Bruce Weber, author of As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires
“Have you read Roe v. Wade?” Tim Tschida was saying to me. “It’s very clear.”
This was three years ago. It was an unexpected moment to bring up the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion. Mr. Tschida is a major-league umpire and we were on our way to the ballpark. I had just asked him why the strike zone, an entity seemingly well defined by the baseball rulebook, was such a bone of contention in the game. And in a flash Mr. Tschida made the instinctive comparison between an umpire’s conundrum and a high court justice’s.
“What it says is very clear. And we’ve still been fighting for 25 or 30 years over what it means.”
An argument for judicial activism? Well, no.
But as President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, heads to the Senate this week for confirmation hearings, Mr. Tschida’s assertion that umpires are like judges is especially pertinent because the analogy most famously goes the other way around.
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