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

Remembering Former MLB Umpire Ron Luciano

Luciano wrote his second pair of books after his brief announcing career with NBC ended. His NBC colleague Joe Garagiola swore upon his suicide that Luciano missed baseball more than he’d ever let on.

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“Becoming a fan has not been an easy job for me,” Luciano wrote in The Fall of the Roman Umpire. “Except for eating ballpark food, of course. But after years of thinking of players as !@#$% and !@#@!!*&, it was difficult for me to start rooting for them. As an umpire, the only thing I rooted for was a fast game. But learning to be a fan has been a rewarding experience.”

A short space later, though, Luciano offered a too-telling self-observation. “Some people spend their lives trying to climb mountains; I do my best to avoid falling into potholes,” he wrote. “I am one of those rare individuals born with the magic touch—everything I touch gets rusted. Football teams lose, entire leagues lose, stores go out of business, companies get bought; my real problem is that I am running out of things at which I can fail. Fortunately, I run very slowly.”

Luciano could make us laugh and think, and from all accounts, he made his friends and family proud to count him one of theirs. But he couldn’t make his own pain dissipate enough to stop him from running a hose from his tailpipe through the closed power window in his car a quarter-century ago.

Re-reading his books now induces a smile tempered with sorrow for a lively, smart, and sensitive man killed by the enemy within himself.