Interview #34: The Aspiring Umpire
#3 of 3 in the Sara Trilogy: DJ Loden
Intro
DJ Loden has been involved in umpiring and refereeing sports since he was a teenager. He’s done baseball, football, softball and basketball. He’s done kids to high school to college to semi-pro baseball. It was interesting hearing from an umpire whose goal is to avoid the spotlight. Today, the only umps you hear about are the ones who either constantly get things wrong or have such big egos that everyone ends up knowing their name. But the vast majority of umps (and refs, but for the rest of this I’m just going to say umpires and you can guess when I mean all sports, not just baseball) have DJ’s attitude, which is a love for the game and desire to ensure they’re played competitively and fairly.
I guess you could say I've had an interesting life with baseball.
Ohh that'll be good.
But it’d be from a different perspective. When I was young, I played all the way through school. When I was 13, I became a baseball umpire. Did semi-professional baseball, college baseball, college softball, so I was all over the place.
Do you still do that?
I do football right now, actually.
Which one's easier?
Football and basketball are a lot more interesting because there's always go, go, go all the time. Baseball is a little bit slower, but everything else keeps it interesting enough, especially if you're behind home plate calling balls and strikes.
So you're done with baseball and softball for now?
Uh, yeah. After I graduated from college, I became a tax accountant and unfortunately, January through April is baseball season, so it didn't really work out very well that way.
You're still an accountant?
Actually, I own my own farm. We raise corn-free, soy-free, non-GMO chicken, turkey, and pork. And on the side, I do taxes and bookkeeping. I was full-time tax and bookkeeping accounting for 10 years and just got sick of the office life, so wanted the change of pace, but still wanted to continue with it.
OK, so you do taxes, you farm chickens, and you ref sports. Do you have any free time after that?
I coach my kids T-ball team.
I haven't met many farmer accountants yet.
Yeah, we're definitely a small breed.
OK. Well, I guess I'll try to figure out what to ask you about.
Getting Started and Trying to Go Pro
Yeah, I mean, I went to the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring back when I was 19 or so. We had a ship captain who came to that school to become a professional baseball umpire. We had a writer. His name was Bruce Weber. I believe he wrote a book about the whole process of becoming an umpire, actually went through the school with us and everything else and then wrote a book after that. There was a lot of different people, lot of different types… we even had a few foreign exchange students from Japan who came over. It's (baseball) definitely something that brings a lot of people together.
I did umpiring for one year when I was 12 and I hated it. I was a shy kid, so I was 12 and I was umping 10-year-olds. You have to yell Strike! or the parents will be all over you. Why did you want to be an umpire?
I was asked by a local coach in Little League Baseball. They were always trying to find people. It kept me with the game, made a little extra money, which you can never complain about. I started umpiring when I was 13 years old. I started playing Little League Baseball, I think I did a year or two. They had it like minors, majors, Babe Ruth, which is the levels, I think 13 years old was Babe Ruth.
When I first started baseball, I was in minor league and I was the oldest one on my team because, for some reason, my parents waited a while to put us in sports, not exactly sure what that was all about. I was the oldest of three boys and a girl, so we all played together. My other brother was a year younger than me, so we played on the same baseball team for a couple of years. After that, I went from minor league straight to Babe Ruth. Minor league, I was hitting bombs, I was doing great. I was the biggest kid out there. Missing that major league division and going straight to Babe Ruth, I was small fish in a big pond and it was just interesting to try and keep up.
But once I started umpiring and being able to get back on the field, enjoy the time being outside, making a little extra money, and just learning something new about the game, because from a player perspective, you don't see everything from the perspective of the umpire. I mean, we're a neutral party out there. We're there to make sure everybody's having fun, but at the same time be safe and make sure to follow some black and white rulebook, which has a lot of gray in the middle.
The gray is like the strike zone. I know some umpires, when you umpire Little League, it's pretty much top of head to tip of toe. If you can hit that ball, you're going to call a strike, and the kids know that. And then as you go up the line, the strike zone gets smaller, too.
Below: Austin Hedges swinging like it’s a Little League zone:
Or more accurate, I guess. So you didn’t play through high school then?
I was kicking off my umpiring career at that point and I kept going through. In high school, I was doing baseball and softball, and I was doing a lot of travel league softball for ASA (what is now USA Softball). So every weekend I was out doing tournaments in the valley, Fresno, Bakersfield, a lot of local tournaments over here. So I think my main focus was more so umpiring than playing high school sports.
And after graduating, that umpire school is the one you do to become a professional, right?
Yeah, it does. What they don't tell you, unfortunately, is it's more of a two to three year process of having to retake this school again. So basically, there is like 100 people in the school, and of that, 5% to 10% are going to get moved up into the minor division where they farm you out and then continue moving around through there. But those 5% or 10% are already two and three-year students, so there was basically no way as a first-year person, unless you were just solid and aced everything, that you would be up there.
And at that point, being as young as I was, I was umpiring, scraping money together just to afford to go to this thing. It was a couple grand to do and it was in Kissimmee, FL, so plane tickets, travel expenses, everything. Unfortunately, I was only able to do it once.
Before you went, did you know that it was going to be a two or three year process?
No, I thought it was more of, go to the school and then they move you up from there. At the time I was doing a little bit of semi-pro baseball because I was umpiring the Blues in San Luis Obispo.
What I'd read about it, you go to the school and then they would put you into a minor league somewhere, either coast of Florida or some other states, and it would basically just be working your way through there. But it didn't work out like that, unfortunately.
Yeah, that's what I read, too, was that you go up a level a year on average and then a spot opens up.
The course was four weeks. So you were there for four weeks straight. You did five days’ worth of classes Monday through Friday and you have the weekends off, but the weekends are just for more studying. Later on, I think like the third or fourth week where they start breaking down like, OK, here's the system and here's how it goes: once you get out of here, you go to this, and then you'll do single-A, and then just start working your way up there. Some of the instructors were triple-A baseball umpires, but they'd been a triple-A baseball umpire for probably five or six years, which makes sense because it takes a long time to get up into the league because it is more so a niche system. It's a who you know system, not really a performance system. It’s like that with a lot of different stuff, just who you know.
It's definitely a lot different of a system than what you would expect. I started umpiring minor leagues and a year later I was doing major leagues. A year later I was doing Babe Ruth. After I graduated high school, I was able to do high school sports, I moved up through college. And I was doing this year after year after year, like moving up every single time. With softball, I did a couple of years of just normal softball and then they were like, hey, would you do tournaments? I was doing tournaments, the next year I was doing championship games, so I was moving up all over the place. At one point I was the youngest college softball umpire in part of the state of California.
Like D1?
No, JC. But I was just in it and moving my way up through there, too.
When you went to ump school, did people there have backgrounds umpiring like yours?
Well, the age range for this school was all over the place. There was a handful of us who were 18 to 20, a good ten of us, maybe. There was people who were in their 50s and anywhere in between, 18 to 50 years old. So yeah, there was a lot of different levels of experience there.
So you had a different idea going into that school than what it actually was?
Yeah, because I just figured, if I'm able to work my way up, and I had a record behind me showing that I was in it to do it, I was willing to work hard and just keep going... And when you get there and realize that there's already that 10% ahead of you and you can't really go anywhere unless you keep coming back, then it's like, OK, that was a little demoralizing. But when I got back, I was basically thrown right back up to the top in our high school division for baseball because I went to this professional school. So they saw that as a great accomplishment.
Did you get anything out of that four-week class that you didn't already know?
I broke a couple of habits. Rally knickknack things, like how to hold your clicker, different positioning, where to sit behind home plate, set up and stuff like that. That I really didn't know about. So it was more of like little niche stuff to make your professionalism a lot better. There was more emphasis on education, basically like why you sit in this position, what's the reason why your down at a certain level from where the batter's at and looking into the pocket between the catcher and the batter, and then breaking those things down instead of just saying, you're supposed to be here and call ball/strike. The educational side of it was very interesting.
So that did help you?
Yeah, definitely.
DJ went to the umpiring school around 2006. That school is no longer affiliated with MLB after some students went on a school bowling outing dressed like the KKK in 2012 (Umpire School Receives Baseball's Death Penalty for Racist Party Joke).
The San Luis Obispo Blues are a semi-pro wood-bat summer league team that plays in the California Collegiate League. I’ve never been to a game, but there are some notable alumni of the Blues that went on to the big leagues: Kyle Hendricks, CJ Cron and Matt Garza to name a few.
The book by Bruce Weber, As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (Amazon).
I knew about the umpiring school from just random research and also the occasional stories SportsCenter or MLB Network would do. You have to attend one of those schools to get into the professional ranks. I thought that was all you had to do, and be good at it. DJ’s relaying of the politics and having to go multiple years was eye-opening but not that surprising. Nothing on any of the schools’ websites mention anything about going back multiple years. But you’d think someone with the resume of DJ would get bumped up a bit, especially if he passed all the tests.
Then you realize that every umpire you see working Major League games every night is someone who went through that journey. They all paid for this class, went to Class A, worked to double-A, triple-A and eventually MLB. The whole process can take 15-20 years, and many wash out in the lower ranks because of the low pay, brutal travel schedule and bottleneck to advance up the ladder. I have met a few MLB umpires from their Umps Care charity golf tournament they hold in Arizona yearly. They’re mostly down-to-earth people doing a job, except their job routinely makes them the most hated person in the stadium at any given moment. And now with social media, they became the most hated people in America, too. (They’re not that bad… it’s not like they shoot puppies!)
Charting a New Course
But then you became a tax accountant.
Once I graduated high school, I was doing high school baseball, high school softball, semi-pro baseball, college softball, high school basketball, high school football. So I was refereeing everything at that time, it was awesome too, because that was the way I was able to make extra money to help me get through college. Thankfully, my dad was a retired veteran, and through the Veterans Association we were able to get free schooling to pay for our tuition. But we still had to pay for all the extra fees and everything else, but being able to do that was making all the extra money, being able to pay my way through school, so I was able to get through without having to take any loans out or anything else.
My junior year is when I had to start taking the internships and stuff for tax season. So I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, 2011 to 2013. I graduated high school in ‘05. I went to Cuesta College, I think two or two 2 1/2 years, college just getting my GE stuff out of the way and trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. I started with psychology. Then I went to math teacher. Then I went to sign language interpreter. And then I finally ended up on accounting.
And how did that happen?
So I'm a big nerd. I love numbers. Two things I love the most is numbers and puzzles. And when it came to my first accounting class, that's basically how I saw it. It was just a lot of fun being able to take these numbers and move them around in a way that makes sense in comparison to just throwing numbers on a piece of paper and not really understanding why.
So that clicked for you more than the other attempts at a career, the other three you mentioned?
Yes. I think when it came to psychology, there was way too much reading. I'm not a big reader, like I hate reading textbooks. I swear there's something in between those pages that make you fall asleep because I yawn all the time I ever read a textbook. With the math teacher, I wanted to do that also, but it was split when I was doing that and sign language interpretation, too. Sign language interpretation was a lot of fun, I had a blast with it. I’m still pretty fluent in it, and actually my sister, she's the youngest of all of us, she actually became a sign language interpreter, so she followed in my steps.
I also found accounting that way. Cal Poly told me to pick a major at 18. Then when I was 20 they told me to pick a concentration. Accounting promised money (fortunes far beyond that of even the richest journalists), so they lured me in. Damn them. Maybe I need to consider raising chickens as well.
Storytime with Blue
So is baseball your favorite sport still?
Yeah. It was definitely in there just because of being in it many different ways. And I think there was kind of a lull after not umpiring baseball for a little bit, but now that I'm back into coaching my kids t-ball, it's bringing it all back.
Back in the day with kids sports, it used to be where the coaches were there all the time and they were the same coaches. It was like a very distinguished honor to be a Little League coach and that was a community thing. Nowadays, it's not like that anymore and it's just all about volunteering and hoping that some parent’s going to stand up and help out. That's what happened with me is they were having a hard time finding people who would have a schedule that you're able to work around. I think another awesome thing for me, because being a farmer, I mean, there's stuff I have to do in the mornings, stuff I have to do in the evenings, but for the most part, the animals take care of themselves after that. Then doing part-time bookkeeping, tax accountant, I'm able to move my schedule around, so it gives me that free time to be able to coach.
So what was it about baseball that drew you and kept you a fan?
Just playing. Growing up, I had three brothers and a sister. On the weekends, we’d get friends together and we'd go play Over the Line. We'd go and just goof around, just going out and hitting some balls. When we were a little bit older, we’d go play in the Little League field and go hit bombs over the fence doing a home run league. But it was more camaraderie, being able to play with friends and family, that was what drew me to the sport. I was not really big on watching professional baseball. I could care less. It just never really interested me. I was more in tune with playing and having fun; if that's what I was doing, that's what I liked.
So are you still not a big baseball watcher?
I mean, like, I'll watch the World Series a little bit here and there, but with my busy schedule, I usually don't have time to watch anything. And that's the same thing with basketball, football, baseball. I love being in the sports. I love being able to play. I love being able to umpire, but I just don't really watch a lot of professional sports.
So what kept you umpiring? Obviously the money, but there's also lots of ways to make money with a high school job.
So it worked out really well because I loved it. It was just a fun, interactive way of being more involved in the sport. It takes a lot to be a sport official. You've got parents yelling at you. You got coaches yelling at you. It's always been where, you be as honest as you can be with a coach. If you're talking to him and if you make a mistake, you own up to it. If you start making up things or saying something where you're just like, ‘Nope, I'm right. I don’t want to hear it. I'm going to throw you out,’ you don't get anywhere from that. Being on that side and trying to make the game better is where I strived to do what I could. Because I've been in games where if the umpire doesn't want to be there, the games miserable, it's not a lot of fun. And my goal was, I want to go out there and have just as much fun as the players do.
That was in your teens, right? So how did you learn to handle stuff like angry parents and pissed off coaches?
There's definitely a learning curve at the beginning. Our head umpire, he was always really good about sticking with his umpires. He would be out there every single weekend during games. If there were issues, he made sure to take care of the umpires. He'd make sure to take the coaches aside, or even just talk to the parents around and be like, ‘Hey, they're out here doing a job, leave them alone.’ I think that was one thing that helped. And then he was really good at giving pep talks and everything else.
As the progression moved up, you actually started to learn how to interact with coaches. I would sit back and watch the next game and watch what other umpires were doing out there and I would see where I'd be like, ‘Oh, yeah, you blew that call,’ but they would go and argue with the coach about, like, ‘No, that's my call. I'm sticking to it.’ And I'm like, well, that doesn't look good. And it was just a whole learning perspective. And when you start learning about talking to a coach, your best way to do it is to bring them down to your level. You're never raising your voice, you're never yelling at him, and you just talk to him. You don't want to tell them what they want to hear, but you basically answer their questions, and as long as you were knowledgeable and knew what you were talking about, they really had a hard time arguing with you.
If you did not know the rule book, the coach is going to tear apart. Back then, they had been coaching for a long time, so they were pretty familiar with that rulebook. And I've had a few times where, if it was a runner interference play, and you know the difference between runner interference and player interference, and being able to explain that to a coach, and they notice that, then as you do that more and more, they start understanding like, OK, I don't have to come out to this umpire every single time and go talk to them about these little knick knack things because I know that they know their stuff.
You do have a lot of parents who get really mad because any sport’s an emotional sport, and especially when your kids are playing. I always had a blast listening to what the parents said because I thought it was the funniest stuff in the world. I'd never let stuff get to me. I always would be like I never heard that. I remember, I was at a tournament in Fresno, and I had a guy walk up to me as I was taking a drink of water in between games. He's like, ‘Hey, I think you dropped your cell phone.’ And I'm like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He's like, ‘Yeah, I think you dropped your cell phone it. Says three missed calls.’ I just started busting up laughing. I'm just like, ‘Dude, that's the first time I heard that one, that was pretty good.’ Just having fun with it.
Did you have any incidents that got physical?
It wasn't against me. It was more so players against players, but I've had coaches come running out to me. I've had a coach bump me before, and the second that happened, the fans were like, ohhhh, and I think the other coach realized and basically went and took his coach back and everything just stopped after that. But for the most part, I've never really had any crazy situation where anybody took a swing at me or anything. I’ve had a couple people follow me out to the parking lot, but it would be an irate fan just yelling at you, like, you cost us the game. For the most part, because I was in a my city, or I was with other officials, or I knew a lot of the parents through travel league when I was doing all the travel stuff, I always had somebody out there who had my back.
Was it different when you were in places where you weren't as familiar, like when you were traveling to different areas?
Not really, because when I did high school sports, you're always going to a different high school every week. The professionalism was there for the coaches and players, and they knew at that point what they could get away with and what they can't. Once I started getting into high school sports is when things started getting a lot more serious with umpires pressing charges against people who would be physical with them.
There was a lot of news articles through NASO (National Association of Sports Officials), they would always have articles basically saying that, hey, we got to get this stuff out of the game, this is unacceptable. And in order to do that, we need to push the case. If somebody comes up to a bumps you or gives you a nudge and you really don't think anything of it, you're just like, whatever, you're just some pissed off person, go home. But there was a big emphasis on pressing charges because they did not want those things to continue. They wanted it to be known that it's a serious matter. So there was a big push back, which I think may have alleviated some stuff.
Which sport had the most anger out of all the coaches?
Football, there's tons of people there. You get a lot of big, loud boos if something happens that's wrong. Basketball, because it was a faster paced sport, there wasn't a lot of breaks to get angry. Football, the fans are farther away. Basketball, they're a little bit more close, on top of you, you can hear a lot more, but for the most part it's like, OK, that happened, we're on to the next play. Baseball, it seemed like there was a lot more emotion behind it because it was a slower paced game. There was more opportunity to rant at the umpires because in between innings, you're sitting there, you're taking a drink of water, you're trying to make sure you got enough baseballs. There was always time to say something. There is nothing worse than softball parents. They were by far the worst spectators of all the sports I've officiated, and it's because there's just a lot of emotion in there.
Is there anything about umpiring that you think most people don't understand?
We're always trying to be fair. We're not trying to be even, we're just trying to be fair. All we're out there to do is make sure everybody's trying to have fun, make sure everybody stays safe, and make sure that the rules are followed.
How did you learn to handle when you did blow a call and you knew it?
Oh I had no problem fessing up. If I had a coach come out to me, he'd be like, ‘You know that was safe, right?’ And I’d be like, ‘You know what? Yeah, I did blow that call. I'm sorry, coach.’ After I was able to sit back and see it, think about it again, and everything else, I blew that call. But there was no overturning it.
What would it feel like now with replay and your call gets overturned?
For me, I'm more about getting the right call than pride. The one thing I was always taught was that pride will get you in trouble. If you are too proud out there officiating the game, you're not going to do a good job because that means that you're not going to learn from anything. You're just going to go out there, think that you're right at every single aspect, and you're not learning anything. You can't improve, you can't get better from that. You have to know that you're not perfect. And that’s a good way to look at it; you're gonna make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. You cannot be 100% on anything. And as long as you're able to work with people, learn from those mistakes, and continue forward, you can do a lot better than you would just saying, ‘Nope, I'm the best and I'm not making mistakes.’
There's plenty of umpires who are the exact opposite. How did you avoid becoming like them?
I guess I just never saw the point. I always thought honesty was the best policy. Talking it out with people and never escalating the situation was what I did. I think it had a lot to do with the mentors that I had. I had Greg, who was the first head umpire that I had for Little League baseball, he did a great job, always explained to us like, hey, it's just a game, go out there, have fun, enjoy. Then moving up in different leagues, I had other high school umpires who were great mentors. Girls softball, we had a head umpire, and it was the same thing for her. She was just like, look, you're going to make coaches a lot more mad if you start making up stuff and start making up rules than you would to understand what those rules are, being able to explain them in a calm manner, and fess up to something if you screwed up.
Is there anything you learned while you were an umpire that's helped you in your in your current life?
Patience, for sure. I think I've always been good with patience, I've always been a person who's a wait-and-see instead of just jumping to something really quick. Time management, because you know for certain tournaments, you only have an hour and a half to get a game going, and in between innings you're like, alright, hustle, move, get ‘em in, get ‘em out. You know you don't want to waste a lot of time. Same thing with football. From a kickoff to when the next play starts, you want that time to be less than a minute, so time management skill. Interacting with people, that was another thing. Conflict control. That was a very important one to learn as an official. So yeah, there was a lot of cool aspects.
Is there still a younger generation of umpires and referees like when you were a kid coming up?
I think there was a lot more back then than now. Like right now, every league is struggling. Football, basketball, baseball, we're always looking for officials. It's really hard nowadays compared to the past, where I think it was one of those things where it was like, hey, I could make a little extra money, I can get out on the field, I can enjoy the sport. And unfortunately nowadays a lot of kids are lazy, they don't want to do anything extra. Trying to find high school officials nowadays, it's hard because people are busy, they have other stuff to do and it seems like sport commitment has dwindled to what it used to be.
I mean, if you don't have refs or umps, you're not going to have a sport. So what do you think would bring them back?
That's why they keep on talking about doing AI stuff. You should always have the human aspect to officiating because that's what makes the game interesting. You will have some good calls. You will have some bad calls. But in the end it's what makes it interesting for people. I know in professional baseball, MLB, they have the AI strike zone on there but they don't use it. They just use it as a tool for the umpires to learn from. And the MLB gets a report. Here's where you were off and learn from it.
So how do you think you would get more younger people to get into umpiring?
I think it's just trying to get the word out. Like I said previously, back in the day, there was a lot more committed people who were committed in doing the same job year after year and love doing it. Nowadays, it's so volunteer based that there's not that commitment. Like there's not that Greg for me who is watching me play baseball and was like, hey, you want to come umpire? Like that guy's not there anymore. There's not that person who's out there trying to pick up younger kids to be like, hey, you want to make some extra money and stay in the game and do this thing? And for us, for high school officiating, we are starting to advertise on Facebook. We're starting to go to the high school kids who are graduating and be like, hey, if you want to stay in the game after you graduate from high school, here's a great opportunity and a way to do it. So it's a lot of footwork, but you have to have those people who are willing to be there and talk and help people understand why it's an interesting thing. A lot of people don't realize that that's an opportunity.
So you haven't done any baseball umpiring in a while, with work and kids?
Yeah, I think 2013 or ‘14 is when I stopped doing it.
Do you miss it at all? You still have your other sports.
I do miss it. I like doing baseball. It was fun. I don't like during the summer when it was triple digits and your shoes were melting on astroturf. If you stand with black shoes in that stuff when it's 100°, it's 120° on that field. Very uncomfortable.
Any favorite memories from umpiring?
So there was one time when I was umpire. So when my brothers and I played, we played on the same team for one year and then after that we were all on separate teams. There was one year where my brother Jake was pitching. My brother Luke was batting. And I was umpiring the game.
First, the funniest part of this interview is that we conducted it April 22 at around 10am Pacific time.
Then, 2 hours later, this happened:
We just talked about DJ’s umpiring philosophy of being a calming presence, knowing the rules and talking to coaches in a conversational tone. And then Hunter Wendelstedt throws out Yankees manager Aaron Boone in the 1st inning because a fan just above the home dugout was heckling him.
I thought this interview was a great look into the motivations, backgrounds and personalities behind the mask. DJ talked about how his umpiring mentors were all influential in navigating the heated moments that happen on the diamond. About how if you know the rulebook and apply it accurately, you will gain the respect of the coaches and fans. About how to own up to a mistake and learn from it.
And then they go out and do this!
Okay, I’d still say give the umps the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been guilty of ragging on umps (mostly refs in hockey, actually, and I yelled at one last week, but Bibs deserved it 😉). I remember the last adult baseball league I played, it was cold and getting late so the ump started calling strikes Vladimir Guerrero couldn’t hit. So I swung at some breaking ball a foot off the plate, cracking my bat when the ball hit near the end of it, and yelling at the ump the whole way down to first that he broke my bat and owed me $100. That didn’t work and I was asked to sit out the rest of the game…