Not everyone was quite as explicit as Weaver, but many of his peers — Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, Bobby Cox — wielded a similarly confrontational style, forging an antagonism with the umpires that persisted into the 1990s.
Valentine recalled being invited to lunch by a veteran umpire when he was a young manager with the Texas Rangers. “I thought, Wow, that’s really cool. An umpire wants to get to know me,” he said. “Well, we meet the next day, sit down to eat and all of a sudden the umpire says to me, ‘If you ever come onto the field to argue with me again like you did last night, I’ll bury you for the rest of your career, just like I buried Dick Howser until the day he died.’”
Before Valentine could reply, the umpire got up and walked out.
“And of course he left me with the check,” Valentine said.
The tide began to turn in 2000, when American and National League umpiring crews merged. As a larger, single subset working under the auspices of the commissioner’s office, umpires were warned about their combative style.
“How we dealt with arguments changed at that point,” said the former umpire Dale Scott, who retired in 2017. “Baseball wanted us to stop being the aggressors. Of course, that was easier said than done, but you could see the difference in the minor leagues. That’s where the culture started to reverse, with the new guys coming up.”
The new generation displaced umpires with distinctive flair — such as Dutch Rennert’s operatic strike calls behind the plate — and brought a homogeneous style, the same demeanor, even the same trim physique. Minor league umpires are strongly urged not just to master the contours of the strike zone but to stay in shape and work on their mobility.