By Marcel Kerr
Every big-league umpire has to take his figurative lumps working in the minors before getting his first game in the majors. Ted Barrett took his literal lumps before working in the minors on his way to the majors. And if his father had not intervened in 1988 with an offer for what Barrett thought would be a sponsored working vacation, Barrett might be among a heap of sports lesser-knowns or no-names.
“When I graduated from college, I moved to Las Vegas to pursue boxing,” Barrett said. “I was sparring and working out with some heavyweight pros. My dad had been a big supporter of mine in any sport I played, but he never was crazy about me boxing.
“He said, ‘I’ll pay for you to go to umpire school.’ I saw that as an opportunity to spend five weeks in Florida. I was getting whupped in the ring, so that would have been a nice break. I fully expected to return and get into umpiring college baseball, but I got hired and was set to start my adventure through the minor leagues.”
(From left) Mike Everitt, Ted Barrett and Laz Diaz during an Arizona fall league game.
So after swapping practice jabs and hooks with icons such as George Foreman, Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, Barrett embarked on an umpiring career that spanned nearly 30 years in the major leagues and saw him work five World Series. Those laurels garnered him the 2024 NASO Gold Whistle Award.
“It’s an extremely high honor,” Barrett said about the award, “particularly with some of the past recipients. To be mentioned in those circles is very humbling. I appreciate the fact people looked at my body of work and saw value in it. This recognition coming from a community that highlights officiating speaks volumes about the work God is doing through me.”
God’s work in Barrett began when he was 8 years old living in North Tonawanda, N.Y., when his family went to Lighthouse Baptist Church on Easter. Barrett responded to the gospel that Sunday, and his parents and three brothers later confirmed their Christian faith. The young sports junkie then had two emphases that captured his interest.
“Our household was all about playing sports, and we were a football family,” Barrett said. “My brothers and I played football, and my dad coached. Then we started going to church regularly and I kind of became a Sunday school superstar.”
Barrett would add a third passion to his teenage portfolio after a buddy invited him to umpire a Little League game together.
“I was 14 years old and had no training,” said Barrett about his debut in the officiating realm. “Umpiring is one of those things you either love or hate. And I loved it.”
Life presented Barrett with little to complain about until his parents decided to relocate to the West Coast during the summer before his junior year of high school. The move across the country sparked a bit of short-sighted anger that also was short-lived.
“I didn’t want to leave home because that’s where my friends were,” he said. “I’d just finished playing JV football, basketball and baseball, and my two older brothers were staying in New York. I was mad at my dad the whole way to California because I thought it was a dirty trick for him to pull me out of there.”
About four months passed before his first winter in the Bay Area city of Mountain View cemented his change of attitude toward his change of address.
“We were outside playing football and baseball, and I thought, ‘This ain’t bad.’ If I were still in New York, I would have been stuck in the gym.”
Barrett played and umpired baseball while he finished high school, but the fire of his faith tapered to a smolder.
“Before we moved from North Tonawanda, I felt God calling me toward ministry, and I had people speaking that into my life,” Barrett said. “When I got to Mountain View, I stopped going to church. None of my friends went to church, and nobody invited me to youth group.
“I was this kid who had been learning and growing as a follower of Christ, then got stunted. I wasn’t reading the Bible. I still called myself a Christian, but without praying and studying Scripture, I was going backward.”
Upon his graduation from Los Altos High School, Barrett enrolled at Foothill Junior College, where he played football and basketball. He dropped basketball after those two years and finished his degree in physical education at Cal State-Hayward, which is now called Cal State-East Bay. Barrett maintained his umpiring schedule while in college. Some of those games partnered him with umpires who were working in the minors. A few of them encouraged Barrett to attend umpiring school, but he didn’t give it significant consideration.
“(Umpiring) was a way for me to keep from working at a fast food joint or somewhere else like that where college kids work,” Barrett said. “Back then in the mid-1980s, schools paid $57 a game for varsity baseball. I worked two or three games a week and had plenty of car money.”
During Cal State-Hayward’s football season, Barrett, a tight end on the team, would attend chapel before games for what he says was “more or less as a good-luck charm.” The chaplain leading those chapel services participated in Campus Crusade for Christ, and he inspired Barrett to memorize some verses and study Scripture.
“That reignited what had been lying dormant in me,” Barrett said. “I started getting hungry for Scripture again, and it was great for me because I was exposed to a lot of things that weren’t good. When I started getting back into the Word on a regular basis, I began to feel again that call into ministry.”
The resurgence in his faith did not scratch the boxing itch Barrett felt. His interlude in the squared circle was another milepost on Barrett’s roadmap to ministry. Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing close to 250 pounds, he was no slouch in the ring. He may have been in Las Vegas chasing a boxing championship, but God was conditioning him to carry his Christianity into the sports world.
“I’m proud to say I got my butt kicked by some of boxing’s best,” Barrett said about the seven world champions with whom he sparred. “George and Evander would do Bible study in camp. When George and I would run in the morning, we’d talk about Scripture … he’d already been preaching at that point. I admired the way they leaned into their faith.”
The interval between amateur boxing and minor league baseball was brief, but it was long enough for Barrett to marry Tina Muhlebach. The two met as teens after Barrett moved to California, and their wedding took place on New Year’s Eve 1988. The first week of 1989 was eventful for the newlyweds.
“My wife and I were married the day before we left for umpire school,” said Barrett, who shares three children — Andrew, Amanda and Adam — and seven grandchildren with Tina. “School started on the fourth of January, so we did a few days for a honeymoon before she went home, and I went to the Joe Brinkman School of Professional Umpiring in Cocoa, Fla.”
Ted Barrett with wife Tina and children Andrew, Amanda, and Adam.
Barrett had stopped boxing with legends, only to begin “wrestling with God” trying to discern how he should activate ministry while umpiring professional baseball.
“I thought I had it all figured out, so I made a deal with God, which He laughed at,” Barrett said. “I knew the odds of me making it to the big leagues were slim, so I said to Him, ‘If I get to the big leagues, then I’ll know we’re cool. When I’m done, I’ll get into ministry.’”
He completed the Brinkman School, then spent five years in the minor leagues before getting his first call to work a major league game in 1994. He went back and forth between the majors and minors until 1999, when he became a full-time umpire in the AL. His addition to the staff afforded him games with each of that league’s eight crew chiefs.
When Major League Baseball merged the NL and AL umpiring staffs before the 2000 season, Barrett got the chance to circulate among the staff’s crew chiefs over the next 13 seasons, which molded him for the same role, which he accepted in 2013. Men like Don Denkinger, Jim Evans, Jim McKean, Tim McClelland and Steve Rippley are some of the leaders to whom Barrett feels indebted.
“I was fortunate to get that mix of styles and personalities,” he said. “They all were great crew chiefs, and they showed me there’s more than one way to run a crew. I took the best of each of them and tried to utilize it when I became a crew chief. It was similar to being a father. You wonder when you are a kid why the heck your dad does some of the things he does. Then when you become a dad, you realize why he did them and find yourself doing the same things.”
Barrett made certain to pick the brains of his crew chiefs so he could connect with baseball’s past through its ranks of umpires.
“The Denkingers, the McKeans, the Evanses … they were my connection to the past,” he said. “They started with men who had been in the major leagues since the 1940s and ’50s, so I’d ask them about their mentors.
“I love the history of umpiring, and a lot of umpires were military veterans who served in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. So they told real war stories. When you look at the service times of the guys in the ’40s, there is that two- or three-year lapse when they served. I am fascinated by stuff like that.”
Reaching the apex of the umpiring profession, however, did nothing to relieve the lingering lure to ministry. With a combined umpiring staff in place for 2000, Barrett decided the time was prime for him — an umpire with one season of full-time service — to take a bold step, one that would prove either fruitful or foolish.
“God was calling me to be more vocal about my faith and not hide my light under a basket,” Barrett said. “Each crew chief put in a list of guys with whom they wanted to work, and the (supervisor) tried to accommodate them. I had some cards made up and passed them out at the umpires’ union meeting. It was just a picture of me with a brief testimony on the back.
“I went home and told Tina, ‘I may have just committed career suicide because nobody wants to work with the Jesus freak.’”
Barrett landed on Ed Montague’s crew for that season. Near the middle of the year, Ralph Nelson, who then was the supervisor of MLB’s umpires, told Barrett he was the most requested umpire among the crew chiefs.
“I had no idea he would tell me that,” Barrett said. “It was confirmation I was doing the right thing. I had to stick with it and turn it up.”
Barrett realized at that point he no longer could avoid the divine appointment, but engaging in full-time ministry while working a major league umpiring schedule seemed mutually exclusive. According to Barrett, it was then that God revealed His plan to integrate the two.
“I started taking classes at Trinity Theological Seminary with full-time pastors, and I really sensed the call into ministry,” said Barrett, who completed master’s and doctoral degrees at Trinity. “The Lord wanted me to stay where He planted me as an umpire. I kind of became the staff pastor for the umpires. That’s the flock God gave me.”
Over the years, Barrett has officiated umpires’ weddings, baptisms and funerals. Along with fellow MLB umpire Rob Drake, he founded Calling for Christ as an ongoing spiritual resource geared toward professional baseball umpires. It provides Barrett a platform to give Christian fellowship to his peers and potential protégés in much the same way he received it at pivotal points in his life.
One of those protégés is Nestor Ceja. He was a student at Arizona State University when he met Barrett at an umpire clinic in 2009. Now he is a second-year major league umpire who leaned on Barrett’s wisdom and insight during his ascension through the minor leagues. He took good notes on his mentor when they worked on the same crew in Barrett’s final season.
“He didn’t stray away from the fundamentals,” Ceja said about one trait that epitomizes Barrett’s longevity. “He did a lot of things his last year I know he was taught in umpire school.
“Home plate umpires learn to go up the first-base line on ground balls to help if necessary. With every ground ball, he was hustling up the line. That’s something that can be taken for granted. On those so-called routine ground balls when you might think nothing’s going to happen, Ted hustled up the line just in case something did happen. He controlled his controllables.”
Ted Barrett works a spring training game with his son Andrew and fellow MLB umpires Pat Hoberg (left) and Tony Randazzo (right).
Halfway through his first full season in 1999, Barrett worked the plate in New York when Yankees pitcher David Cone faced and retired 27 consecutive Montreal Expos. As the game progressed, he could sense something special was brewing inside Yankee Stadium, but he couldn’t pinpoint it fully in the moment.
“I remember looking at the scoreboard and there were zero hits,” Barrett said, “but I did not know he had a perfect game going.”
Barrett had a replicate experience 13 years later in San Francisco when the Giants’ Matt Cain pitched nine perfect innings against the Houston Astros. The anxiety in games like those is not restricted to the hitters trying to get on base or the defense trying to avoid errors. The man behind the plate bears an added burden.
“The pressure was for me to be consistent,” said Barrett, who also called Ervin Santana’s no-hitter for the Los Angeles Angels in 2011. “Whatever I’d been calling a strike, I needed to continue calling it a strike, and whatever was a ball needed to continue to be called a ball. Missing a pitch may cost the pitcher a perfect game, but there’s also the thought of giving him so much off the corners that it seems like I helped the pitcher, so he didn’t deserve it.”
Traveling the nation from one major league city to the next permitted Barrett ample opportunities to meet like-minded people. While in San Francisco nearly 20 years ago, he attended a chapel service led by Jeff Iorg, who was the chaplain for the Giants at the time. The two struck up a friendship and ministry alliance that has borne fruit in academia.
“Ted is one of the finest Christians I’ve met,” said Iorg, who in May completed a 20-year tenure as president of Gateway Seminary in Ontario, Calif. “He came to our campus and I interviewed him. It is one of our most downloaded chapels. We didn’t talk about baseball; we talked about how to build a ministry from nothing to viability.
“Calling for Christ is an example of that. How do you create vision? How do you shape and develop good leaders so you can hand it over to the next generation? How do you expand and change your organization as the needs change? Ted models all of those things beautifully, and he’s a great encouragement to me as a leader.”
Besides their commitment to Christ, Iorg also shares officiating acumen with Barrett. His 25 years as a youth baseball umpire gives him some semblance of awareness of Barrett’s spiritual obligation while on the diamond.
“Ted is a great example of taking the gospel into the workplace. He’s done that with integrity, honor and respect, and he’s done it in such a way that umpires who are not Christians are not antagonistic toward him. They may not share or agree with his beliefs, but because of the way he carries himself, they respect him for the work he does.”
Umpire Lance Barksdale shares that respect for Barrett. He became a major league crew chief after Barrett retired from the field in 2022.
“I learned from Teddy how to deal with the pressures of this job and to handle situations that come up on the field,” said Barksdale, who has been in the majors since 2006. “I also learned how to be a Godly man, a good husband and a good father while being away from my family as much as I am. Some people get caught up in the job we do, but Teddy always had his priorities in order.”
In his retirement days, Barrett’s baseball business finds him working for MLB TV and Apple TV as a rules analyst. He also attends minor league games to observe and evaluate umpires.
“If I can be an encouragement to the younger guys, I’m all in on that,” he said. “I’m glad my opinion is still valid.”
The Gold Whistle Award seems a fitting finishing touch for a superb career, and Barrett’s entry as the latest recipient likely surprises no one who knows him.
“It is one of the highest accolades in the athletic officiating community because it is given by one’s peers,” said Larry Young, a former major league umpire who received the award in 2002 and now serves as a supervisor of major league umpires. “We don’t hire people for their umpiring ability alone. It obviously has a high level of importance, but we want good people. We want good citizens on and off the field, and there simply is none better than Ted.”
Ted Barrett participates in an UMPS CARE hospital visit with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and fellow MLB umpires Tim Timmons (left) and Jim Reynolds (middle).
Barrett appreciates the honor and the sentiment behind it. The tribute will be a tangible reminder of what gives him the most gratification.
“What I’m proudest of is leaving the umpiring profession better than it was when I came in,” Barrett said. “I was able to show it’s OK to practice my faith on the job and to speak about it. Major League Baseball never said I couldn’t do that. People knew I was respectful and not being phony about my faith.”