MLB Umpire Ron Luciano, the ump who finally couldn’t strike back

Remembering Former MLB Umpire Ron Luciano

Writing a few days ago about baseball men and depression in retirement, I’d included Luciano, whose 1995 suicide stunned a game that had no knowledge he suffered depression severe enough to hospitalize himself for it a year earlier. I have Strike Two and The Fall of the Roman Umpire in my library (somehow, my copy of Luciano’s first book, The Umpire Strikes Back, is missing in action), and thinking of Luciano prompted my re-reading.

Until the later 1940s umpires came from two ranks: they were former players or managers; or, they learned the business the hard way “in the very rough amateur leagues.” Another one-time pitcher who decided almost overnight that he had more future as an umpire was Paul Pryor, who’d make a two-decade career as an MLB umpire.

Pryor’s epiphany came in 1948 when he pitched in the D-level Georgia State League. He got his unconditional release, Luciano related, on the same day an MLB umpire was injured in a serious automobile accident. Pryor asked the league for the job. He worked home plate a day later.

“I remember calling a strike on a kid,” Pryor told Luciano and Fisher, “and he turned around and said, ‘You couldn’t get me out pitching, so now all you have to do is raise your arm?’ I grinned at him. ‘Nice, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Strike two’.” Can you think of a better anecdote for providing an umpire-turned-author the name of his second book?

The Fall of the Roman Umpire hooked mostly around anecdotes Luciano and Fisher collected from players. (“You’re nothing but a rotten vampire,” pitcher Bill [Spaceman] Lee once barked at Luciano.) Luciano included pitcher Milt Wilcox, whom he’d described as maturing from a thrower who hated umpires to a smart pitcher who barely tolerated them.

“That curveball was low,” Luciano once told Wilcox.

“It wasn’t a curveball,” Wilcox replied. “It was a slider.”

“Yeah, well, I meant to say slider,” Luciano rejoined.

“No,” Wilcox answered, “you meant to say strike.”

Before giving knuckleball specialist Charlie Hough his chapter, Luciano couldn’t resist asking:  “What is it that turned an honest, decent human being into a knuckleballer? What sort of twisted mind makes a man resort to that pitch? Desperation, usually.”

Hall of Famer Phil Niekro once told Luciano, “I throw my fastball only when I know the hitter is waiting on the knuckleball. Tell you what, though. I can’t throw two fastballs in a row.” Luciano called knuckleballers’ fastballs “straight balls” thrown as changeups because “it wouldn’t be fair to other pitchers to call them fastballs.”

“Tommy,” Hough remembered telling Tommy Lasorda, while Lasorda managed the Los Angeles Dodgers’ rookie league and Hough was one of his prospects, “I’m gonna start throwing a knuckleball.”

After describing Lasorda as overjoyed, Hough quoted the skipper: “You’d better do something, ’cause I love you like my own son, and if you don’t start doing something now, I’m going to have to release you.” That’s one way to help provoke a 25-year major league pitching career.