ONE AND ONLY WOMAN UMPIRE : While Others Have Tried and Failed, Pam Postema Has Been on Job 11 Years

As attempts to crack the baseball Establishment go, it is a fairly low-key effort. No news conferences, no magazine covers, no expressions of outrage.

That is the way Pam Postema wants it. Quietly, in the summer heat of the heartland, she tries to take the final step toward becoming major league baseball’s first woman umpire.

Postema is the only woman working as an umpire in professional baseball and one of only three who ever have tried it.

Bernice Gera worked one Class A game in 1968 and promptly quit, reportedly in tears. Christine Wren spent four years working in the low minors before quitting in 1979. But Postema has made it into her 11th season, the last five in Triple-A, the level from which the major leagues draw their umpires.

If nothing else, the record shows how thick Postema’s skin is.

“She’s heard every combination there is and some that were made up, and hasn’t reached the breaking point yet,” said Dick Butler, former supervisor of American League umpires, who has watched Postema work on several occasions. “I’d have to give her an A for effort for staying with it. She’s a good plate umpire and she’s improving on the bases.”

Earlier this season, St. Louis pitcher Joe Magrane, then pitching for the Louisville Redbirds, asked for a new ball from Postema by calling, “Miss? Miss?” Postema responded by snapping, “Call me Blue. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Another umpire trying to make it. Nothing more. Nothing less. That’s Postema’s attitude. With her hair cut short, she is practically indistinguishable from the other umpires in uniform on the field.

She submits to interviews grudgingly and tells little about herself. “I don’t think you need any press,” she said. “This profession doesn’t need any press. But I understand that I am different, so I am going to have some press.”

In 1983, when her contract was purchased by the Pacific Coast League, making her the first woman umpire to advance to Triple-A, she made an appearance on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” but did so reluctantly. “She hated every minute of it,” PCL President Bill Cutler said. “I had to force her to go on.”

Postema, 33, became a full-blown media star last year when she ejected Larry Bowa, then managing the San Diego Padres’ Triple-A team in Las Vegas three times. In one tirade, Bowa cursed Postema, spit on her, kicked dirt on her and made obscene gestures.

Postema ran into another kind of trouble this year. On June 9, she ejected Toby Harrah, the former major league infielder who is managing the Texas Rangers’ Triple-A team in Oklahoma City, when Harrah fussed over one of Postema’s calls on the bases. Harrah left peacefully but ripped Postema in a postgame interview.

“She is a joke,” he said. “The broad is overmatched. She belongs in A ball. If she were a male umpire, she would never have gotten out of A ball. She wouldn’t be in this league, but I guess it makes good PR.

“She always looks for a reason to start her arm (throw someone out). Other than that, she’s just a lousy ump. She just doesn’t grasp the game of baseball. If you haven’t played the game--and I’m sure she hasn’t--you miss the grasp. It’s like someone reading a medical book. That doesn’t make them a doctor. . . . I’ve never seen a game where she hasn’t blown at least one call.”

Postema says little about the incidents--”Another night at the park,” was her only comment on Harrah’s diatribe--but umpiring officials seem to put little stock in them, noting that Bowa and Harrah had well-documented reputations as hotheads as players.

Postema’s background is in softball. Growing up in Willard, Ohio, she played on a women’s fast-pitch softball team. “I was a tomboy,” she said. “I always liked sports.”

But she had no great desire to turn that interest into a career, and she pretty much stumbled upon umpiring.

She was living with her sister in Gainesville, Fla., working as a waitress and contemplating entering the University of Florida when she read a newspaper article about the Al Somers Umpire School in Daytona Beach.

As Postema remembers it, the umpire school had something the university couldn’t match. “It was easier, less time,” she said. “Six weeks as opposed to four years.”

So she gave umpiring a shot.

“I’m 20, 21 at the time. I’m young. Who cares?” she said. “What’s one job after another? For a while there, it doesn’t matter. You can always get a job.”

After finishing 17th in a class of 100 at the school, she got a job in the Gulf Coast League, a rookie league. After another year at that level, she rose through the minors: two years in the Class A Florida State League, two in the Double-A Texas League, four in the PCL. She was shifted to another Triple-A league, the American Assn., this year as part of a plan calculated to get more exposure for umpires who have spent four years or more in Triple-A.

But none of this may translate into a spot as a major league umpire.

Anyone trying to make the majors as an umpire faces long odds. There are only 60 jobs, 32 in the American League and 28 in the National, and with most major league umpires staying on the job 18 to 20 years, the turnover rate is low. Umpires who remain at the Triple-A level more than five years often are released if the life--average pay is $2,000 a month plus $55 per diem--doesn’t get them first.

And in Postema’s case, the odds appear much longer.

“She realizes that if and when the time comes (for her to make the majors), she has to be better than the fellow next to her,” said Butler, now a special assistant to American League President Bobby Brown. “She’s got to be better because of the fact that she’s a girl. I’m not saying it’s fair. It’s just the situation. I don’t think it’s fair, but it exists and she’s not going to change it.”

Cutler said that Postema was a decent umpire--”middle of the pack”--in his league, but he also said that he would be the “most surprised person in the world” if she reached the major leagues. “I don’t think anybody thinks she’d fit in,” he said. “(Major league umpires) run around after games. They dress together. You’ve got older umpires. She’d have a heck of a time getting accepted.”

Postema says yes, occasionally she does wonder if she is held up to higher standards because she is a woman. But that’s only occasionally. Mainly, she does her job and figures she will get her opportunity if it’s meant to be.

“I don’t follow anybody else’s career,” she said. “All I do is my job, and then if I get the call, I get the call. If I don’t, I’m not worried. I’m not checking the papers, always saying, ‘This guy’s up before me, that guy’s up before me.’ Some guys like to talk. Some guys talk about it all the time. But not me. I don’t.

“I just do what I have to do. I go out there, try to do my best on the field. If somebody’s watching, somebody’s watching. If they’re not, they’re not. I’ve still got to go out there again tomorrow night.”