Caleb Dye has gone allin on his career as an umpire for baseball, and it is starting to pay off. Dye recently accepted an offer to become an umpire for a professional league affiliated with the MLB.

Dye’s career in baseball, which is now thriving, was once all but gone. Six years ago, just out of the Marine Corps, he decided to start calling games, and he was thrown into a unique situation. That situation was that there were too many umpires. A problem that is by no means common nowadays.

After two years of calling games that came few and far between, Dye decided to throw in the towel. He quit umpiring, started his own construction company, and moved out of state.

Eventually, he did move back to Tullahoma, and one conversation with his grandpa got him to put on his umpire uniform again, as he got back into baseball.

“He said, ‘You know what you need to be doing.’ I looked at him and shook my head, and he said, ‘You need to call ball,’” Dye said regarding his conversation with his grandfather that got him back into being an umpire “So I was like, alright. I went full tilt, and I was like, I am going to do this until I find something else. Then, when I started to do it again, I was like, dang, I really love this.”

Dye, pursuing his baseball career more intensely than he ever had, began to see a payoff from his efforts. Once he got back in it, he was calling 10U, 12U, and 13U travel ball games. He eventually carved a doorway into calling games for the TSSAA (an organization that covers all high school and middle school sports in the state of Tennessee). Dye then landed another gig calling games for an organization called TruBlu. They cover a lot of showcase travel baseball for high school players and high school seniors who recently committed to play college ball. The umpires who work these games are all highly respected, with a lot of them being collegiate umpires. So Dye getting thrown in the mix with them was a monumental deal. He made connections, sharpened his skills by working and talking with these highly regarded umpires, and then eventually got his next lead in his umpiring career.

After a game, somebody who knew Dye asked his wife if he was interested in going to pro umpiring school. Dye accepted that amazing offer, which kept the momentum of his umpiring career snowballing forward.

The pro umpiring school that Dye attended was run by a current MLB umpire, Hunter Wendelstedt. The school Wendelstedt helps run has been around for over 50 years, where, as once upon a time, it was run by Wendelstedt’s father. This golden ticket school that has helped many aspiring want-to-be pro umpires accomplish that dream is coming to an end. Dye got in just before the buzzer, as 2026 is the last year they are doing the school.

In Dye’s class, there were people from all over the globe coming into near Daytona, Florida, to attend the highly touted school. People came from Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, among several other places. There was no lull in consumers for Wendelstedt’s school, as the total number of umpires attending was around 160.

The school lasted for four and a half weeks, with their only day off being on Sundays. Throughout the long duration, Wendelstedt and his crew made sure to throw everything they could at their students. Not only to better their skills, but also to get the best evaluations they could of their attendees.

“They break you down from the very beginning. You don’t know what a baseball is. You don’t know how the game of baseball is played, regardless of your experience, and they start you from scratch. Baseball is a game played by two teams with at least nine players under the direction of a manager. It is that elementary when you go in, and they build off of it every day,” said Dye on how the first classes they had were structured at the pro school he attended.

The two hours in the classroom were just part of an average day at Wendelstedt’s school. They did field work every day, took tests on the material they learned that day when they got home, and two to three weeks into school, they would work control games.

Dye, in the controlled chaos of the program, excelled. He finished at the top of his class and was also given the Lee Weyer Award. It is an award given out by his peers and instructors at the event. It represents the umpire that they would want to walk on the field with.

Through his time and success at the school, he got an offer from another league, which then opened the door of the job Dye recently took. That job being an umpiring position for the American Association of Professional Baseball. It is a professional wood bat league that runs from May to September.

From once hardly being able to get a game on his schedule, Dye is now booked up heavily and is officially a professional umpire.

Dye, now with all the success he has recently had, does not want to keep it to himself; he wants to pay it forward. For anyone interested in becoming an umpire, Dye wants to help make that happen.

“Contact me, I am going to be a resource in the community for whoever wants it and whoever needs it. We are starting an umpire clinic type of deal, where we are going to train them and give them the same training I got at a fraction of the cost,” said Dye The best way to get in contact with Dye is by contacting the following email: tennesseeumpires@ gmail.com.