Making the calls

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Making the calls

County News

Friday, 26 November 2010 11:50

Umpire04

Submitted photo
Kissimmee area resident Laz Diaz, a major league umpire, has plenty of baseball stories to tell.

Major League ump stays in the zone By Ken Jackson
Sports Writer
Laz Diaz is a major-leaguer, but can go out to eat or to a mall without getting mobbed.
In fact, if he and his teammates do their jobs well, they are an afterthought.
The umpires like it that way.
Diaz, a Miami native but a resident of the Kissimmee area since 1998, has been calling balls and strikes and outs in Major League Baseball for the past 11 years. He’s been part of games with historical footnotes, and not all for good reasons.
In April of 2003, while working a game at Chicago’s U.S. Cellular Field (then Comiskey Park), a drunk fan came onto the field and tried to attack him. Diaz, a Marine Corps reservist, easily turned him aside.
“I got my shots in, but the players came out and did more damage than I did,” he said. “You take it seriously because you have to wonder if this guy has a knife. From now on, when I hear the crowd get loud for no reason, I start looking around.”
But, Diaz, 49, laughs that off, and has many more stories he’d rather tell.
“It’s the best job in the world. I love the game,” he said.
Diaz began in umpiring much like his counterparts did. He played high school and college baseball at Florida Memorial College in Miami, and made a go of a pro career but it didn’t stick. He was signed as a free agent by the Minnesota Twins in 1984, reaching as high as Class A, and spent parts of the next three seasons in the Cardinals and Yankees camps before finally giving up the big-league dream.
He began umpiring in a Boys Club league in 1988 to stay connected to the game, and even at that level worked around future big leaguers, like Mike Lowell, Raul Ibanez and Alex Rodriguez. He said the culture shock of moving to the other side of the plate really hit him.
“When I played, I was tough on umps. I was bad,” Diaz said. “If I knew umpiring was like this, I would have never played.”
With the intent to umpire for a living, he attended the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School in Daytona Beach in 1991, and emerged top of his class, helping him earn a job on a minor-league crew.
He reached the International League (Class AAA) in 1995, which enabled him to get spot work working major-league games; his big-league debut came on June 23 of that year.
Cue up the funny baseball stories.
“The game was in Detroit, I was working third base and Duffy Dyer was the Tigers’ third-base coach,” Diaz said. “He was my first minor-league manager and it took him a while to figure out who I was.”
After working Spring Training in Fort Myers in 1996 and Tampa in ‘97, he came to Kissimmee in 1998 to work games at Osceola County Stadium and Disney’s ballpark. It quickly became home when he met his wife that spring and settled into a home in Kissimmee. He now lives in the Meadow Woods community just across the county line, which is convenient, as he still works the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves spring games. That enables him to sleep in his own bed in March before embarking on a whirlwind road trip of baseball cities from April to September (and into October when he works the postseason).
“I get four weeks off in the season, but we still travel more during the season than the players do,” Diaz said.
He did not have a postseason assignment this year after working the American League Championship Series in 2009. He first worked the playoffs in the Division Series in 2002, then again in 2006. His 2007 LDS work was followed by a surprise.
“I didn’t expect to work the World Series because I hadn’t worked an LCS yet,” Diaz said. “I got home from the Division series and started unpacking, then I got the call saying I shouldn’t. I thought it was a joke, but it was a supervisor telling me I was headed to the World Series.”
Diaz worked Game 1 of the 2007 World Series in Boston at first base, meaning he had the plate in Game 2. The Red Sox defeated the Colorado Rockies in a sweep.
And, aside from that goofball in Chicago seven years ago, he’s been part of other baseball lore. He was at San Francisco’s AT&T Park on Aug. 7, 2007 to see Barry Bonds’ 756th home run that broke Hank Aaron’s all-time record. Diaz was working second base, which to him was preferred to working the plate in a game like that.
“You have the commemorative balls that have to go in play when he’s up, and they’re sequential, and you’re sifting through two bags,” he said. “Meanwhile you’re doing all you can to call balls and strikes.”
He was at Mark Buehrle’s perfect game in Chicago in 2009, and nearly worked another this summer in Philadelphia.
“But, I’m into the game, I don’t realize that stuff,” he said.
One of Diaz’s favorite memories was when Wade Boggs got his 3,000th hit with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1999 on a night he worked the plate.
“He needed three hits, and his third one was a home run (the only player to homer for his 3,000th hit). That was really hair-raising,” he said.
Diaz said the biggest change he’s seen in the game in his 11 years in “The Bigs” is the propensity of pitchers to nibble at the corners of the plate instead of throwing their best pitches for clear strikes.
“Buerhle, Cliff Lee, C.C. Sabathia, Mariano Rivera, there’s a handful of pitchers who just bring it. Pitchers don’t understand how the eyes and mind work,” he said. “Guys who attack the zone are going to get more borderline pitches.”
Through 2009, a website listed Diaz with nearly 1,500 Major League games worked, including the postseason. He was “credited” with 20 ejections, which he says is part procedure and part art.
“Ninety percent of the time, the manager gets ejected because of what follows saying, ‘You are,’” Diaz said. “The things they say ... when you’re in boot camp you’re called everything from A to Z. You can’t do this without a thick skin. I laugh about it.
“The rest of them are when his team’s not playing well and he’s looking for a lift from them or the crowd. We’ll generally play along.”
Diaz is in the first year of his third five-year contract. He plans to work through this and the next one before retiring with 20 years in the majors. By then, in his mid-50s, he’d take on a supervisor’s role if asked.
Until then, he’ll be criss-crossing the country, working games in cathedrals of the pastime like Chicago’s Wrigley Field, and heading to places like Dublin’s in the Windy City for some of the best food on the road.
“The cooks make the menu, and if you order their food they get part of the bill,” he said.
It’s a great place, where nobody knows his name.