t umpires declare they have off days just like players, when they know
that they are making mistakes and cannot help it. If a pitcher of Mordecai
Brown's kind, who depends largely on his control for his effectiveness,
happens to run up against an umpire with a bad day, he might just as well
go back to the bench. Brown is a great man to work the corners of the
plate, and if the umpire is missing strikes, he is forced to lay the ball
over and then the batters whang it out. Johnstone had an off day in
Chicago in 1911, when Brown was working.

"What's the use of my tryin' to pitch, Jim," said Brown, throwing down his
glove and walking to the bench disgusted, "if you don't know a strike when
you see one?"

Sometimes an umpire who has been good will go into a long slump when he
cannot call things right and knows it. Men like that get as discouraged as
a pitcher who goes bad. There used to be one in the National League who
was a pretty fair umpire when he started and seemed to be getting along
fine until he hit one of those slumps. Then he began calling everything
wrong and knew it. At last he quit, and the next time I saw him was in
Philadelphia in the 1911 world's series. He was a policeman.

"Hello, Matty," he shouted at me as we were going into Shibe Park for the
first game there. "I can call you by your first name now," and he waved
his hand real friendly. The last conversation I had with that fellow,
unless my recollection fails me entirely, was anything but friendly.

Umpires have told me that sometimes they see a play one way and call it
another, and, as soon as the decision is announced, they realize that
they have called it wrong. This malady has put more than one umpire out. A
man on the National League staff has informed me since, that he called a
hit fair that was palpably two feet foul in one of the most important
games ever played in baseball, when he saw the ball strike on foul ground.

"I couldn't help saying 'Fair ball,'" declared this man, and he is one of
the best in the National League. "Luckily," he added, "the team against
which the decision went won the game."

Many players assert that arbiters hold a personal grudge against certain
men who have put up too strenuous kicks, and for that reason the wise ones
are careful how they talk to umpires of this sort. Fred Tenney has said
for a long time that Mr. Klem gives him a shade the worst of it on all
close ones because he had a run in with that umpire o