SOUNDS OF THE GAME
Baseball’s unique soundtrack is a cue for players and umpires
During the Blue Jays’ back-toback playoff appearances in 2015 and 2016, and the successful regular seasons that got them there, there were times when Kevin Pillar could barely hear himself think in the outfield at a sold-out Rogers Centre.
“You had to really learn how to deal without one of those senses and trust your eyes and what you see,” Pillar said.
Sound isn’t something players, managers and umpires spend a lot of time thinking about, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a big part of baseball.
“There’s a distinct sound the glove makes when the ball hits it. There’s a distinct sound when a foot or hand hits the base, so sound’s definitely an important part in the game,” said Pillar.
Larry Young, one of Major League Baseball’s umpire supervisors who called nearly 2,900 games in a 24-year career, says listening for the game’s unique sounds is “second nature.”
“I think most of our people that have been doing it for a while would say, ‘Yeah, I do use sound,’ ” Young said. “But you don’t think about it every day and you don’t think about it on every call. A lot of what we do is just instincts. It’s repetition, because we work so many games and it’s instincts. But yeah, we take it for granted, for sure.”
Visual signals, which happen almost instantaneously, are most useful to players, according to Carolyn Falls, an audiologist who manages the Munk Hearing Centre and the Centre for Advance Hearing and Balance Testing in Toronto. But athletes learn to pick up on any cues and hearing is no different.
“For one thing, sound travels a lot slower than a visual signal would,” Falls said. “If you’ve sat in the stands, you probably have noticed that you can sometimes see the ball in motion before you hear the crack of the bat. There is a little bit of a delay. The distance from home plate to a player on the field is going to be shorter, so they’re going to hear the sound of the ball being hit sooner than somebody sit- ting in the cheap seats.”
While athletes’ initial reactions will probably happen before they even hear anything, noise — be it a good hit or more of a thud — can help players fine-tune their movements, Falls said.
Behind the plate, catcher Russell Martin says he can use sound to his advantage.
“If you really catch a pitch properly, you’ll get the glove to pop,” he said. “Some guys have harder gloves a little bit and those make more sound. Typically if you’re just close to the zone that you were set up at, and you make the mitt pop, it’s like almost automatic that you get the umpire to call a strike.”
Foul tips and hit batters are also calls made by ear, both Martin and Young agree.
“You can’t really see if the ball’s nicking off the bat or whatever, you’ve got to use your ears,” Martin said. “Obviously wood and flesh sound different.”
Sometimes a hit by pitch, one that just barely hits the batter or even hits the uniform, isn’t that obvious, Young said, adding a foul tip can’t really be seen with the naked eye.
“Just about every time, that’s called by sound as well.”
Another area where sound is particularly important for umpires is at first base on force plays, Young aded.
“The umpire is looking at the bag and he’s listening for the sound of the ball hitting the mitt. That’s how we call force plays.”
While Young said it would be difficult to work as an umpire with a hearing impairment, MLB has had deaf players within its ranks. Martin remembers watching outfielder Curtis Pride, a former big leaguer and baseball’s current ambassador for inclusion.
“It’d be hard to be a catcher; a guy’s stealing and you don’t see it, you don’t throw,” said Martin, who gets his cues by communicating with the Blue Jays’ dugout when there’s a lefty hitter up and a runner on base is stealing. “But you could probably play outfield. Infield too, I assume. You could probably pitch, too.”