Will Cowboy Joe Be Put Out To Pasture?

The old cliche says that you never notice the umps until they screw something up. And for the most part, I think that's right. The men in blue take a lot of flack when they get something wrong, and it seems to me that the level of anger directed at them has been growing recently. But generally speaking, I think they do a good job. If we need a super slow-mo instant replay from three different angles before we can tell, I think we can cut them a little slack on the close ones.

What isn't quite so easy to stomach is when an umpire chooses to make himself less inconspicuous. Certain umps like to get a little too emphatic with their punch outs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Tim McClelland is notoriously slow and nonchalant when behind the plate. Tuesday night saw Balking Bob Davidson nearly lose his mind in tossing Carl Crawford and Joe Maddon after an indefensibly bad strike call.

And of course, Cowboy Joe West has been having a quite a 2010 for himself. While West is usually the one with the poor strike zone while Davidson calls the balks, the two apparently chose to reverse roles this week. By now you've certainly heard of West's two balk calls on Mark Buehrle yesterday, leading to West tossing Ozzie Guillen and then Buehrle. As Rob Iracane at Walkoff Walk rightly points out, the two balk calls may have been borderline, but West within his rights to call them. And while I can understand Buehrle's frustration after getting hung up twice on something many other pitchers get away with, he didn't help his case by drawing a line in the dirt after the first and dropping his glove in frustration after the second. You can debate whether or not his ejection was deserved, but it certainly shouldn't be surprising.

What's most disturbing though is that circumstantial evidence is mounting that West's repeated appearances in the news may not be accidental. On the heels of yesterday's debacle in Cleveland, word leaked that West will be working this weekend's series between Boston and Kansas City. It will be West's first series with Boston since his early season comments about their pace of play. Normally umpiring crews are not publicized by MLB in advance of a series, and this one is no different. How then did this information become public? Through Joe West's publicist of course.

This is the real problem here. Regardless of how poorly regarded West is as an umpire, regardless of his confrontational history as an umpire, I'm willing to cut him some slack as an arbiter of the game. I can understand why West, with a side career as country singer, might retain a publicist to support that endeavor. But there's absolutely no way that any umpire or any official within Major League Baseball should be publicizing his upcoming series. His job as an umpire is to be invisible, not to intentionally draw attention to himself.

Buehlre may face a fine for his actions yesterday. Ozzie Guillen will certainly be fined and possibly even suspended for his actions and for his hilarious, and likely truthful, postgame rant. And that's fine. I don't begrudge those two the actions they took but they took those actions knowing full there are consequences for them. Now they'll be held accountable, but accountability is a two way street.

I understand that MLB cannot publicly admonish, fine, or suspend Joe West. But at this point, with his comments on the pace of play, with his look-at-me actions during yesterday's game, and with his inexcusable press release, Major League Baseball has to do something about Joe West.

West is in his 32nd year as a Major League umpire. He'll be 59 by year's end and isn't exactly the fittest fella on the field. This past off-season, MLB had no qualms with quietly showing the door to longtime umps Randy Marsh, Ed Montague, Rick Reed, and Charlie Relaford, as well as even longer-tenured supervisors Marty Springstead, Rich Garcia, and Jim McKean. After his antics through the first two months of 2010, MLB would be very wise to do the same with Joe West after this season.

There Might Be Some History Between Mo And Joe West

Good morning Fackers. The first week of the season is in the books, and for all the gnashing of teeth over Javy Vazquez' performance Friday, slow starts by Mark Teixeira and Nick Johnson, and Marcus Thames' defense, things are pretty good. The Yanks went 4-2, on the road, against what figures to be their two toughest opponents in the American League.

Off the field, the week's big story was the comments long time umpire Joe West made to the Bergen Record regarding the pace of Yankee-Red Sox games. To me though, the most surprising part of the story was not that a veteran umpire would publicly single out two teams for their pace of play, but that Mariano Rivera, who's about one hundred times more likely to blow a save than he is to court controversy, was the first player to respond to West's comments, and that he responded harshly.

I was pondering all of that as I did some yard work Saturday morning. While I don't disagree with Mo at all, I found it highly uncharacteristic of him to speak out like that. Then I thought back to a story told to me a couple years ago.

The morning after the Giants defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, I boarded a plane to Phoenix. I was a day late and several hundred (thousand?) dollars short for the feature event, but had a business trip planned nonetheless.

I was staying at a resort in Scottsdale, and one night upon returning there, I decided to hit up the hotel bar for a night cap. As I entered the lobby, I observed several signs adorned with the MLB logo, reading "Welcome Umpires". As it turned out, the World Umpires Association was holding their annual meeting there.

Entering the bar, I met Marty Springstead, a long time American League umpire who retired in 1985 but worked as an umpiring supervisor until his termination this past off-season. Springstead was a friendly guy, and introduced me to a few of the other men in blue who were in the room: Richie Garcia, who made the infamous call on the Jeffrey Maier home run and later lost his job as part of the mass umpire resignations of 1999; Jim Wolf, brother of Brewers' pitcher Randy Wolf; Derryl Cousins, and Jim West.

Now, my recollection of that evening isn't exactly airtight, and it was a brief conversation. But in light of the comments made by West and Rivera last week, I think it's worth recounting here.

I spent a few moments speaking with West and Cousins. When it came up that I am a Yankee fan, West immediately told a story of a playoff game in Yankee Stadium during which he worked the plate. If I recall correctly, West made some comments as to the pace of the game. What I do specifically recall is West saying that late in the game Joe Torre summoned Mariano Rivera from the bullpen.

Apparently, Mo squeezed in a couple extra warm up tosses in the pen after he had been waved in. So when he got to the mound, West indicated to Mariano that he was only allowed six warm up tosses, rather than the customary eight. When Mariano protested, West informed Mo that he was docking him the two extra pitches thrown in the pen. West also made a comment indicating that such gamesmanship was common practice with Mariano.

Clearly, this is just one story, about one game. But why would Joe West, upon meeting a complete stranger, at the mere mention of the Yankees, amongst all the stories he had accumulated in twenty nine years of umpiring, choose that story to tell? And why would Mariano Rivera, after fifteen years in the daily cauldron of the New York media, with all the various issues and controversies that have surrounded the Yankees during that time, choose Joe West's comments about the pace of play as the one issue about which to speak out? Could it be that there's more history between these two than meets the eye?