Marty Springstead, who umpired games in Major League Baseball for 20 years and supervised major league umpires as an executive for more than 20 more, died on Tuesday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 74. The cause was a heart attack while swimming at a club near his home, his son, Bradley, said.
Springstead was an American League umpire from 1966 to 1985 and worked in four League Championship Series, three World Series and three All-Star Games. He was behind the plate for two no-hitters, both by otherwise run-of-the-mill pitchers: Clyde Wright of the Angels, who no-hit the Oakland A’s in 1970; and Mike Warren of Oakland, who no-hit the Chicago White Sox in 1983.
A witty, voluble man both on and off the field, Springstead was not shy about arguing with players and managers; he twice led the league in ejecting them. (Orioles Manager Earl Weaver, who once pulled his team off the field and forfeited a game in a snit over one of Springstead’s decisions, was a particular nemesis.)
But he was also known as a mentor to young umpires and a riotous storyteller. “The damn pitch is coming at you 100 miles an hour, and you don’t know what’s coming, where it’s moving,” he said to this reporter for the 2009 book “As They See ’Em,” responding to a question about the difficulty of calling balls and strikes. “I’m not trying to be smart; it ain’t that easy to see.”
The son of a nurse and a New York City police officer, Martin John Springstead was born on July 9, 1937, in Nyack, N.Y., and grew up in nearby Garnerville. He went to Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx and for a while attended Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, though his most pertinent training came at the Al Somers Umpire School.
In the late 1950s he joined the Army, his service overlapping with that of Elvis Presley for a time at Fort Dix, N.J. He began umpiring in the minor leagues in 1960, working in the Northern, South Atlantic and Southern leagues before being elevated to the majors.
Springstead’s first marriage, to Marlene Beacher, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Linda Koch, whom he married in 1985, and a stepson, Robert Zimmerman.
After the 1985 season, Springstead came off the field to be executive director of umpires for the American League. When the umpiring staffs of the American and National leagues were consolidated after the 1999 season, he was on the major league staff of supervisors for another decade. A number of highly publicized missed calls by umpires during the 2009 postseason seemingly cost him his job; the next January, Springstead, along with two other supervisors, Rich Garcia and Jim McKean, was fired.
“I was totally shocked,“ Springstead told USA Today at the time. “Fifty years and I get a four-minute phone call to say goodbye? They didn’t give us a lot of reasons.”
As an executive, Springstead was known for his support of the umpires on the field, often intervening on their behalf with major league officials. He also encouraged them to look after their lives away from baseball, perhaps remembering that he was working on second base in Anaheim, Calif., the day his son was born in 1975. He learned about it from a congratulatory message flashed on the scoreboard.
“He met me where I was at, took the things I was interested in and related them to umpiring,” Ted Barrett, a big league umpire who is also an ordained minister and a former boxer, said in an interview Wednesday. “He talked to me a lot about God, and a lot about boxing.”
Barrett, who was hired by Springstead for the A.L. staff in the 1990s, recalled that during his first season, Springstead watched him work and was not terribly pleased by what he saw.
“But at the end of the day we were at the bar,” Barrett said, “and Marty said: ‘Hey, religious boy! When you say your prayers, say a prayer for me, because as long as I’m O.K., you’re going to be O.K.’ “