It’s 100 degrees outside but it feels like 120 on the field.

Sweat pours off the 9-year-old catcher behind home plate at Osteen Field in Linley Park in Anderson.

Approaching the plate, the batter looks at the dust beneath his feet and kicks the ground.

A voice urges him on.

“You think you can hit this one, bud? I bet you can,” the voice says from behind the umpire’s mask.

After eight hours of installing satellite dishes, Tommy Patterson, dressed in black shorts, a black and white Anderson Parks and Recreation umpire shirt, padding and protective gear, sweats it out with the ballplayers on the field.

Squatting behind the catcher, he’s eye level with the batter’s shoulders ready for the next pitch

The ball comes at the batter like a rocket. There’s a swing.

And a miss.

“Strike three!”

Parents howl. Coaches yell.

But Patterson isn’t listening. He’s already talking to the catcher and the batter on deck.

And he’s smiling.

For nearly 15 years, Patterson has heard coaches question calls, listened as parents scream over lost games and watched while kids try their hardest to hit one out of the park.

And he loves every minute of it.

Patterson, a South Anderson resident, is a field supervisor for the City of Anderson Parks and Recreation Department. He’s also one of a handful of men who put their judgment calls on the line for as little as $10 a game.

“If we don’t show up, who’s going to do it?” Patterson says. “If we’re not there, the kids don’t get to play, and it’s all about the kids. You don’t ever get tired of this.”

Patterson is on a field or court somewhere in Anderson seven nights a week from September to June.

Basketball leads into baseball, and it all fills his 14-hour days.

“Sometimes, you only have enough time to get off of work, shower, grab something to eat and head to the field,” he says. “But when there’s a rain-out or a game is cancelled, you sit at home … you just don’t know what to do with yourself.”

It’s not the money, he says. His boss agrees.

“Anyone who says the guys are doing this for the money, I tell them they’re crazy,” says Ashley Mullen, athletic director for the recreation center.

Mullen says he starts the year with between 14 and 16 umpires, not including field supervisors like Patterson. By the end of the year, he’s down to between eight and 10.

“Sometimes, if they catch some grief over a call or two, they take it personally and they might not come back,” he says. “During the beginning of the season, it’s cooler out and everyone is in a good mood. But as the season goes on, as the temperatures get hotter, the tempers get hotter too.”

The hardest part of the job, he says, is making the call.

“There are rules, but most of the calls are judgment calls,” he says. “If a batter bats out of order, you don’t have to make a judgment, he’s either in order or not. But most of the rest are judgment calls. … You’ve got less than a split second to decide whether or not someone is safe or out. It’s one of the toughest jobs you can have.”

During a game on June 9, the end of the 10 and under season, Patterson calls a kid out.

“What do you mean he’s out? He was on base!,” a woman yells from the rows of lawn chairs behind home plate at Osteen Field.

“He slung the bat,” Patterson answers.

Parents erupt like a volcano.

“They cheating, that’s all it is,” one mother says. “I’m all about them kids playing, but I want it to be fair to all of them, not just the other team. They ain’t called no one for bat slinging all season and now they calling it on MY boy. Uh-uh. No, sir. That’s just cheatin’!”

Patterson turns to confront a man standing behind the fence and yelling about the call.

“Did you say I’m wrong?” Patterson’s face is hard, set and determined. His eyes narrow behind the metal bars of the mask.

“No sir,” the man replies. “I said ‘It rolled.’”

“He slung the bat,” Patterson says. “It’s my call, and I say he slung the bat.”

Patterson turns his back to the crowd.

After the game is over, the losing team’s parents grumble to their cars. Patterson walks angrily to the sideline and strips off his gear to switch places with his partner. His face is hard. They talk, heads nodding sometimes, shaking at others.

“Parents, when their kids lose a game, the first thing they’re going to blame is the umpiring,” he says. “They don’t think about their kids flubbing the ball on third, or the bad pitches, or the missed plays.”

But being in a small town makes umpiring different, says Dan Long, an umpire with the Anderson recreation center four nights a week.

“It makes you more honest,” Long says. “It makes you want to make sure that you’re right. I may be sitting in Logan’s next to a guy who may be mad at me for a call I made. I work harder to do my best because we’re going to see these people. It’s not unusual to be walking through the mall and have some kid come up and say ‘Hey, You called my game!’ We’re still in the community.”

Knowing the game

Different levels of play have different rules, and the umpires have to know them all. Most of the coaches and parents know the umpires well enough to know that they know what they’re doing.

“They hate to see me at the ball game, but they’ll all complain when I’m not there,” Patterson says. “They know what they can expect from me and that I’m consistent.”

Parents and coaches just don’t see what they see, the men say.

“It’s a whole different perspective when you see something from two feet away,” says Doug Stephens, 47,of Anderson, who is also a field supervisor with the rec center. “We’ll see them tag (a runner) out, but their feet may not be on the bag. We can see that from where we are. A coach thirty-, forty-feet away won’t see that.”

Stephens works frequently with Patterson.

“We’ve worked enough together that we know who will be watching what,” Stephens says. “I may be watching the bag while he’s watching the ball. Or I’ll be covering first and second base, while he’s watching what’s going on at third and home plate.”

Regardless of what others think they see, the two men say, what they say goes, and you’re not going to get anywhere arguing with them.

“I’ll put ‘em in their place,” Patterson says. “You’ve got to cause it’s about the kids. If you let them go on, what are the kids learning?”

Stephens says he doesn’t even hear most of the things parents say.

“They may say we’re cheatin’, but how do they think an umpire can cheat?” Stephens says. “We’re out there to make it a fair game for everybody, not just their team.”

Some umpires go so far as to try intentionally to keep out of the game, and keep focused on the plays at hand.

“I try not to know what the score is,” says Long. “When it gets down to the end of a close game, it’s hard because you know your calls are going to impact the outcome of a close game. We try to be right on top of it and not let anything else get in the way of making a call.”

But sometimes, the men admit, they are wrong.

“Of course we make mistakes,” Stephens says. “You’re going to make a bad call, ‘cause you’re not perfect.”

Mike Collier, 36, a music artist and auto mechanic during the day and umpire during his nights, says that in his eight years umpiring he has made mistakes. He still remembers his first.

“I saw the play, and everything I saw said he was out. I was ready to say ‘out,’ I wanted to say ‘out.’ When it came out, I said ‘safe,’” he says. “But once you call it, you’re stuck with it. You can’t take it back.”

Mistakes happen, Long says. But that doesn’t mean another one will make up for it.

“If I make up a bad call against you, I’m not going to make another bad call against the other team,” Long says. “There’s no point in it. It’s a mistake. You move on.”

Being an umpire has given Westside baseball player Justin Goyack, 17, of Anderson, a new perspective on the game.

“It’s tough,” Goyack says of his first year at umpiring. “Now that I’m in the situation. When I go back and play at Westside, I see it from new shoes.”

Sometimes, it’s the players who complain most about the yells coming from the parents and coaches.

“The catchers are your best friends,” Stephens says. “They’ll tell the coaches we were right. And the catchers know because they were right there.”

Some players, he says, even come to them and ask for their coaches to be thrown out of the game.

“In baseball, anything can happen,” Mullen says.

Umpires also face injury on the field. Patterson says last year an umpire was hit in the chest by a foul tip that sent him to the hospital. Patterson himself was injured this year when a line drive up the middle hit him in the leg, and dropped him to his knees.

The unthinkable can happen to kids too, he says.

Earlier this year, he was at home plate when the ball hit a batter in the face.

“As soon as I heard that splat, I knew there was gonna be blood,” he says. “I jumped up and put my hand around his head and face and walked him off the field. ... If the kids had seen the blood it would have been bad.”

But their concern for the kids doesn’t end when they walk off the field.

After the game, Patterson says he went to the hospital to check in on the player who was in the emergency room waiting room at the time.

“I walked over to him and handed him the ball,” he says “I told him ‘You see that? You did that.” He saw these marks his teeth left in the ball and his eyes got all big and he broke into this huge grin. He was like ‘I did that?’ So I gave him the ball and left for the house.”

That kind of concern translates on the field as well. Often, the men say, they will encourage the players and try to help them learn.

“I try to do that, cause that’s what they need,” Long says.

Long says he remembers one player he couldn’t help but talk to.

Standing in the outfield the kid looked miserable.

“I asked him if he was having fun and he said ‘No. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to throw the ball…’,” he said. “So I told him, ‘You just look for me, and where ever you see me, that’s where you throw the ball.’ A few games later, I saw him and his whole countenance had changed. I asked him if he was having fun now and he said “Yeah. I know where to throw the ball now.’”

Long days, long nights

It’s dark out, but still more than 90 degrees outside on a Thursday night. Patterson and Stephens walk to their cars in the parking lot of the Anderson Sports and Entertainment Complex.

Patterson spits sunflower shells out of the right side of his mouth.

They talk about the game - the kids, the calls, the plays, the coaches.

A coach talks to him.

“You hear that?” he says. “They’re apologizing to me. They got upset about a call, … now they’re apologizing because they figured out they were wrong.”

Tomorrow, like the other men, Patterson will rise early for his day job before heading off to another game that night.

The men say they come back over and over again for the game and the children who play it.

“I don’t have any intentions of stopping doing it,” Long says. “It takes such a small portion of your lives really. It’s tough when you have a full-time job to get over there. But that’s no different from how hard it is for moms and dads to get them to the field. … Maybe it’s cliché…. It’s just a way to give back just a little bit to the organizations that gave us such joy when we were kids.”

Working with the kids, watching them develop and staying in the game are what matters to these men, says Winfred Green, another umpire, and intramural director for Anderson University.

“I’ve been doing it for about 30 years. It’s just the love of the game and being with the kids,” Green said. “ Baseball is a game where you’re going to fail more than you succeed, but at the same time you learn a lot more - teamwork, respect, how to perform under pressure… It’s a great game.”

Green says he builds a rapport with the players and works to help the kids as much as he can. After 30 years with the rec center in almost every sport and every position available, he knows the best thing an umpire can do is be good at what they do.

“I’ve been doing it a long time and a lot of the parents know and respect me. My thing is if you do a good job, and everyone else will know it,” he says.