You would think that after six years of sitting on Okotoks town council, a guy would get sick of having his decisions questioned.
Not Jamie Tiessen. He actually took vacation time to learn a new job in which not only his decisions are questioned, so is his eyesight.
Tiessen returned from the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School in Florida in mid February where he learned more about being one of baseball’s men in blue.
“I have been umpiring baseball for a couple of years and I wanted to go and learn the rulebook and the sport a bit more to become a better umpire,” said Tiessen, an Okotoks councillor from 2001 to 2007.
“I did not go down there with any intentions to go into professional baseball — I’m too old for that,” the 29-year-old Tiessens said.
Tiessen has been around calling balls and strikes for the Okotoks Minor Baseball Association for the last couple of years. He even earned the right to officiate for a provincial championship game in Strathmore.
But Strathmore is a long ways from hanging around with Major League umpire experience.
Tiessen discovered at the Wendelstedt school that umpiring takes more than knowing that a balk isn’t a sound a chicken makes.
“What was really unique was learning how umpires need to sometimes let baseball deal with itself while still upholding the standards of the game,” Tiessen said. “There is only so much an umpire should do on the field. They shouldn’t be looking for problems.”
Tiessen learned from some of the best. Wendelstedt has been nominated for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2012. His son Hunter is also a major league umpire and was an instructor at the camp.
“I did a seminar with Jerry Layne (a Major League umpire) on handling situations — how to talk to both sides if a coach or manager believes a call is incorrect,” he said. “You have to keep things calm on the field.
“When Jerry Layne talks, not only do the students listen, so do major league managers because he is quite well respected.”
Major league umpire Ed Hickox, a detective with the Daytona Beach police, also dropped by to gives Tiessen and the students some pointers.
“He really got engaged,” Tiessen said. “He got in there and taught us how to work with our strike zones and our positioning. It was really neat to see a guy who has been umpiring for more than 20 years like that step in and get his hands dirty.”
Tiessen was also forced to deal with things he hasn’t seen in his young umpiring career.
“We were immersed in things that don’t happen every game,” Tiessen said. “Things like awarding bases on certain types of interference. Those are things that I learned but you call them so infrequently.
“I might see batters’ interference or catchers’ interference once a season and I was calling it every day at practice.
“I learned so much from the rulebook. That’s what I wanted to do.”
Tiessen played some ball as a youngster growing up.
He wasn’t bad, but he was never a prospect to play the game he loves professionally.
“I want to do something positive to contribute, to baseball and the community,” Tiessen said, who was on council during the initial plans to bring the Okotoks Dawgs to town. “You can associate this with what I did as a councillor for six years. You can’t win sometimes on council. So when it comes to controversy, I think I am a fairly balanced person and I can handle it.”
The two-week umpire camp wasn’t exactly like going to summer camp. It was a lot of work.
He wrote plenty of tests.
“I did pretty well — I think I was always in the 80s,” Tiessen said. “I still don’t know all of the rule book, but I know it a lot better than I did before.”
Tiessen also got to hear first-hand what happened when an umpire famously ejected a fan from a Brewers-Cardinals game in 2010.
“Bob Davidson was at the camp so I went up to him and asked ‘So what really happened,’” Tiessen said. “Well a fan had made a comment to the catcher and Bob told him (Cardinal catcher Yadier Molina) that he would take care of it. But the announcers on TV kept saying ‘The fan must be razzing the umpire.’ It had nothing to do with the umpire.”
Tiessen’s goal is to use the camp as a stepping-stone to earn national certification in Canada.
“The umpire school will help me reach that goal,” Tiessen said. “In the future, you will likely see me on the diamonds some day at a Dawgs game. Maybe not this year, but maybe in a year or two.”
