between moments the crew shares before and after games and moments from the private lives of its members—Harvey, Wendelstedt, Nick Colosi and Art Williams. […] This worthwhile reprint of Lee Gutkind’s The Best Seat In Baseball, But You Have to Stand! reminds us how slowly some things move, how some things do not change. Umpires go on doing much the same things that they always have done, keeping order, rendering judgment. – Daniel R. Bronson – See more at: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/reviews/120#sthash.NtlDcqpy.dpuf

—H-Net

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