Simply for the love of the game, plus $59

If you go to a baseball game with Michael Cerruti, sit to his left. If you sit to his right, as his wife, Leslie, will warn you, the dinner on your lap will be in danger whenever the umpire calls a strike. Cerruti’s right fist will reflexively punch forward. You may go to the ballpark because you identify with Milton Bradley or Vladimir Guerrero. When Cerruti’s in the stands, he’s identifying with the umps.

Cerruti is part of a subculture of thousands of men whose love of baseball rarely took them beyond their high school team, but who were determined to stay in the game. So they umpire. They do it for a hot dog and a Coke at Little League games, or, like Cerruti, for $59 a game at desolate high school diamonds where players often outnumber spectators.

Sometimes these umps call a game with a partner. Other times they work solo, desperately scurrying toward the right base to get in the right position to make the right call as a play unfolds. They have mantras players never hear: “Angle over distance” ... “Pause, read, react.” In a world of increasingly combative fans, umps consider a good game to be one in which no one notices them.

Their only transcendent reward, doled out each May, is receiving a playoff assignment -- a game that sometimes features the luxury of umps at every base, as in pro ball. One of the umps Cerruti works with, Randy Bergman, received that prize earlier this month: He was chosen for the umpiring crew at the Los Angeles City Section high school baseball championship game Saturday at Dodger Stadium. Bergman, 49, who drives a truck for a pest-control company, had been working toward this moment for more than half his life. He’s been umpiring high school games since he was 23. “Lotta politics,” he says good-naturedly when asked why it took so long.

Cerruti, a late bloomer who was 39 when he started umping high school ball five seasons ago, knows he faces a long wait for such stature. But umpiring has become his calling -- a more fulfilling experience than the distribution, information-technology and insurance sales job artwork he’d worked since graduating from Cal State Northridge in 1985. He approaches umpiring with biblical solemnity. You can see it in the way he checks each team’s equipment for cracked helmets or flawed aluminum bats, the way he studies the rule book for distinctions as small as what an ump should do if a pitcher licks his fingers and puts them directly on the ball (eject him before he can throw the pitch, but merely call the pitch a ball if he throws before you can act), the way he tries to upgrade his “Strike!” call in order to make it more authoritative.

“The ‘out’ and ‘strike’ calls are taught the same way,” he explains, raising his right hand up, keeping his upper arm parallel to the ground and the forearm perpendicular. “You make a fist and you bang the wall.” The new wrinkle he’s practicing came from a more experienced ump who works college games: On a strike, with a right-handed batter up, the ump strides forward with his left foot as he makes the call. “That’s giving the air of confidence, that you’re very confident in that strike,” Cerruti said.

This matters because fans on one side or the other will disagree with much of what you do -- especially if they feel you’re inexperienced. Crass outbursts and even threats by parents, ever-vigilant of the treatment their child receives from the outside world, has been a mounting problem. Concern about withering civility is so strong that many youth leagues have banned the traditional “Hey batter batter -- swing!” infield chant, deeming it to be “negative” or even cruel.

Cerruti, who umped about three games a week from Chatsworth to La Crescenta since March, saw his share of bad behavior this season -- a player throwing his helmet down so hard it bounced higher than his head, the use of a racial epithet by a parent, the verbal challenges of a couple of coaches whom Cerruti “restricted” to the dugout. But none of it came close to the indignities -- and the subsequent joy -- of a Little League tournament game for 7-year-olds he umpired in 2001 in Simi Valley.

Cerruti said the trouble started when one team started the “Hey batter batter” chant and he told the manager that only positive cheering was permitted -- a policy whose P.C. overtones tend to inflame older generations. Cerruti said his ruling inflamed the father of the pitcher. “He was swinging on the [chain-link] fence. Then there was a close play at third that went against his team. And then his son, the pitcher, started to complain to me. I said, ‘Just because the adults are disrespecting the officials doesn’t mean you can. If you don’t stop I will send you home.’ The coach comes out to the mound. The kid puts the ball in his hand and says, ‘If he’s going to umpire, I’m not playing’ and walked off the field.” Eventually police were called to sort out allegations of physical threat (by the father) and verbal child abuse (by Cerruti). By then, he said, “I’m going, why do I do this?”

The game ended. Cerruti found a patch of shade that was occupied by a woman who was going to watch an ex-boyfriend’s son play in the next game. She sprayed the back of Cerruti’s neck with a spray bottle. Then, worried about his safety (the father had apparently not left the complex), she walked three blocks to her car and drove it back to the field and offered Cerruti a ride to his car. He mustered the nerve to ask for her phone number. Which is how Michael Cerruti met Leslie Eisner.

“It was basically my worst day of umpiring turning into my best day -- period,” he says.

They were married two summers later in Las Vegas -- on a rented Little League field. Their friends all wore baseball jerseys. They held bats pointed skyward, and the couple walked under the display to “Wild Thing,” the theme song of the baseball comedy “Major League.” The ring bearer brought the ring on a baseball glove. The flower girl dropped a trail of peanuts. The justice of the peace stopped the ceremony midway through and, in seventh-inning-stretch style, had the audience sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Among his more experienced umpiring colleagues, Cerruti is viewed as someone who takes the game seriously -- sometimes too seriously, too personally. The veterans say one of the hardest lessons to learn is ignoring the venom that sometimes flows from the stands or the dugouts. “Some [umpires] walk on the field and want to be king of the hill,” says one. “I try not to listen to the fans behind me. That’s part of the game. Nobody came to the ballgame to watch the umpire. The people there, they’re not rooting for you; they want to take things out on you.”

Put yourself in Cerruti’s shoes and make the call: You’re working solo at a high school game calling balls and strikes and calls at the bases. There is a close play at third and you call the runner out. On the next play there’s a close call at first and you call the batter out. Then the coach of the team at bat tells you, “That’s two calls you blew; you better not blow another.” Umpires have a cardinal rule: You can criticize the call but not the umpire personally; you can’t use the word “you.” In this case, you restrict the coach to the dugout, but he won’t go back inside. He tells you, “You have a short fuse today.” Do you eject him? That’s what Cerruti did in a game in March. Whether that wins an ump respect (he’s tough) or ridicule (he can be rattled) is impossible to predict.

Part of what makes the job hard is the relative youth of many high school coaches, said Gil Perez, a high school and college ump for 20 years who is now an instructor for the San Fernando Valley Baseball Umpires Assn., which trains and assigns umpires for games in the Valley. Coaches once tended to be cut from the older, P.E. teacher mold; the new breed is more competitive, Perez said.

“Society has changed -- the competitiveness for everything, even at work, has escalated. What kids see on TV -- pro basketball players going into the stands -- has changed,” he said.

Cerruti is 5-foot-11, 240 pounds and balding. He grew up in Livermore in Northern California, played catcher and first base, got cut from the high school team and started umpiring softball games. When his two sons from a first marriage started Little League, he volunteered to umpire, and a few years later, in 2000, he felt serious enough to attend a weeklong Little League umpire training program that launched him into high school ball. A month ago he started working at Dodger Stadium as a group-sales/season ticket telemarketer -- a dream job not for the pay but because he can cross paths with the likes of Vin Scully. “It’s a place inside major league baseball, the place I want to be.”

If he had his life to live over, he says, he would have tried to go to professional umpiring school as a young man. Like any obsessed hobbyist, he is always on the lookout for a new wrinkle, a new tip. “I study it. I’m working on my mechanics all the time, always looking to improve. I’m always talking to my peers.” Somewhere he heard that if an umpire wears a watch, it implies he has somewhere else to be; he won’t wear one at games.

Cerruti’s reward this year was being assigned to a three-man crew at the Fillmore High-Bellarmine Jefferson High playoff game in Burbank last week. It was time to get his pants pressed. These were the moments you live for, he said. The possibility that your call on a 3-ball, 2-strike pitch in the last inning -- your skill -- will determine a game. Learning how to ignore a coach who is hectoring you, so that you see nothing beyond the mask but the plate. Coordinating base assignments with your partner, rotating to the right base (remember, “angle over distance”) to see whether the ball or the runner gets there first. Or the elation of watching an unlikely hero emerge.

“Two years ago I was umpiring a summer league game,” Cerruti says. “This kid wasn’t good enough to make the JV team, but they liked him so they brought him in as a bullpen catcher for the varsity. A little kid. This day, they put him in to pinch-hit. They’d already scored six or seven runs that inning. He comes up with runners on second and third and rips one down the line, a double. He’s standing on second base and all his teammates are whooping and hollering -- his nickname was ‘Opie.’ He’s standing there beaming from ear to ear.... The game of his life. Those are the stories you want to see.”

Oh, by the way, you not only want to avoid sitting on Cerruti’s right. You probably ought to avoid sitting in front of him and Leslie. Nowadays, when the organist plays “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and everybody else throws their fists back on “three strikes, you’re out! at the old ballgame,” they’ll be throwing their fists forward, just the way Mike practices.