Ocean State Libraries

For twenty-five years, Ken Kaiser was the most colorful umpire in the major leagues. Planet of the Umps is his sidesplitting tale of life behind the plate. "Two things nobody wants to grow up to be are an umpire and broke. Thanks to my career in baseball, I got both." After calling balls, strikes, and outs for thirty-six baseball seasons and more than three thousand major-league games, umpire Ken Kaiser finally called it a career. From the first...

The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. No hits, no walks, no men reaching base. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in more than 130 years of Major League Baseball, it has only happened twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball's twenty-first perfect game. Except that's not how it entered the record books. That's because Jim Joyce, a veteran umpire with more than twenty years of big league experience,...

Former MLB umpire Dave Phillips was at the center of some of baseball's most unforgettable momentsComiskey's infamous Disco Demolition Night, Gaylord Perry's spitball ejection, Albert Belle's confiscated corked bat and George Brett's pine tar bat debacleand he shares with baseball fans the untold stories behind those incidents and many others, giving baseball fans a complete perspective on the life of an umpire.