Enjoy stories and Q&A from former Big League Umpire of 26 years - Al Clark.
Sports Travel and Tours has teamed up with Ump’s Eye View to give our baseball fans a behind the scenes look at the Great American Pastime! Select Baseball Road Trips will include the excitement of a personal, inside look into big league
baseball through the eyes of a big league umpire. You can ask questions and hear stories from the man behind the mask.
Ump’s Eye View: Play at the Plate
This premium option entitles the avid fan an opportunity to be part of an intimate group and spend an hour (usually over breakfast or lunch) with Al Clark where you can ask all those questions you’ve always wanted to if you could sit down with an umpire. Ask your travel coordinator about this option on trips featuring Ump’s Eye View.
Al Clark
If an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball’s great umpire baiters, such as Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, and Dick Williams, while ejecting any number of the game’s elite—once tearing a hamstring in the process. He was the first Jewish umpire in American League history, and probably the first to eject his own father from the officials’ dressing room. But whatever Clark was doing—officiating at Nolan Ryan’s three hundredth win, Cal Ripken’s record breaker, or the “earthquake” World Series of 1989, or braving a labor dispute, an anti-Semitic tirade by a Cy Young Award winner, or a legal imbroglio—it makes for a good story.