Isn’t it always the way? We haven’t had a mainstream book about umpiring since Bruce Weber’s AS THEY SEE ’EM: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires in 2009. Now we have two: THEY CALLED ME GOD: The Best Umpire Who Ever Lived and CALLED OUT BUT SAFE: A Baseball Umpire’s Journey, both written by veteran arbiters with the assistance of equally veteran sportswriters. (To be accurate, Weber was not a professional ump; rather, he was an embedded journalist going through the rigors of preparation for the job.)

Harvey is one of a handful of umpires who have been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (he was enshrined in 2010). He ruled his office --- in this case, the diamond --- with an iron hand, making sure everyone from the players to the managers to his fellow umpires knew who was the boss.

His story evinces hardscrabble American roots. Perhaps it’s because he considers himself among the best at his craft; there’s no false modesty here. But the constant reminders about being such a pillar gets a bit grating over the course of the book. Harvey is almost never wrong (at least on the field). He presents himself as a pillar of virtue against those who would denigrate the integrity of the national pastime. He has his favorites, of course, although he would never allow that to influence any of his calls. He also isn’t shy about telling you with whom he did not get along and why. Perhaps Harvey’s hubris didn’t allow him to consider the fact that THEY CALLED ME GOD might not be a sign of respect but veiled contempt.

Harvey certainly has a high sense of self, which he shares over and over, literally. There are passages that are repeated almost verbatim, which would indicate a poor editing job or a laissez-faire attitude by the publisher and/or co-writer for not catching these things in the manuscript. There are also a few factual errors that are very easy for the savvy fan to catch. One wonders whether Harvey’s advanced age (84) and declining health has anything to do with the decision to publish the book at this time.

In direct opposition to THEY CALLED ME GOD, we have Al Clark’s much more contrite memoir. Clark, who umped for almost 25 years, has a self-denigrating sense of humor that is sorely lacking in Harvey’s book. While still maintaining the dignity of the profession and his total control of his environment (he points out that a given individual player doesn’t need to be on the field, while the umpires do), Clark still manages to show a playful side, as when he points out that it is relatively recent that umpires worked American and National League games; when he was working for the AL, he became the only umpire in history to wear his name on his hat.

Where Harvey --- who worked in the National League for 30 years --- takes credit for being a self-made man, Clark is grateful to those who helped him along the way, including his father, a sportswriter in New Jersey (he even has nice things to say about his three ex-wives). In fact, Clark notes that the idea to do a memoir stems partly from the love of writing, which he had maintained throughout his life.

Clark also admits to some mistakes along the way, one of which cost him his job in 2001, the other of which landed him in federal prison three years later for mail fraud. He takes full blame and has managed to grow from the experience, and the title --- CALLED OUT BUT SAFE --- is a nod to those misfortunes that ultimately turned into life lessons.

Yes, you want a book that’s authoritative, but given the choice between Harvey’s megalomania and Clark’s avuncular style, if you have to go with one umpire’s tale, I’d thumb THEY CALLED ME GOD and go with the SAFE call.

        --- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan