Is, not was. As he does laborious leg lifts in a heated pool, a gold number 14-umpires, too, have number-glistens on a chain beneath his face which at this moment is ashen from fatigue and pain. Inch by inch he is pushing away the possibility that his career ended last July on a Dallas sidewalk.
His baseball story began, as baseball stories should, with a scout spotting raw talent on a sandlot. Palermo first umpired in Little League games, the year he became too old to play them. He was 13, earning $2 a game. After a five-year hiatus he was asked to umpire a Little League all-star game in his hometown of Worcester, Mass. An umpire scout saw him. Six years later Palermo worked third base at Fenway.
Baseball’s small community is a severe meritocracy. Umpires, too, earn, from the discerning, unsparing assessments. In the sport of the long season, talent, or lack of it, tells. Palermo is one of the two or three best. In a game thickly coated with cliches, this is one of the most familiar: Baseball success is inseparable from a lot of failure. The World Series winner is likely to be beaten about 70 times on the way to glory. Any batter who fails, say, only two thirds of the time for a dozen seasons goes to Cooperstown. But umpires are supposed to be perfect and anonymous. An old umpire once told the young Palermo that even a good umpire will miss 12 ball-and-strike calls in a game (of perhaps 260 pitches). Maybe so but, if so, good is not nearly good enough for Palermo. Twelve a month, he says, would be intolerable.
Once when the Yankees’ Lou Piniella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Piniella demanded, “Where was that pitch at?” Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Piniella, no dummy, said, “OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?” What Palermo calls the umpire’s “challenge of trying to do something humanly impossible-to get everything right,” perhaps should not extend to matters syntactical.
But it is natural that someone who strives for excellence admires it in others. For Palermo, part of the joy of his job is that it is a pretty good place to watch the game. He says that the most professional of the players men like the Brewers’ Paul Molitor and the Twins’ Kirby Puckett-are the least likely to complain about umpires’ calls. And Palermo’s voice fills with an aficionado’s enthusiasm when he says he likes to be working first base when the Brewers’ Robin Yount gets on base, it is such a pleasure watching Yount on the base paths doing the small things right, the things seen only by the game’s initiates.
Palermo’s high standards-what society needs, Americans crave and umpires embody-brought him to the rehabilitation hospital here. He and some friends were finishing a late dinner after a night game in Dallas. The restaurant Italian, of course-was closing when two waitresses were attacked in the parking lot. Palermo and friends chased and captured one of the assailants. Then three others drove up. Five shots were fired. One passed through Palermo’s torso at waist level, nicked a kidney, fractured a vertebra and frayed his spinal cord.
Baseball is, as the saying goes, a game of inches–often the difference between a ball and a strike, or a runner safe or out. Good umpires earn their reputations being right about inches in the heat and blur of action. Palermo’s life was saved by a millimeter. If the bullet had been that much thicker, he would have died. Instead, he was paralyzed from the waist down. The 23-year old who shot him has been sentenced to 75 years in prison. Palermo has been sentenced to a spring when the rhythms of baseball quicken again, but without him.
His wife, Debbie, a bride of five months when he was shot, has a mantra: “Inch by inch, life’s a cinch.” But every inch hurts, as hamstrings are stretched, and muscles cramp because they are no longer controlled by healthy nerves, and terrible burning sensations sear the paralyzed portions of the body that served him so well in a profession both serious and strenuous.
Baseball, said Bart Giamatti, has no clock and indeed moveis counterclockwise, thereby asserting its own rhythms and patterns. But because baseball’s severe independence includes independence from clock time, the keepers of its especially autonomous rules-the umpires-have special dignity. They represent the human hunger for coherence, which requires rules. Furthermore, sport presupposes equality for the purpose of establishing inequality–a level playing field on which some will achieve the pre-eminence of the highest attainment. Sport, said Giamatti, replicates the challenge of freedom, which is to combine energy and complex order. And baseball mirrors the conditions of American freedom: We freely consent to an order that enhances and compounds freedom even as it constrains it. Umpires, the constrainers, make it possible.
Next time you go to a game, give yourself a connoisseur’s treat. Watch the people who do not want to be noticed. Watch the four umpires’ gestures and movements. By the vigor of their gestures they impart authority to their decisions and communicate information to spectators. By their coordinated movement–sprints, often-they get into positions to monitor the various vectors of the ball on particular plays.
Palermo, a slender 6 feet 2, was mobile and graceful. Because he is determined to be so again, his spring training began last July, when he could move only two toes on his right foot. Three months later the world watched him walk. In last October’s humdinger of a World Series, one of the most stirring moments occurred before the first batter stepped in, when Palermo walked, with the help of hand crutches and leg braces, to the Metrodome mound to flip the ceremonial first pitch. Today canes have replaced the crutches and one brace has been put away. Some April-not this one, but there is one every year-Palermo may be back where he belongs, looking at pitches from the other end of the delivery. He is still many inches away, but they are all just inches.
