It was the bottom of the fourth, two outs, full count, and the home plate umpire rang up the leadoff hitter on a pitch that may or may not have caught the corner. I will never know if it caught the corner, because before the catcher could stand up, the umpire turned toward the FOX broadcast booth and said, in a voice clear enough to wake my dog, that he sleeps better than he ever has thanks to a queen-size foam mattress that ships in a box.
They mic’d up the umpire. They mic’d up the umpire of a World Series game and sold the audio rights to a bedding company. I watched it happen in my own living room, on my own couch, with my own bowl of pretzels, and I am telling you now that I have lived too long.
Coach DiMaggio used to say an umpire’s job was to be invisible until somebody yelled at him. He said it the way other men say grace. He believed an umpire who got noticed was an umpire who’d failed, and an umpire who talked was an umpire who ought to be selling insurance somewhere off the highway. I think about Coach DiMaggio a lot during October. I thought about him for the rest of the inning, while the umpire told America about cooling gel layers.
Then in the sixth, during a pitching change that already featured two commercial breaks and a graphic explaining what a slider is, the same umpire pivoted to a meal kit read. Fresh ingredients. Pre-portioned. Use code STRIKE3 for fifteen percent off your first order. I am not making any of this up. I wrote it on the back of a TV Guide because I knew nobody would believe me.
Ray Kowalczyk called during the seventh-inning stretch. Ray is sixty-eight and has not adjusted to anything since the introduction of the wild card. He didn’t say hello. He said, “Did the umpire just tell me where to buy chicken?” I said yes. He said, “I’m going to bed.” It was eight forty-five.
Here is what bothers me, and it isn’t really the mattress. The mattress is a symptom. Everybody on the field has a sponsor mouth now. The dugout has a sponsor. The replay booth has a sponsor. The little graphic that tells you how hard a pitch was thrown has a sponsor, and the little graphic that tells you how hard the bat hit the ball has a different sponsor, and somewhere in a conference room a man in a vest got promoted for thinking of it. The only person on the entire broadcast not currently reading ad copy is the guy operating the foul pole camera, and frankly I don’t trust him either.
Petey Corrigan umpired Little League in our town for about eleven years for forty bucks a game and a slice of pizza from the snack shack. Petey wore a chest protector older than my marriage and got yelled at by mothers who had not slept. Petey did not have a mattress sponsor. Petey had a bad knee and a thermos. If you’d told Petey he could be mic’d up during a game, he would have asked you to please leave him alone, and then he would have called a low strike on a kid who didn’t deserve it, and that would have been the end of the conversation.
The game itself, I should mention, was tremendous. Two-one in eleven, a leaping catch at the wall, a manager arguing about a check swing in a way that suggested he might actually mean it. Real baseball broke out around the advertising for almost three full hours. I caught most of it between reads. I am told the box score does not list the umpire’s commercial obligations, which seems generous.
Denise is bringing chili over for Game 3. She says she got the recipe from a podcast. I told her I don’t want to know which one.