or a bit more than a decade I’ve lived in a region where "the frost is off the pumpkin" means some of next Halloween’s harvest is showing a bit of shape in the farmers’ fields. Yes, in the mid-80s my wife and I packed up the family and fled the year-long warmth of the West Texas sun for the often frigid Upper Midwest. Here the landscape is dominated by Packer fans and cheesehead hats (which really exist even off the television screens). More often than not the same landscape is dominated by a powdery white, drifting substance well into May.

Here the transition from "Spring" to "Summer" baseball is much more than a symbolic turn of the calendar page. With luck, Wisconsin umpires literally emerge — much like butterflies bursting out of their cocoons — shedding plate coats and multiple woolly layers, finally working regularly in those colorful navy, powder and scarlet shirts.

Granted, at least a quorum of the summertime coaches would instead compare the arbitors’ evolution to rattlers shedding their skin, but I’m convinced that’s more a function of their own dramatically different level of professionalism. You see, when you start working games where the uniforms stop boasting of academia you begin coping with a very different officiating checklist.

Continued...