UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1980: Former American League Umpire Ron Luciano looks on before a Major League Baseball game circa 1980. Luciano was a Major League Umpire from 1069-79. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
A quarter-century ago former MLB umpire Ron Luciano was a suicide. Re-reading his books now stirs laughs—but also sorrow for what killed him.
An old saying, usually wielded in indignation, declares that those who can, do, while those who can’t, teach. When I pulled my copy of former MLB umpire Ron Luciano’s Strike Two out again, I was reminded that enough baseball players can make the case: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, become umpires.”
In his very first chapter, Luciano and his collaborator David Fisher noted that some players- or managers-turned-umpires actually could and did before they became arbiters. Pants Rowland went from World Series-winning manager (the 1917 Chicago White Sox) to umpire. Ed Walsh went from Hall of Fame pitcher to umpire. Relief pioneer Firpo Marberry—pitcher one minute, umpire the next.
At least one player got to do it while he played, even if he did become a later full-time MLB umpire. Luciano said that when Jocko Conlan was a White Sox outfielder, a game between the White Sox and the St. Louis Browns was disrupted when one of the base umpires collapsed from heat exhaustion.
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Both sides agreed Conlan should take his place for the rest of the game. In the mid-1930s games between those teams caused stronger men to faint, but little did the Sox and the Browns know. Luciano swore Conlan already wanted to be an ump after his playing days. Earlier the same season, Conlan ran out a grounder hard and saw first base ump Brick Owens, hands in pockets, thumbs only sticking out. When Conlan hit the pad Owens just wiggled his thumb.
“I’ve got to hit, and run, and sweat,” Conlan hollered, “and that’s all there is to that play, that little wiggle?” Owens nodded yes. “At that moment,” Luciano said, “Conlan knew he wanted to be an umpire.”
Today’s players who believe with cause that today’s umpires are even more impressed with their own power than the umpires in Conlan’s day should learn the legend of George Pipgras. As a pitcher, he won Game Two of the 1927 World Series for the New York Yankees. As an MLB umpire in 1941, calling another White Sox-Browns game, Pipgras ejected seventeen players from their bench.
Luciano wrote that Pipgras got a call from then-American League president Will Harridge the following morning. Harridge wanted to know, not without reason, whether Pipgras’s senses went on strike. When Pipgras assured him no, they hadn’t, Harridge could barely speak above a whisper: “But, George, seventeen? Seventeen?”
Pipgras is also the MLB umpire who let Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg talk him out of calling a September 30, 1945 game on account of darkness in the top of the ninth. Well, Greenberg told Pipgras, since he could still see the ball we’ll just see about that. Pipgras relented, and Greenberg whacked a game-winning, and ultimately pennant-winning, grand slam.
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.”
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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.
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.
“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.
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Re-reading his books now induces a smile tempered with sorrow for a lively, smart, and sensitive man killed by the enemy within himself.
