THREE’S COMPANY
Froemming, West in 5,000-games-umpired club
When Bruce Froemming and Joe West were young umpires, they heard talk of legendary Bill Klem and his unimaginable record of working 5,375 games in the major leagues.
“We knew about Klem,” said Froemming, a Milwaukee native who broke into the big leagues as an umpire in 1971. “But never in my mind did I think it was possible to work 5,000 games.”
Yet, there Froemming and West sat Friday night in the umpires room at Miller Park, the only other umpires in majorleague history to reach that incredible plateau. Froemming worked his 5,000th game on Aug. 16, 2006 in Boston and retired after the ’07 season with 5,163 games under his belt.
West, who broke in as a fulltime umpire seven years after Froemming in 1978, reached No. 5,000 on June 22 at Coors Field in Colorado, working the game between the Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks.
Asked if he thought he could break Klem’s record, the 64year-old West laughed and pointed to Froemming.
“I haven’t caught him yet,” West said. “But I might as well go for it. Why not?”
West was chief of the umpiring crew that worked the Milwaukee Brewers’ weekend series against Miami, but unfortunately did not escape unscathed. On Friday night, while umpiring first base, he was struck on the back of the head by a baseball thrown from the stands. The culprit has yet to be identified.
That incident aside, West was in good spirits after getting to
the 5,000-game plateau the previous week. But he was quick to note that Klem, who worked National League games from 1905 to 1941, had it much tougher than modern-day umpires.
“In my mind, you couldn’t compare anybody to Bill Klem,” West said. “He worked when they only had two umpires.”
And those two-man crews did not always rotate between the plate and the bases. Klem worked 120 games behind the plate in his first season, a workload that increased to 148 games in 1910.
“We don’t have catchers now that work 148 games behind the plate,” West said.
In 1915, the NL informed Klem they were going to fire his umpiring partner because they didn’t like his work behind the plate. Klem would
have none of it and said he would do every game behind the plate to save his friend’s job.
“So, he worked the next two years behind the plate every game — 156 games (each season),” West said. “Imagine that.”
Because major-league games were umpired by two-man crews and there were no playoff rounds before the World Series, Klem worked more than 100 games in the Fall Classic, a record that never will be threatened. MLB did not go to three umpires until 1921 and finally to four in 1941.
Klem died in 1951, so Froemming and West never had a chance to meet him. But they both had a common link to “the father of umpiring” in Al Barlick, another legendary umpire. When Barlick broke into the majors in 1940, he was assigned to Klem’s three-man crew and considered him a mentor.
When Froemming got his first major-league assignment in ’71, he was placed in the umpiring
crew of Barlick, who would retire after that season. Also in that crew were umpiring greats Ed Vargo and Harry Wendelstedt.
“They wanted to protect me,” Froemming, 77, said with a smile.
Though retired at the time, Barlick lobbied hard with the NL to hire West, who worked his first game on Sept. 14, 1976, at age 23 before getting a full-time gig two years later.
“Barlick was responsible for me getting hired. He was behind me and took a liking to me. That really helped,” said West, whose crew now includes Wendelstedt’s son, Hunter.
After his retirement, Froemming served as an umpiring supervisor, overseeing games at Miller Park on most nights, before retiring after the 2016 season. West, who has been a crew chief since 2002 and is working in a record 40th season in the majors, isn’t sure how much longer he’ll go but has no current plans to leave the game.
While both speak with
reverence about Klem, they quickly note he didn’t have to deal with the major challenge for modernday umpires — games that regularly go past three hours and approach four hours far too often.
“That’s the biggest change in the game,” Froemming said. “The reason games are so long is you’re seeing 11 or 13 pitchers in a game every night.”
Thanks to quick research by Hunter Wendelstedt, it was discovered that Froemming’s first game behind the plate in 1971 went 2 hours 28 minutes.
“I did better than that. My first game behind the plate was an hour and 54 minutes,” said West, who left the majors in 1999 during the labor conflict that prompted the MLB umpires association’s mass resignation but was rehired in 2002.
Yes, times have changed. But it is highly unlikely that the 5,000game club will expand beyond the current threeman membership.