V.I. umpire picked for Little League World Series crew

ST. THOMAS — Seven years ago, Michael Bute thought he was just helping out young baseball players from the Virgin Islands when he started to regularly umpire games on island.

He never knew it would take him anywhere.

Bute, 48, who was born on St. Martin but moved to the territory when he was 1 year old, will become the first umpire from St. Thomas to ever stand behind the plate and call balls and strikes when he works the 2010 Little League Baseball World Series in South Williamsport, Pa., in August.

“It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” said Bute, who is a physical education teacher at Emanuel Benjamin Oliver Elementary and an assistant baseball coach at Charlotte Amalie High School. “A problem that happens here is that we have plenty of coaches but there are never enough umpires to do the games so I fell right in line. I kind of liked it and after a while, I stopped coaching but continued to umpire.”

Bute has coached baseball since the 1970s and naturally put on the blue uniform after a shortage of umpires started to plague the local little leagues in 2003. He is also certified to umpire at the high school level but he prefers to make the call for the youngsters.

“You can actually slow the game down and explain things to the kids,” said Bute, who volunteers every Saturday with the Alvin McBean and Elrod Hendricks West little leagues. “The opposing manager won’t care if I help, whereas in high school and other leagues, they don’t want you to do that. It’s almost like being a coach on the field and I like helping them learn the game.”

He is the director of the St. Thomas Baseball Explorers, a youth travel club, and he will be behind the plate for the Elrod Hendricks West little league championship today at Emile Griffith Ballpark at 5 p.m.

The Little League Baseball World Series is an international tournament that attracts the very best teams from ages 11 to 13. The 32-game tournament has been held in August in South Williamsport every year since 1947 and in recent years, many tournament games have been nationally televised.

Little League Baseball is the world’s largest organized youth sports program, with nearly 2.6 million players and 1 million adult volunteers in every U.S. state and scores of other countries. Teams from the U.S. have to qualify by winning one of the eight regional tournaments, while eight other divisions compete in the international bracket and include squads from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

The championship game pits the top U.S. finalist against the international champion.

Bute was behind the plate for the Caribbean Division championships in 2007 and 2008 but a spot on the 16-member LLWS crew is considered the highest honor Little League Baseball and Softball can bestow on an umpire. Potential candidates are eligible to be selected for a LLWS assignment only once every four years and twice in a lifetime.

“This was the next step for me,” said Bute, who estimated he’s umpired more than 800 games in his career.

It was a stroke of fate that earned Bute the opportunity. During the regional tournaments that were held in different Latin American countries — if a V.I. team qualified, then it also brought along an umpire to oversee other games — most of the umpires went out during the night and treated the trip like a vacation.

Coincidentally, the region’s Umpire-In-Chief held meetings every night to discuss that day’s action and schedule the next day’s assignment. The meetings were not mandatory but Bute liked to sit in on them and caught the eye of his boss.

“One night, he asked me, ‘Mike, how many World Series games have you done?’ and when I said, ‘None,’ it was shocking to him,” Bute said. “He told me that as soon as I get home that I send him a baseball umpire resume to his office in Puerto Rico. He wanted to push for me to go to Williamsport because he knew I did a good job.”

He won’t be the first Virgin Islands representative at the LLWS. St. Croix has had two umpires achieve World Series status: Emile “Gravy” Henderson went to Williamsport in the late 1990s, while in 2004, Steve Paris made the calls for the Big League World Series, which brings together the best ballplayers from age 17 and older. Franklin Johnson, out of Frederiksted, was named to this year’s Big League World Series umpiring crew as well.

“This is a great honor for Mr. Bute and I treated it the same way when I was chosen,” said Paris, who now serves as the assistant district administrator for Little League Baseball on St. Thomas. “Now this is all volunteer so these umpires are giving back to the community and the fact that they are chosen for the World Series just proves their dedication and knowledge for the game.”

— Contact sports reporter Aaron Gray at 774-8772 est. 352 or e-mail agray@dailynews.vi.

Sign up for Text Alerts

Sign up for e-mail newsletters