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…