You teach the kids to play the game right: G, 57.
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A seven-minute conversation with an umpire on a North Philadelphia ball field, and one of the plainest pieces in this archive. Maceo stops him because he played baseball himself and never once spoke to the people making the calls. “I never took time to really speak to the umpires, but you guys make all the calls, right?”
G is 57, from North Philly, and has been umpiring for ten years. Before that he played: “I played baseball all my life.” The championships come with dates attached and he says them like a man who has said them before. “92, 93, 94, 95, four years in a row,” with “my man Paul King” coaching. The tape has him counting it twice over, the way a man does when the run is the proudest thing he has.
Asked what makes a championship team, the answer is not tactics. “You gotta have love for the game. Love for the game and play the game right.” Asked what makes a good coach: “A good coach is a leader and everybody follow his lead.” Asked what he sees coaches do that they should not, he does not hesitate. “Yell at the kids. Let the kids be kids. Let them have fun.”
There is a moment in the middle worth watching for what it is. Maceo asks about the ballpark G grew up near, calls it a Negro League stadium, and gets gently corrected, “I don’t know what it was called back then”, and says, on camera, “Damn, here I go saying stuff.” The archive keeps that in.
On the job itself: “You teach the kids and that’s what I’m here to do. Teach the kids to play the game right.” On what the community could do, the answer is unglamorous and repeated until it lands: “Support the kids. Come out. Cheer for the kids. Cheer for your kids. Cheer for other kids.”
Then the turn. Asked what comes to mind when he thinks about Philadelphia, the answer is one word: “Crime.” What follows is the argument this channel keeps running into from people who have watched a city for fifty-seven years. “We got to put the guns down. We got to get these kids something to do, besides be in these streets.” He is specific about what changed: “I had to be in the house when the street lights come on.”
Asked for something positive about the city, he does not manufacture one. “Well, something positive. I can’t really come up with nothing.” His best memory of community is infrastructure that used to exist: “Basketball leagues, baseball leagues, recreation centers.” Asked where love shows up in Philadelphia today: “At this point in time, no. No, not really, to be honest with you.”
His question for the city, and then for the world, is the same both times. “Let’s stop the violence.” And then: “Everybody, stop the violence, where’s the love?”
He closes by giving credit rather than taking it, to the For Real Umpire Association and its founder Marvin Atwell, and to Greg Holmes.
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