Last Saturday night, Jordan Baker umpired the biggest baseball game of his umpiring career — and one of the best games in World Series history — when he called balls and strikes during Game 7.
By Tuesday night, the lifelong Oklahoman was watching something with slightly lower stakes.
His kids’ junior high basketball games.
But he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
“Starting to get back to the normal,” Baker said with a chuckle.
After being part of the umpire crew for one of the most dramatic World Series ever, Baker was happy to be back home in Shawnee. Yes, it was special to be part of an 18-inning classic in Game 3. Sure, it was amazing to be behind the plate for a come-from-behind, extra-inning epic in Game 7.
But at the end of a long season, Baker was ready to relax.
“It’s time to be a husband and time to be a dad and do all the things,” he said.
And maybe spend a little time reflecting on what he’d just experienced.
It was the culmination of two decades of work, after all.
Baker grew up a baseball junkie in Enid. He loved to play the game. Watch the game. Talk the game. When he was in high school, he even started umpiring rec-league games in and around the north-central part of the state.
He continued umpiring when he started school at Oklahoma State, even calling some college games. When he realized going to college might not be his thing, a talk with his dad prompted Baker to go all in on umpiring.
In January 2005, he went to the Wendelstedt Umpire School in Daytona Beach.
After a five-week course in umpiring, Baker was chosen as one of the top 25 students. That earned him a spot in Major League Baseball’s 10-day tryout camp for umpires.
Minor-league assignments would be handed out at the end.
“I was pushing all the chips in for sure,” Baker said.
But he already knew he’d found his life’s work.
“I loved it,” he said. “I love the game. I love the camaraderie. The travel, that’s probably the worst part of our job, to be honest with you. I wasn’t married or didn’t have a family when I was young, so it was easier. But now, it’s a lot more difficult.
“But I loved everything about it, and I knew that the Lord had called me to do this.”
Baker did well enough at the tryout camp to earn a spot in the Arizona rookie league.
Over the next few years, he did well enough to get promoted to higher levels of the minor leagues. Low Class A. High A. Double A. Triple A.
Finally in 2012, seven years after starting his journey, Baker made his big-league debut.
Two years later, Major League Baseball hired him as a full-time umpire.
“I just kept working at it, and the chips fell my way a few times and I got to go out and do my thing,” he said. “Everything has worked out very, very well. I’m very, very blessed.”
Baker got his first postseason experience in 2017, and over the next five years, he worked the playoffs four times, including the World Series in 2022 when Houston beat Philadelphia in six games. Even though he hoped to umpire more World Series, there is never a guarantee.
Work the wild-card round, and an umpire is eligible to call either the National League or American League championship series.
Work the divisional round, and he would be eligible for the World Series.
This year, Baker was selected for the American League divisional series between the Yankees and the Blue Jays. But after the series wrapped, he flew home not knowing if he’d get picked for the World Series.
The Sunday before the series started, Baker was in Oklahoma City for a baseball tournament that his boys were playing in. He was watching his youngest pitch when his phone rang.
Mike Hill, MLB’s senior vice president, was on the other end.
Baker was on the World Series crew.
Then, Hill started going through the home-plate game assignments.
“Game 1 will be Will Little,” Baker remembers him saying. “Game 2 will be Adrian Johnson. Game 3 … ”
On and on Hill went. He got through the first six games without mentioning Baker.
“And you’ll have Game 7,” Hill finally said.
Baker’s reaction?
“Put (the phone) on mute and scream, and then get back to him,” he said.
He laughed.
“It’s pretty intense.”
After he hung up with Hill, Baker got to return to family and friends at the baseball tournament and share his good news. A big cheer went up in the stands that had nothing to do with what was going on in the game.
“Being around all the family and friends to celebrate that moment was pretty neat,” Baker said.
“Then to watch my son pitch four shutout innings, it was even better.”
Baker admits that he started joking with family and friends about his Game 7 assignment.
“Everybody start praying for six or less,” he said.
But the Dodgers and Blue Jays had other plans. An epic series ensued that was frankly so good it simply had to go a full seven games. Had to culminate with a winner-take-all seventh game.
Had to have Jordan Baker behind the plate.
Game 7 ended up being as dramatic as the rest of the series, including an incident in the bottom of the fourth inning that cleared the benches. After Blue Jays hitter Andres Gimenez flung out his hand and looked as if he was trying to get hit by a pitch, Dodgers pitcher Justin Wrobleski came inside and plunked Gimenez with the next offering.
Gimenez immediately stared down Wrobleski, then flung out his hands.
Wrobleski responded by walking toward him, flinging out his hands.
But before Wrobleski had even cleared the mound, Baker had already come out from behind the plate, put his 6-foot-7 frame in between the two potential combatants and started walking Gimenez toward first base.
The benches cleared.
The bullpens cleared.
All the while, Baker walked beside Gimenez, keeping his arm around the hitter and pulling him away from the fray.
“Got a little tippy there … ” Baker said, “but we settled that down and figured it out and kept playing baseball.”
And what great baseball it was.
Baker ended up making several big calls at the plate, including a force-out by the Dodgers that would’ve given the Blue Jays the game-winning run. Even though Los Angeles catcher Will Smith initially pulled his toe off the plate, he tapped it back down before Toronto’s Isiah Kiner-Falefa slid in.
The call was challenged, reviewed and upheld.
Baker got it right in the moment.
“We were busy,” Baker said of the umpire crew having to make a lot of big calls. “It was pretty, pretty wild, pretty intense and an amazing atmosphere. But it shows just how good the guys I was working with are.”
He admits that as much as he tried to trick himself into believing it was just another game, the magnitude of a Game 7 in the World Series was impossible to ignore.
He leaned on his experience, his preparation and his faith.
“You have to trust — trust the man upstairs and trust what you put in to that point to be successful,” he said.
And successful Baker and the rest of the crew were. People weren’t talking about the umpires after the game or the series; they were talking about the baseball.
That, Baker says, is always the goal.
“It’s about those players and coaches who did what they did on the field and off the field that made this special,” he said, “and we were just there to officiate it and umpire it.
“Everything worked out really well as far as I’ve been told.”
Now Baker gets to enjoy his offseason. There’ll be more junior high basketball games, and he hopes to go hunting with his boys. Even taking the kids to school is a treat.
“I enjoy those little things,” he said.
But being behind the plate for Game 7 was pretty great, too.
Baker’s takeaway from the experience is simple.
“Blessed.”
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.