Dreamer Creek Puts His Money on Umpiring Career

John Creek, a 30-year-old with a finance degree, sits in a tiny room, spitting on his hands as he rubs mud on four dozen baseballs, as he’s asked to explain his career choice.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” said Creek, who passed on selling real estate be a minor league umpire.

Instead of zipping around some posh suburb in a Lexus, talking to clients on his car phone about escrow, closing costs and “doing lunch,” he spends his life driving from hotel to hotel, ballpark to ballpark, doing a job in which the greatest nightly achievement is to go unnoticed.

“When you’ve got someone screaming at you two inches from your face and spitting at you, it makes you wonder, ‘What am I doing out here?’ ” Creek said.

The doubt comes frequently, but it is always chased away by The Dream.

“In the back of your mind you always think the big leagues are going to be there,” said Creek, one of 10 umpires assigned to the California League. “But there are so many things against you. The numbers, for one.”

Numbers are against everyone in the minor leagues, from the players to the managers. The odds of reaching the major leagues are slim for them all. But they are the most daunting in the face of the umpires.

About one in 10 minor league players will reach the major leagues. Among the 28 teams, there are 700 active major-league players at any given moment, with dozens more on disabled lists.

There are 64 major-league umpires and the rate of turnover is glacier-slow. One new major league umpire is hired about once every three or four years.

“You might be the best ump in triple A, but for four or five years there are no spots [in the majors],” Creek said. “If you can wait it out, you will make it eventually. It’s just a matter of waiting for that spot to come open, but it’s a long time to spend in the minor leagues.”

Creek is in his fourth season in the minors, and he’s in his fourth Class-A league. Jeff Powell, Creek’s partner, is in his sixth season, four in Class A and two in rookie leagues.

They have watched players they used to work with in Class A soar to the majors, while they remain deep in the minors.

“It gets harder and harder when you are at the same level for an extended time because of the monotony,” Powell said. “It makes it more difficult to motivate yourself at times.”

But Powell says he hasn’t thought of quitting because “for now, it’s still fun.”

For young, single guys, as both Powell and Creek are, the life can be sort of fun. For five months, they sleep, play golf or watch movies during the day, then show up to work a ballgame at night.

A few years of umpiring in the minor leagues can provide a lifetime of stories to tell. The one that first popped to Creek’s mind was of a game in Watertown, N.Y., where one of the give-aways that night was a free mammogram.

Honest.

This year the pair was working in Visalia one night and midway through a game the host Oaks were losing badly, the public address announcer called out the lucky numbers to see who would win a set of knives.

“I was like, shoot, we’d better get out of here before they start giving away guns,” Powell said.

Of course, there are always screaming managers, abusive fans and overzealous mascots to deal with.

Class A umpires do it all for $2,100 a month during the season, which works out to about $75 a game. That’s less than Division I college baseball umpires, who make at least $85 a game and sometimes more.

The per diem in Class A is $15 a day, plus 25 cents a mile for travel between cities.

With so little income, most minor-league umpires have to find other jobs in the off-season.

Powell has worked as a bellman, an inventory manager and a computer salesman, among other things, in the off-season. Creek sells sporting goods.

Still, neither Creek nor Powell regret their career choice. Not at the moment.

But Creek does have to chuckle, thinking back to his days at Western Michigan University, when he was taking all those finance and management classes.

“Now, I have no finances to manage,” he said.

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The sad-sack Bakersfield Blaze got down to only eight pitchers last week because of injuries and promotions, meaning catcher Todd Johnson had to take the mound in relief.

That wasn’t so shocking, since Johnson mopped up in several losses earlier this season. What was different about Wednesday’s appearance was that Johnson was sent in to protect a lead.

He entered with a 5-2 lead in the eighth, gave up two runs in two innings and notched his first save.

Ty Van Burkleo is nearing a return from his broken right foot--again. Van Burkleo, the Lake Elsinore Storm’s player-coach, broke his foot in May, then returned to action July 6. In his second trip to the plate, he took a big swing and re-broke his foot, which apparently had not healed completely.

Van Burkleo, noting that he broke his foot both times in Rancho Cucamonga, said: “I probably should have waited [to come back] till I got out of the scene of the crime.”