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| In 1976, New York Yankees manager Bill Martin, in a familiar pose, went nose to nose with Froemming in a World Series game. AP/file |
Bruce Froemming's home is behind the plate
Legendary umpire will retire after the longest tenure in Major League Baseball – one marked by occasional spats with managers and operatic calls of strikes.
from the September 28, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Froemming is short, stocky, built like a russet potato. He has a steady gaze, ruddy face, and a surprisingly diminutive mouth. He is affable in person, grandfatherly even, at least until something triggers his "business look." This is a stoney gaze that conveys a demand for absolute compliance. It would intimidate a longshoreman.
The look came up twice in our interview – first when I asked him what goes through his mind when a player gets in his face. "Let me stop you right there," he interjected. "No one ever gets in my face. That'll never happen." Spoken like Tony Soprano.
The second time came at the mention of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Froemming becomes eligible for induction six months after retirement and he seems like a Cooperstown certainty. "I don't talk about that," he says, with finality.
Born and raised in Milwaukee. Froemming was the oldest of three kids. He didn't have the money to go to college, so, after high school, he responded to an ad for the Al Somers Umpire School. At 18, he was the youngest student to don a mask. Only one out of three graduates was hired. He was one of them.
Froemming was quickly shipped off to the minor leagues, where the work wasn't always romantic: It was a lot of hotels with 25 thread-count sheets and little pay ($3,200 in 1970). He had to work in the off-season, which, at one point, included picking up bodies for a funeral home. He got $7.50 a corpse.
Froemming is nothing if not decisive, and in 1959, he married, yes, his high school sweetheart, as soon as he got his first umpiring contract. Their relationship has survived 48 years despite his itinerancy – traveling from April through September and beyond. One of his big breaks came in 1966, when Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlan noticed him calling a game and recommended Froemming for the big leagues. Before he could make it, however, he was nearly run out of baseball – not for blowing a call, but, in his eyes, for getting it right.
A runner for the St. Louis Cardinals' AA team missed the bag when rounding third, according to Froemming. He called him out. The Cardinals team lost. Many of their top brass were in attendance. Froemming was tartly reminded that day of the Newtonian law of baseball that all umpires labor under: Every decisive action brings an unequal and opposite reaction. "They said to me, 'We're going to get you,' " Froemming recalls. "I was looking over my shoulder for years."
In 1971, he finally made it to the big leagues after being noticed by two prominent people – Ted Williams, then manager of the Washington Senators, and veteran umpire Al Barlick. Williams told Barlick to put Froemming in the American League. Barlick, a National League umpire, wanted him closer. It was one of the few times Froemming was fought over, not with. But by the end of spring training, he finally had the job in the sport he had revered since he was 8.
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