Canzano: The umpire hit a home run

The kid kept her head while the adults lost their minds.

An incident at a youth softball tournament made news this week.

Lillie Brooks raises goats. She runs the business operation when she’s not playing softball on her high school team and getting straight A’s at Dayton High School. She’s headed to Santa Clara University next year on a softball scholarship.

She’ll play catcher there.

Her planned major?

“Political Science,” Brooks told me, “with an emphasis on legal studies and a dual minor in pre-law and Spanish.”

Turns out they messed with the wrong umpire.

Brooks, 17, was caught in the middle of that youth softball ruckus last weekend that set off fireworks in Newberg. She did a nice job defusing the explosive behavior from a St. Helens assistant who raced out of the dugout, raising hell after a tall player on the Astoria team hit a one-hopper off his shortstop’s ankle.

“I want to see birth certificates or this game is done!!!” he cried.

Brooks called time, attempted to calm the coach down, and when it didn’t work, pivoted and summoned the tournament director. While the grown-ups were arguing over the absurdity of the coach’s accusation, the teenage umpire wandered down to first base, where she found an 11-year-old little girl named Brinley Stephens fighting back tears.

Stephens is 5-foot-10.

That puts her in the 99th percentile for height at her age. Her mother says people sometimes approach and ask how old Brinley is or what grade she’s in. But the chatter over the weekend went too far. I wrote a column about the misbehaving adults, but today’s follow-up is about Brooks because I love and appreciate the job she did.

Canzano: It's ugly when youth sports coaches fall short

During pre-game warmups, one of St. Helen’s coaches walked over to the umpire and raised a question about the age of the tall player on the Astoria team. Brooks dismissed the claim, pointed out that the tournament rosters are vetted, and quipped: “She’s tall. God forbid — everyone has different genes.”

Then came the top of the first inning.

“When the ball was hit,” Brooks told me, “I knew it wasn’t going to go great. The coach (Kevin Marcon) came out firing. I don’t like ejections. Looking back, I probably should have tossed him. But in the moment, I wanted it to de-escalate.”

Given how fired up Marcon was, I wonder if he’d have left the field peacefully or if police would have been summoned. Parents in the crowd jeered and traded insults. I cringed when I watched the video of the incident. It’s ugly, but after a lengthy delay, the game resumed. I think the ump got it right.

Two long-time former Major League Baseball umpires, Dale Scott and Jimmy Joyce, are friends. They know every word in the rulebook and aim to get calls right, but what I’ve noted about both men is how insanely fair, poised, and diplomatic they are. Both are reasonable, rational, well-adjusted, even-keeled people with their hearts in the right place.

“Great umpires can defuse volatile situations and raw emotions, usually by keeping calm and dissecting whatever the situation is,” said Scott, who worked the World Series three times. “It’s like I tell umpires at camps and clinics, ‘It’s easy to eject people. It’s much tougher to tap down the emotion while keeping people in the game.’”

Lillie Brooks has that gift, too.

It was on display in the warmups, and again when she refused to shout back at Marcon and called her supervisor to the field. And it was evident when she walked over to the player at the center of the storm and stood with her during the commotion.

Two cool kids — Brooks, 17, and Stephens, 11 — talked for a bit.

The adults around them lost their minds.

“I got a little emotional when I was talking to her,” Brooks said. “People are always going to tell you that you’re too much this or too little of that. She just turned 11. I told her, ‘Don’t let anyone turn off your flame. Keep lighting it up.’ I felt really bad for her. I can only imagine.”

The next time you go to shout at a youth sports official, maybe think a little about this story. Lillie Brooks is a member of her church youth group and participates in FFA. She’s got big plans after high school graduation. When I asked her how much she was paid to umpire the game that day, she wasn’t even sure.

“Maybe $50? I don’t really know,” she said.

“I’m kinda just there because I just love the sport.”

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