"That guy in a twenty-five cent bleacher seat is as much entitled to know a call as the guy in the boxes. He can see my arm signal even if he can't hear my voice"
About this Quote
Klem is talking about umpiring mechanics, but he is really sketching an early, blunt philosophy of public accountability. Baseball sells hierarchy in every possible way: velvet boxes, cheap bleachers, the soft moat of distance that turns decision-makers into silhouettes. His point is that the call has to travel across that moat. If the fans in the best seats get clarity and the bargain seats get ambiguity, the game quietly becomes two different products: one for insiders, one for everyone else.
The line works because it treats communication as fairness, not courtesy. Klem is not pleading for empathy; he is laying down a standard. You are "entitled" to know. That word drags the issue out of manners and into rights. And he makes it concrete: an arm signal is visual, democratic, durable. A voice is fickle - swallowed by crowd noise, distance, and stadium architecture. In other words, you build systems for the worst-case audience, not the best-case one.
Context matters here. Klem worked in the era when umpires were becoming professionalized, when packed grandstands and increasingly national attention made officiating part of the spectacle and part of the controversy. His insistence on visible signals is both practical showmanship and institutional trust-building: if people can see what you called, they may still hate it, but they cannot claim you hid it. In a sport obsessed with "the human element", Klem argues the human element has obligations: be legible, especially to the people who paid the least.
The line works because it treats communication as fairness, not courtesy. Klem is not pleading for empathy; he is laying down a standard. You are "entitled" to know. That word drags the issue out of manners and into rights. And he makes it concrete: an arm signal is visual, democratic, durable. A voice is fickle - swallowed by crowd noise, distance, and stadium architecture. In other words, you build systems for the worst-case audience, not the best-case one.
Context matters here. Klem worked in the era when umpires were becoming professionalized, when packed grandstands and increasingly national attention made officiating part of the spectacle and part of the controversy. His insistence on visible signals is both practical showmanship and institutional trust-building: if people can see what you called, they may still hate it, but they cannot claim you hid it. In a sport obsessed with "the human element", Klem argues the human element has obligations: be legible, especially to the people who paid the least.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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