Baseball is full of situations. What gets tricky is when those situations become incidents.
This is the language of umpires. A situation is a flash of irritation, a simmering temper, a plea for reconsideration. (Think of throwing a helmet.) An incident is a fight, an ejection, a rules violation. (Think of throwing a punch.) Yet there can be surprisingly little space between them. A brief moment of venting under one umpire can become a total explosion under another. Which is why situation management has its own dedicated section of the curriculum at MLB Umpire Prospect Development Camp.
Or, put more simply, daily case studies in handling a screaming manager.
This comes right before lunch, after the prospects have spent the morning studying the rule book in the classroom, before they will spend the afternoon making calls in simulations on the field. It’s a delight for the instructors, all current or former umpires, now role-playing as frustrated skippers and putting some other poor sap on the business end of outbursts they’ve endured. And it’s a crucial learning opportunity for the prospective umps.
It’s essential to pay attention to detail. Was the manager sprinting out of the dugout or simply walking? Keep the discussion focused on the specific play at hand. (Don’t let it become about how the zone has been called all day. That never leads anywhere.) Know the difference between general criticism of the call and personal criticism of the umpire. Make sure everyone knows that a warning is a real warning. Never get caught two-on-one: If a base umpire sees his partner behind the plate getting an earful from the hitter and his manager, they should come down, get in between and peel one of them off. (To borrow language from another sport here: This is “setting a pick.”) Understand when a manager is legitimately asking for information. Just as important: Understand when a manager is putting on a show for his players. And call everyone by their first names.
But even with a perfectly smooth touch, inevitably there will be some of those situations that escalate to incidents. And when they do, the umpire needs to scribble down some notes on the lineup card, because every incident requires a written report.
As put by one camp instructor now umpiring in Triple A: “It’s a lot more than just showing up to the ballpark and making people mad.”
But it’s easy to see where people get the idea. This has been the primary cultural understanding of the umpire for more than a century. It’s perhaps the most unifying experience in baseball: No matter the level of play or the rooting interest, everyone hates the umpire. The job has always been rather thankless. Yet it’s perhaps never been more so. MLB umpires are better at their jobs than ever. (Really!) Their performance has never been more easily and ruthlessly dissected.
That comes in slow-motion replays and with video reviews and on social media recaps, such as Umpire Scorecards, which has 372,800 followers on X. (Forget the strike zone shown on a television broadcast: Umpires would like to reiterate that approximation is not the real zone.) It’s easier than ever to determine just how much and how often an umpire has erred. The umpire’s judgment used to be indisputable. Now, the process of disputing it has been codified in the rule book, with replay challenges a regular part of the game.
And there are potentially more disruptive changes on the horizon. It’s little surprise that “MLB umpire” is one job the American public seems particularly eager to replace with robots. Automated balls and strikes have been experimented with in the minor leagues in varying forms over the last few seasons: The most popular version so far is not a full robo-ump, but instead a challenge system, where a (human) umpire still calls the zone but teams may challenge a number of pitches, with the resolution played out in seconds on the scoreboard, much like the Hawk-Eye technology used in tennis. (This is the version being tested in some games at major league spring training.) Calling balls and strikes has long been not just the most visible part of umpiring, but its most contentious, the source of some of the most spectacular blowups in the history of the game. That could soon meaningfully change. It’s all sparked plenty of conversation about how established umpires are (or are not) adjusting. Yet these logistical, cultural and technical shifts mean something for umpires just starting out, too.
Who signs up for the unforgiving grind of becoming an umpire now?
Start with the 56 candidates at MLB Umpire Prospect Development Camp. This is a training ground that did not exist a few years ago. Announced by MLB in 2022 in hopes of recruiting a broader pool of talent and taking more control of umpire development, it’s now the main pipeline for entry-level, minor league umpires. The camp teaches and tests the prospective umpires on every sentence of the rule book, in theory and in practice, over 30 days each winter at the old Dodgertown spring training complex in Vero Beach, Fla. Just over half of them are rewarded at the end of the month with umpiring jobs in the lower tiers of the minors.
And while the profession has changed over the last decade, with even bigger changes looming, it still represents the ultimate dream for those few dozen prospects, who devoted a month to studying, training and, of course, learning how to manage situations.
“I’ve always thought there’s a twist in your DNA that makes you want to do this,” says MLB director of umpire development Rich Rieker, who spent a decade working his way up the ladder in the minors before umpiring for just as long in the majors. He now oversees the prospect development camp. “All the kids in there think they have it. We try to find out and see who does.”
MORE: Register for 2025 MLB Umpire Camps
If every umpire has that certain twist of DNA—whatever characteristic that makes someone volunteer for this—its specifics look different for everyone. This is how it looked for Tyler Funneman. The 42-year-old is MLB’s manager of umpire development. But first, he was a 13-year-old in Moweaqua, Ill., who discovered that he loved umpiring. He’d always liked baseball. But this was different, a fascination that became an obsession, a way of thinking about the sport that framed his questions and gave him answers. “I played the game, but even then, I personally looked at it a little bit different compared to, I think, what a normal teenager does,” says Funneman.
He began reading everything that he could on how to become a professional ump. “You dig deep, and dig deeper, and then suddenly you say: ‘That’s me,’” he says. Funneman began fixating on roster announcements for the MLB All-Star Game—not the players, of course, but the men in blue. He promised himself that when he graduated from high school, he would pull together the money for one of the two umpiring schools that were then the only way into the profession.
Funneman left for the Wendelstedt Umpire School in Florida when he was 18. “I was young, probably too young to do it, and the way the game has changed, I’m not so sure I would have survived in this era,” he says. He got his first job in affiliated ball a year later in 2003.
Thus began the meandering journey through the minors, not unlike that of a player, with low wages and long odds. Funneman got well-acquainted with every town in the New York-Penn League. He internalized what it meant for every game to be a road game. Next was the Midwest League, followed by the Florida State League, then a few seasons in the Texas League. And finally, in his seventh year in the minors, he reached the gateway to the majors.
Funneman got the call to Triple A. The promotion meant a raise, but more importantly, it meant a chance at joining the list of big league call-ups. Here is another way the journey of an umpire is like that of a player. Inevitably, someone in the big leagues gets injured or sick or needs time off, and when that happens, the replacement comes from Triple A.
Many of those umpires are back in the minors soon after. But just like for players, those cups of coffee still hold enough to realize dreams, even if no more comes of them.
Funneman did one full season in Triple A. He did another. He started a third. And on June 17, 2011, before he was scheduled to work a game for the Sacramento River Cats, his phone rang with the call he had been working toward for a decade and dreaming of for much longer. An MLB umpire in Los Angeles was ill. Funneman had to get to Dodger Stadium.
The details are still fresh years later. A mad dash to the airport. Vin Scully calling down to wish him luck. (The broadcaster always noticed when an umpire was new.) Funneman’s assignment was third base. The night unfolded without incident, though not without excitement: He got a fan interference call. On that cloudy night in Chavez Ravine, for two hours and 39 minutes, Funneman was in the major leagues. It turned out to be the only game he would ever umpire in MLB, making him the Moonlight Graham of men in blue. But it was enough.
Funneman went into umpire supervision and development the next year and has been doing it ever since. The pathway into the profession is very different for the young umpiring candidates he mentors today.
Nearly every MLB umpire for decades had gotten there in the same way as Funneman. The system—which almost always involved a candidate paying their own way through school—was primarily a product of tradition. MLB finally decided it was not one that served the game well anymore. “It just made so much sense to try to bring it in-house,” says MLB senior vice president of on-field operations Michael Hill.
The league introduced its new model in 2023. It had expanded the small camps it had run into a series of umpiring clinics held around the country each summer. Especially promising candidates from those free, one-day clinics would be selected for additional interviews, and the best would be invited to MLB Umpire Prospect Development Camp in January.
The camp now teaches much of the same material as private umpiring schools. But the curriculum is set by MLB. “The messaging wasn’t always consistent in how it was being taught,” says Hill, who started in the league office in 2021. “We want to be consistent at every level.” Crucially, the prospect development camp is free of charge, including housing and meals. That’s designed to solve the problem of talented umpires who could not easily drop a few thousand dollars on five weeks of instruction without a job guarantee.
“[We] were losing that talent pool because of finances,” Hill says. “When you’re talking about trying to get the best and have the best, it has to be a free and open system.”
And MLB changed how umpires get promoted early in their careers. Under the old system, umps almost always needed to work at least one full season at every level of the minors, often waiting nearly a decade for a job in the majors. But that no longer made sense in an era where technology can evaluate umpires at every level.
The system is still a grind. But it’s a far less rigid one. A particularly skilled umpire can skip a level. Someone with experience in the NCAA or in a foreign league might start in Double A rather than Low A. Everyone still has to climb the ladder. There’s just no longer a requirement to hit every rung.
“It was an opportunity to devise a system that’s a meritocracy,” Hill says. “It rewards the best. If you’re a talented young umpire—there’s no reason that, if you’ve mastered a level, you shouldn’t be able to move as fast as your talent dictates.”
All of these changes underscore a key point: An umpire’s job is not what it was two decades ago. While technology is more prominent, and authority is less absolute, MLB does not consider the job less critical. Even a future with a fully automated strike zone would not have a robot making an obstruction call, or handling the dugouts emptying—keeping situations from becoming incidents.
The league’s restructured training program produced the 56 candidates selected for the camp in 2025. It was a more diverse bunch than was often the case at traditional umpire schools: They came from 30 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. There were three former minor league players and three women. Some had significant umpiring experience. Some had just a bit. But all had stood out in some way to MLB.
Scouting those potential umpires is more than just seeing how they call balls and strikes, which they do at length in batting cages. There are other questions. How is their footwork? How well do they listen to criticism? How do they get along with not only players and managers, but also potential crewmates? Are they scared of getting hit by the ball? Do they hustle? Is there any sign of that particular twist in their DNA? This is what the league seeks at the clinics and in the ensuing interviews.
That’s how MLB got Jacob Ashworth, a schoolteacher from Massachusetts, who had been umpiring since he was a teenager and realized that he wanted to give himself a shot at making it a career. It led to 23-year-old Kyran Bacchus, a former college infielder, who got so overcome when Funneman called with his invite to camp that he screamed in the aisles of his job at Dick’s Sporting Goods. It found Alexis Berry, whose only umpiring experience came from local youth tournaments, but that was enough for her to know that calling games satisfied the competitive drive she built growing up as a softball player in Iowa. “It’s just challenging myself,” she says. “Wanting to be the best gives me that adrenaline rush that keeps everything going.”
Everyone in their cohort at camp was keenly aware of how the profession is changing. Yet all of them still came.
Umpire training requires serious attention to the rules. (That’s both the Official Baseball Rules and the separate yet equally dense Major League Baseball Umpire Manual.) It requires an emphasis on conditioning. (Sessions begin at 6 a.m. before the umpires hit the classroom at 8 a.m.) It requires mastering the art of calling pitches, as in literally, verbally delivering calls. (Do not expect any flourishes. New umpires are instructed to deliver calls with no embellishment; they can start getting fancy only as they climb the ladder.) It requires developing a sense of timing and practicing the finer points of crisp signals and cultivating a suitably commanding presence.
And beyond any of those skills, it requires imparting a sense of structure, a deeper understanding of the rhythm of the game.
It’s a structure that can be invisible even to people who spend their entire lives playing and working in baseball. That includes someone like Hill—who played at Harvard and for three years in the minors before a long career in front offices, most prominently as general manager of the Miami Marlins, until he began working for the commissioner. His first year of supervising umpires still felt completely revelatory.
“I was only talking about an umpire previously when I thought they made a mistake,” Hill says. “Now that I’m working with them every day, I’m watching the game differently, and I tell them all the time, ‘I never realized how hard your jobs are.’”
Every part of the gig has its own technique.
“There’s a proper way to give the count,” explains Funneman. “There’s a proper way to start an inning, to dust off the plate, to stand between innings for both the base umpires and the plate umpire.”
Most observers, of course, do not pick up on any of that. The general perception of the job mostly boils down to two things: balls and strikes. And this is one area where technology has meaningfully changed the training. At prospect development camp, the umpires call pitches in the cages under the watchful eye of Trackman, the state-of-the-art data capturing technology. Every call shows up on an adjacent screen almost instantly. The umpires know down to a fraction of an inch whether they were right or wrong. Later that night, they’ll be able to log in and review it all. Their performance in these daily training sessions is graded and recorded just like every moment of their journey through the minor leagues will be.
Rieker watches them from behind the cage. The senior director worked his first season in minor league ball in 1983. There was no way to judge his own performance beyond what he thought himself and whatever people happened to yell at him. “You’d watch video tapes if you were lucky to get them,” he says. It was not unusual for an umpire to reach the majors without ever seeing quality film of himself working a game.
It was brutal. They all got behind the plate in search of perfection, desperate to get every call right, aiming for a golden ideal of fairness. It was impossible to get there.
“There’s so many advantages,” Rieker says. “These kids have it so much better than we did.”
More MLB on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as MLB’s Umpire School Is Adapting to a New Era of Increased Scrutiny.