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SLIKE MANY college graduates, when he
finished up his degree Mike Muchlinski
decided to continue his education. But
the speech communications major at
Washington wasn’t going to take classes
to further his goal of becoming a TV or
radio broadcaster. Rather, he opted to go
to somewhere that could land him on the
other side of the mic: umpiring school.
Muchlinski had been a good high
school player. To make a little extra
money in the year before he went to
college, the Ephrata, Wash., native got a
job on the county road crew. A local ump
approached him with an offer to handle
a few low-level summer league games in
what little spare time he had. Muchlinski
agreed and continued working games incollege. Eventually he met
some minor league umps
who convinced him to give
the profession a shot.
That meant enrolling
in school. Unlike football,
where a ref can work his
way up the chain from
pee wee to high school to
college to the NFL, the road
to the majors begins in the
classroom. “It’s very intense,” Muchlinski
says. “It is six days a week, 10 hour days.”
Roughly half of that time was spent
studying the rule book, and the other half
on the field, where students were put into
increasingly difficult scenarios—with
instructors impersonating managers by
screaming a lot. “Sometimes they put
you in what I call Star Trek situations,
where there’s not a scenario where you’re
going to succeed,” he says. The idea
was to teach the students how to stay
calm when things began to break down.
Muchlinski was good enough at it that at
he was offered a job in Rookie League in- He called his first big league game
in 2006 and was hired full-time in ’14.
That time in the minors allowed
Muchlinski to gain experience—and also
to hone his style. More than any sport,
baseball affords its officials the chance to
bring some flair to their calls. Muchlinski
admits he spent time early in his career
in front of a mirror, perfecting his strike
call. “I’m more of a high energy guy,” he
says. “I like to be a little bit more crisp
and physical cause that’s my personality.”
Last fall he got to show off on
baseball’s biggest stage, behind the
plate for the deciding game of the
World Series. Muchlinski looked good,
but more importantly, he was good. Of
the 144 pitches the Braves and Astros
took, he got 139 of them right.
“Sometimes they
put you in what I
call STAR TREK
situations, where
there’s not a scenario
where you’re going
to succeed.”MIKE MUCHLINSKI
MLB UmpireROLARRY RAN SCHWDALOFF/NE/GETTY ICON SIMPORTAGESS (MWIRE/GETTY UCHLINSKII WMAGEITH SS (PL AY AT PL ATE) UNGLASSES);R
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