The Ottumwa Courier · Ottumwa, Iowa · 1904

Behold now the man that is an umpire, even a baseball umpire

A 1904 life of the umpire told entirely in scripture voice: he crieth Batterup, the bleachers yell Blindasylum, and the gentle of heart bring eggs, even bad eggs.

In August 1904 the Ottumwa Courier ran “Day of the Umpire, the parable of an ordinary baseball game and its chief executive,” a full column of King James baseball reprinted from the Baltimore American. It opens like a psalm: “Behold now the man that is an umpire, even a baseball umpire. Are not his days full of joy and his nights full of pleasant memories? Yea, even as those of the collector. Only more so.”

The parable follows him from a youth spent reading “Reach’s rules and Spalding’s baseball guide” to the day he “putteth on a blue blouse and a dinky cap.” He crieth out in a loud voice, Batterup, “which is being interpreted, Let the man getreadytohitit.” A called strike is “Stur-ri-i-i-ike. Which is, being interpretted, another guess.” The bleachers yell Blindasylum and Puthimout, first base is “the unlaundered sofa pillow at that place,” and after a close call at home the roar is such that “the great falls, even Niagara, would seem like the silence of Judge Parker by contrast.”

It ends, naturally, with eggs. The man gentle at heart draweth from his pocket “an bad egg that hath been set upon by the hen until she hath said, ‘Behold, there is no life in it. Let it alone.’” His brethren have all brought eggs too, and though the whole crowd seeth who threw them, nobody knoweth when the policemen ask “Who-trowed-de-aig?” For the rest of the doings of the umpire, “are they not written in every baseball report in the country?”