In Praise of the Umpire, the Journalist of Baseball

Everybody hates them. That’s the job.

My grandfather Dennis Dooley, my mother’s father, was many things. He was a World War II veteran who still wore his dog tags around his neck every day, a fitness buff with a tight crew cut who busted out of his white sleeveless tank top well into his 60s, a diabetic whose checked his insulin levels every morning with his breakfast grapefruit, a gas station owner and operator, a loving father to four and grandfather to eight, a man who could grill a steak in the garage in the dead of a freezing Central Illinois winter like he was put on this earth specifically for that purpose.

But it was a side hobby that gave him more joy than just about anything else. My grandfather was the best baseball umpire tiny Moweaqua, Illinois had ever seen. For 25 years, every kid from Assumption to Stonington to Pawnee knew Mr. Dooley. With his children all grown and out of the house, he would spend every Saturday at the ballpark, umping every game, at every level. Whenever I saw him, the grandkid who clearly loved baseball as much as he did, he would tell me stories of his weekends at the diamond, out in the sunshine, just watching kids play ball.

You would think that his stories would be full of parents screaming at him, or kids getting thrown out of the game, but while it’s possible he was just protecting the gentle ears of the 10-year-old who revered him, I don’t think that’s the case. It might have gone done that way today, but it wasn’t then. As practiced by Dennis Dooley, the umpire was not merely someone who called balls and strikes; the umpire was the authority, the man who judged what was right and wrong, the arbiter of fair play, the last line of defense against the barbarians at the gate. Dennis Dooley took being an umpire seriously. Dennis Dooley believed his job was about more than a baseball game; he believed his job was about truth. It was about standing for justice. It was about being, in the end, a rule of law.

His favorite story, one I’ve told in various publications in the past but am still going to repeat here, involved a close play at home plate. A kid came streaming around third base and slid into home right as the catcher tagged him, a bang-bang play. My grandfather called him out. The kid jumped…