This is fan fiction. Every character and event in it is made up. No real league, team, player or official is involved, and nothing here happened.

Nobody hired him. That was the first problem.

He showed up Tuesday at the ballpark, eight feet tall, a carved pumpkin where a head should be, a whistle on a lanyard around a neck made of vine. He wore a striped shirt two sizes too small and carried a rulebook that smelled like cinnamon.

"Ball four," he said, before the pitcher had even started his windup.

The plate umpire, a sturdy man named Gus who had worked the same corner of the league for nineteen years, turned around slowly. "Who are you?"

"I," said the pumpkin, candle flickering behind his triangle eyes, "am the Pumpkin Ref of Section 13. And you are out of position."

The calls get worse

By Wednesday he had moved on to the hockey rink. He waved off a goal because the puck "lacked festive spirit." He gave a two-minute minor to the Zamboni. When the home goalie protested, the Pumpkin Ref blew his whistle so hard that candy corn shot out of it and pinged off the glass like hail.

"You can't do that," the goalie said.

"Check the rulebook," said the pumpkin. The goalie did. Every page said the same thing: THE PUMPKIN IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

Gus has a plan

Gus found him Thursday night under the bleachers, carving a smaller pumpkin by moonlight.

"You know why nobody can overturn your calls?" Gus said. "Because nobody ever asked you to explain one."

The Pumpkin Ref stopped carving. His candle dimmed. "No one has ever asked," he admitted.

So Gus asked. They sat under the bleachers until dawn going through every call, one by one. Some of them, it turned out, were right. Most were not.

By Friday the Pumpkin Ref was gone. All he left behind was the little pumpkin, carved with a single word:

REVIEW.

End. Fan fiction, not news.