Event before Colorado Rockies game highlights umpire goodwill, tensions

On Sunday, MLB umpire Chris Guccione hosted 13-year-old Josh Cordova at Coors Field before the Colorado Rockies faced the Los Angeles Dodgers. Cordova was the umpire at a game between 7-year-olds in Lakewood, Colo., a few weeks ago that ended up having an adult-fueled brawl.

Guccione, who’s from in Salida, Colo., which is about a two and a half hour drive southwest of Coors Field, invited Cordova to meet him at the home of the Colorado Rockies after he heard about his story a few weeks ago.

Cordova was the umpire in a game that had an adult-fueled brawl after a disputed call. Video was captured of the event at Westgate Elementary School in Lakewood and it went viral.

Guccione and Cordova spoke to the media, including Rox Pile’s Kevin Henry, before the game and Guccione said that his career got started much like Cordova’s. Both are from Colorado and they started umpiring at the age of 12, while they still continued to play baseball as well.

When Guccione heard of the story, he said that he was “shocked and saddened” so he wanted to reach out to Cordova to “encourage him to keep going forward [with his baseball career]”.

Umpiring in Major League Baseball is one of the hardest things to do in sports.

You have to know the rule book cover to cover so that they can enforce an obscure rule on players that may not even know the rule exists, having to tell whether hundreds of pitches often traveling 95+ MPH miss by a few millimeters, be on the road for six months of the year, have perfection be the baseline for being good, and having an increased risk of work-related injuries are just some of the things that umpires have to deal with on a regular basis.

It’s even harder when you’re in limbo on a full-time job.

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Guccione had nine years in between his MLB debut (in April of 2000) and his first season as a full-time MLB umpire (2009) due, in part, to a mass resignation of umpires that saw 55 umpires (split between the National League and American League as Commissioner Bud Selig was in the process of combining the umpires from each league since they had been separated since umpires had been in the major leagues) submit resignations as part of a failed labor negotiation tactic in July of 1999.

The umpires did not believe that the resignations would be officially submitted by their union’s attorney, Richie Phillips, but he did submit them and the resignations could not be rescinded it backfired.

In September of 1999, 22 of them were accepted.

You can read more about the whole debacle here.

Along with three retirements after the 1999 season, 25 umpires had to be hired.

Through arbitration, exactly half of the umpires that resigned (11 of them) came back to the majors. However, they had to be rehired as full-time umpires again when other umpires retired.

That pushed off Guccione’s hiring until 2009 when umpire Larry Poncino, himself one of the umpires whose resignation was accepted and rehired before the 2002 season, retired after the 2008 season after missing ’08 to injury.

At least by the Commissioner’s office and MLB’s chief baseball officer, Joe Torre, who determines which umpires have postseason assignments, Guccione is viewed as one of the best umpires in baseball as he has had a postseason field assignment in each year that he has been eligible.

After his “rookie” season (even though he already had a MLB record 1,255 games as a Triple-A fill-in umpire), he was eligible for postseason in 2010 and since, he has worked three Wild Card Games (2012, 2017-2018, the latter two of which the Rockies played in), six LDS’s (2010-2011, 2013-2016), three LCS’s (2012, 2017-18), and one World Series in 2016 (umpires cannot work back-to-back World Series and rarely work two World Series in three years (the last one was Jeff Kellogg in 2008 and 2010)).

The only umpires who have longer active streak of seasons with postseason field assignments than Guccione have both been MLB umpires longer than him (Ted Barrett since 2005 and Bill Miller since 2008 and both have became full-time umpires as a part of the aforementioned hires after the ’99 umpire mass resignation).

With all of the umpiring that Guccione has done (coming up on 2,600 games in the major leagues including games this season, the minor leagues, and games as a kid), he said that he has never seen a situation like the situation that Cordova had to deal with.

However, fan backlash is something that can be a problem for umpires.

“The attacks [towards umpires] have always been there…” says Guccione. “…[B]ut with technology [in the Majors]–and the game has changed in that aspect because we have super slow motion cameras and we have the replay system now–in the end, we do get the calls right, which is important.”

According to Guccione, the verbal attacks, and events that get out of hand like what happened with Cordova, are part of the reason why there is a shortage of people who are officials, whether be an umpire in baseball or any other sport.

Cordova, while sitting next to Guccione pre-game on Sunday, spoke about the situation that he found himself a part of.

“It was scary, not only for me but for the 7-year-olds there,” said Cordova. “I don’t want them to have the idea that baseball is like that. I want them to have the idea that baseball is a great game and for them to learn to love the game, just as I have.”

The invite came a bit out of the blue as Guccione was not originally supposed to be in Denver this weekend. His regular crew assignment for this week was switched, as originally, he was going to be in Queens, New York this weekend for the Braves-Mets series with his regular crewmates of crew chief Mike Everitt, Bill Welke (both of which were hires in the ’99 mass resignation), and Lance Barrett.

However, with his schedule change for the week, he found himself umpiring in Denver this past weekend, as he was filling in for the crew’s regular crew chief, Jeff Nelson, as Nelson, himself (not the former MLB reliever by the same name who pitched in the majors from 1992-2006), was filling in as a crew chief on a crew in San Francisco.

Cordova also said that he didn’t think that the incident “would get this big.” Just the video on Twitter that was tweeted by the Lakewood PD has nearly 3,000 retweets and 6.500 likes as of Sunday night, let alone all of the coverage outside of that tweet.

But with the rise of televised games and technology in baseball, some fans (and some people in the media) have argued that a computer can do the job better.

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In 2017, even Commissioner Rob Manfred said that “[i]n all candor, [the ball-strike] technology has a larger margin of error than we see with human umpires.”

With the assistance of technology for replay, the numbers show that umpires are correct more often than not on the reviews. With plays that have been challenged this season, according to Close Call Sports, the call has been upheld or confirmed 51.5 percent of the time. That’s on plays that a team (or even the umpire, if it’s a crew chief review) thinks the call was wrong.

Cordova said that he is very grateful for all of the support that he has been given, by Guccione as well as numerous other people that have reached out to him.

Guccione, along with his crewmates for the week, acting crew chief Laz Diaz, Tony Randazzo (both of which were two more of the hires as a part of the ’99 mass resignation), and Colorado native Cory Blaser, who had the plate on Sunday, spent some time with Cordova and his family

Guccione even gave him an umpire uniform and a chest protector, the latter of which Cordova was really happy about as he said that his current one is worn out.

With the new chest protector, Cordova wants to help others appreciate our national past time.

“I think I’m going to continue umpiring for awhile and hopefully make it as a professional like he did,” said Cordova.