Umpire Scouts
Every now and then I like to look around old issues of The Sporting News at random to see if anything interesting pops out.
I found something at least somewhat odd from 1911.
Back in those days, it was pretty common to see major disagreements between the clubs and the umpires. Part of the problem, of course, is that there really wasn’t much supervision of the umpires. The American and National Leagues weren’t really staffed well enough to keep tabs on all umpires at all times, and there was obviously no television to record things.
Horace Fogel, who owned the Philadelphia Phillies, proposed that the National League employ “umpire scouts” that would travel in secret and at random to various National League games to check up on the umpires:
This was actually a pretty practical solution to the problem. There were only 8 teams in the National League, and so having four scouts on hand would have taken care of every single game.
But, of course, newspapers in 1911 were run by men who had legendary senses of humor.
And so the St. louis Post-Dispatch decided to run this cartoon on May 24:
This cartoon was reprinted in The Sporting News on June 1st, though the reprinted version is kind of hard to make out. The above scan is better.
Anyway, the cartoon takes the “umpire scout” idea out of context, and makes it look like the scouts would be going to find new umpires. But it’s still pretty funny.