Woman Umpire Given Heave-Ho After Seven Years

Pam Postema never wanted to be a cause, and now she won’t be a big-league umpire either. Stalled at the threshold of Triple-A for seven tumultuous years, she has been handed her walking papers by baseball.

“I got my evaluation, and the only thing it said was that I ejected too many people,” Postema said in a telephone interview Tuesday night from Phoenix, where she was back at her off-season job driving a UPS delivery truck. “That, and that my attitude went downhill at the end of the season.

“It’s too bad. I would have been good for the game. I have a lot of integrity and I wouldn’t have embarrassed anybody, that’s for sure.

“I could understand it if they said I wasn’t good enough, or I wasn’t strong enough on the balls and strikes, or I couldn’t handle the bases, or whatever. But this was just outrageous, and it tells me they’ve got to be reaching.”

Postema, 35, came into the business in 1978 as only the third woman umpire in professional baseball, and four years later became the first promoted past Double-A.

She always insisted she cared not for pioneering the women’s cause, but neither did she let her sex get in the way. Postema’s tenure in the game was marked by many of the incidents common to members of the fraternity--she was spat on, cursed at and had a collarbone broken because a young catcher mishandled a fastball--and a few that were not. One night someone left a frying pan waiting for her at home plate, and she was occasionally the victim of sexual innuendo.

But she kept her cool throughout. Her departure robs baseball of one of its more colorful and feisty arbiters and leaves 29-year-old Theresa Cox, who worked last year in the Arizona Rookie League, as the only woman umpire in the game.

“I liked the game, I liked umpiring and I really thought it should be my life. That’s why I stuck it out,” Postema said. “And I still think I can do the job as well as anybody.

“I’m bitter right now and I don’t want to brag, but if I couldn’t make it, I don’t see how any woman can.”

Postema’s prospects for a ticket to the big leagues seemed strongest in the last two years, when she worked spring training games under the watchful eyes of Ed Vargo, a former umpire who is director of umpire supervision for the National League.

Vargo declined comment when reached today at his New York office.

Postema said she was informed that officials of both the National and American leagues decided during the recent winter meetings that she was judged unsuitable for the majors this season.

Because it was the third straight year she fell into that category, she was given her release to make room at the Triple-A level for another prospect. Half a dozen other Triple-A umpires, all of them men, were similarly released in recent weeks.

“The job of minor-league umpire is in no way intended to be a career,” said Randy Mobley, who heads the American Assn. circuit, in which Postema worked 144 games last season. “It’s a means to an end, the end of which is to become a major-league umpire.”

Ed Lawrence, director of the major leagues’ Umpire Development Office, did not comment directly on Postema’s situation. But when asked what his office looks for in a big-league umpire, he replied: “The No. 1 thing is handling situations”--what the rest of us call arguments.

“That deals directly with one’s maturity,” Lawrence said. “Very close behind that is consistency in calling balls and strikes, and handling the plays at the bases. Then technique, voice and so on.

“But handling situations is at the top of the list, showing force without being arrogant,” he concluded. “Because the umpire holds the ultimate weapon of rejection.”

Postema conceded that the news did not come out of the blue. And she was well aware that openings at the big-league level are few and far between because umpires no longer have a mandatory retirement age and those who have suffered the deprivations of the minors--low pay, abusive ballplayers and demanding schedules--are reluctant to step down once they’ve hit the comparatively plush big time.

“I never regret anything I say or do, because at the moment, I really believe it,” Postema said. “It’s the way I’ve lived my life and always have. I endured a lot, but it was a great experience that I’d never want to take back.”