Toward the end of my second year in the big leagues, Sports Illustrated wrote an article in which it voted me the outstanding umpire in the National League. Al Barlick was spitting nickels, believe me. It was tough for him to take. And tough for a lot of the other veteran umpires as well.
Oh, did Barlick try to bury me. I went to the guy who wrote the article and pleaded with him, “Please, whatever you do, don’t ever do this again. You’ve gotten me buried.”
Fortunately for me, after two years of being tortured by Al Barlick, I was transferred to Jocko Conlan’s crew for the 1964 season. Jocko was a little guy, feisty, and he’d fight at the drop of a hat. He was a presence, which is a central theme when you talk about the great ones.
Jocko Conlan was an ex-ballplayer. He had played outfield for the Chicago White Sox, and after his playing days were over, he used to work the high steel in Chicago.
One day he was up on a tall skyscraper, and he said it was colder than shit. He just couldn’t believe how cold it was, and he was having trouble hanging on to the steel.
“Fuck this,” he said, and as he rode down he told himself, I’m going someplace where the sun shines.
He headed for Arizona, and when he arrived, the Cubs were playing the St. Louis Browns. When umpire Red Ormsby fell ill because of the heat, Jocko was asked if he would fill in.
“Jocko,” they said, “we won’t give you any shit.”
He went out, fell in love with it, and asked if he could get a job umpiring in the minor leagues. The next year he was umpiring in the minors. His major league umpiring career began in 1941, and I was part of his crew when he retired in 1965.
His most famous argument was with Leo Durocher. Leo was kicking dirt and accidentally kicked Jocko in the shins. Jocko, angered, kicked Leo in the shins. Jocko, the plate umpire, was wearing shin guards. Leo wasn’t.
Afterward Leo was heard to say, “You guys are wearing shin guards. What the fuck was I doing?”
Jocko was a sweetheart. I loved working with him. Jocko could charm anyone. He always had the writers around him, and that just pissed off Al Barlick. Jocko and Al hated each other. Jocko could make friends with anybody and Al couldn’t. Al always said Jocko made it to the Hall of Fame because of all the sportswriters he befriended. That’s not fair. Jocko was an excellent umpire, and of course he was behind the plate when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. That didn’t hurt.
Jocko was the funniest guy I ever umpired with. One time we were in Milwaukee when a beach ball went bouncing out past second base. Jocko was umpiring at second. Jocko ran over and grabbed the ball, which he stuck under his arm like it was a football. He went running off the field, putting out his left arm like he was going to straight-arm someone.
He wasn’t quite so funny when it came to getting the game started on time. Jocko was a stickler for making sure that if the game was supposed to start at 1:05, it didn’t start a minute later.
A music group was scheduled to play between games of a doubleheader in Milwaukee, and as a group of roadies came out onto the field and began setting up the instruments, Jocko went over to the general manager and warned him he better get the band off the field by the time the second game was supposed to start.
“Don’t worry,” said the GM. “We’ll be out of here.”
The umpires went back to our dressing room, and when the time came for us to start the second game, the group was still playing their World War II songs.
“Hey,” said Jocko to the general manager, “I told you I wanted these guys out of here when I came out.”
“Jocko,” the GM said, “this is their last song.”
“They just did their last song,” said Jocko, and he took his foot and kicked down the front row of stands on which the band was playing.
“Now get the hell off the stage,” he said.
Toward the end of his career, Jocko developed a serious drinking problem. He liked his toddies. He’d buy me a drink and I’d buy him two drinks. One year I had to work three plate jobs for him because he came down from his hotel room drunk, and we left him back at the hotel. I didn’t hold that against him. He was in his last year in the league, and it was hotter’n hell, so what was wrong with giving the old man a day off? That’s just the way I felt about him. Tony Venzon wasn’t quite so generous.
“I’m not working your fucking plate,” was what Tony told him. “You either show up, or it’s not going to get worked.”
After he said that, I had a talk with Lee Weyer, and Lee was also willing to work the plate in Jocko’s absence. Lee didn’t mind either.
His last year in the league, Jocko went out singing. Jocko and I would go to a bar—in Chicago there was a bar one block directly behind our hotel—and if it was a day game, he’d spend the evening drinking.
Jocko and I would sing a lot together. We had a lot of fun.
Jocko, who died in 1989, was very ill and in the hospital. Joy and I went and saw him. He had his gown on and we were walking down the aisle singing, “When your old wedding ring was new / and the love in your heart was true / I remember with pride as we stood side by side /what a beautiful picture you made as my bride.”
After Jocko retired, I became a member of Shag Crawford’s umpiring crew. I was with Shag for the next twelve years. Shag and I had similar upbringings. We came from poor backgrounds. Before he became an umpire, he drove a milk truck. He was a catcher in the Philadelphia A’s farm system but hurt his arm and wasn’t able to play, and he began umpiring in the sandlots. Johnny Stevens, an umpire from the Philadelphia area, saw him and recommended him. Like me, he never went to umpire school.
Shag was the best umpire I ever worked with. He had a great feel for the game and for his fellow umpires.
Shag was a real man and all Irish. He was a tough guy. A newspaperman would come into our locker room after a game and ask Shag a question like, “You’re the one who ejected him? Why did you do it?”
Shag would blow his Irish stack and call the guy every motherfucker in the world.
“Get the fuck out of here before I kill you,” he’d say.
This was when newspaper writers were electing the members of the Hall of Fame, and I do think it’s what kept him out.
Over the years, Shag and I had some hellacious arguments. I can recall a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. I don’t sleep on night flights, so I was talking to another member of our crew, Johnny Kibler, all the way to Chicago.
We were talking about umpiring. Shag was sitting there on the plane, drinking, until it finally put him to sleep.
When we got off the plane Shag was still a bit buzzed, and John and I were still talking baseball.
Shag attacked me, really jumped on my ass.
“What the fuck are you trying to do, take over my crew?” he asked.
“No, Shag,” I said. “God almighty, I would never do that.”
“I hear you talking to him,” he said. “I’ll tell you one thing. You better not be trying it anymore, because I’ll send you to help someone else. I don’t need you on my crew.”
“Okay, Shag.”
The next day I was walking around downtown Chicago before we were to leave for the ballpark. It was about ten in the morning. I had had breakfast, and I heard “Yo.” I looked across the street and it was Shag. He was waving for me to come over. I didn’t know whether he was still pissed; whether he wanted to take a swing at me.
But don’t get me wrong. I loved the guy. I dearly loved him. And here’s the reason: He called me over and so I went, still on the alert, and walked over to him.
He pointed to a pair of shoes in the window of a shoe store.
“What do you think of those?” he asked. “Are those me?”
“No,” I said, “not unless you’re going gay.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go, kid.”
And that was the end of the argument.
The great thing with Shag was when it was over, it was over. He never held a grudge as far as we were concerned. Shag could get mad at me, but we could always settle it.
Another aspect of Shag’s personality that I greatly admired was that he was always fair. I would find out that wasn’t necessarily true of all crew chiefs. During the time I was working under Shag, I was asked to join Tom Gorman’s crew for one three-game series. They were down a man and they decided to send me to Gorman, because they had umpired a tough series and they wanted to send a young umpire to go on Shag Crawford’s crew for a few days.
When I arrived in Atlanta, Gorman asked me, “Where did you work last night?” I told him I had worked the plate. Ordinarily when you leave one crew and go to another, you are assigned third base. It’s what Al Barlick or Shag Crawford would have done. Had Gorman done that, I wouldn’t have had to work home plate during the three-game series. But Tom told me to go to second base, and so for game three I had the plate.
After I returned to Shag’s crew, Shag said to me, “Harv, I watched the game on TV. Did that son of a bitch put you at second base?”
“Yeah, he did, Shag,” I said.
“That Irish cocksucker,” said Shag.
Here was one Irishman calling another one a cocksucker, and that was all right.
During that series I lost a lot of respect for Tom Gorman for another reason. Al Forman was behind the plate on this day, and he and Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh began arguing. Gorman and I walked over so we could be witnesses to whatever was going on.
As Gorman was walking toward him, Murtaugh turned around and said to him, “You get your fat ass back where you belong. I don’t want to fucking talk to you at all.”
“Calm down, Danny,” Gorman said to him.
Gorman not only didn’t eject Murtaugh, he took it and kept quiet.
I turned and walked away. I could only shake my head when he didn’t eject Murtaugh. Al Barlick taught me that they were to call us sir or Mr. Umpire, and if they called us anything else, we were to eject them.
In my early years of umpiring all three of my crew chiefs—Al Barlick, Jocko Conlan, and Shag Crawford—drank heavily. And I would drink along with them, though I was a terrible drinker.
When I was a boy, I was the batboy for the El Centro Imperials, and I can remember making deliveries to the umpires at their hotel. They were staying in a second-rate hotel in town, and the rooms didn’t have air-conditioning. All they had was a fan at the end of the hallway. You could open the transom to your room and the fan would blow some air around to cool you off a little, but not much. It was usually over 100 degrees in the summer. The fan was just moving the air. It was so hot the umpires couldn’t stay in their rooms during the evening. There was nothing to do and they had to get out of their rooms, so they went to the hotel bar and drank. You sat in the bar and sipped cold beer. And if you left the bartender a couple of tickets, many times he would pick up the tab. That’s where it came from. The guys all learned to drink in the minor leagues.
When I became an umpire in the minor leagues, there wasn’t a whole lot to do except go to the hotel bar, bullshit the evening away, and drink. It’s what you did. You got trapped into it.
About five years into my career, one day I realized that I had become a drunken bum. I finally realized that when you’re drinking and drinking hard, no one is going to stop you but yourself. I’d go out and get loaded with the guys, and half the time I’d wake up in the morning with my clothes still on. I finally said to myself, God almighty, what am I doing?
I finally said, This is freaking ridiculous.
There was another reason I was drinking so much in the major leagues. For the first time in my life, I had the money to do it. You have to remember: In the minor leagues you’re making so little money that you’re almost starving to death. Your wife has to work. You’re trying to pay your bills with what little money you’ve got.
Then all of a sudden you go to the major leagues and you’ve got a decent per diem—which you never had before—and you have more money than you know what to do with. You always ride with your partners in the cabs, and even as a first-year umpire I could see that we always got a deal at the hotels. We’d leave tickets to the game with the hotel managers, and they’d give us a really good deal for the rooms. With the money you had left, you could get drunk every night.
The first three and a half or four years, I drank too much. I realized it when I was going home. I was drunk calling my wife at home, and it couldn’t have been any fun. Later I asked her about it and she said it was terrible. So I did a good thing. I quit drinking, except once every two weeks or so, I’d have a glass of wine with my partners to let them know I still loved them.
After that, I put all of that energy into my umpiring, because I’m not a chaser. I told my wife when I asked her to be my bride, “I’ve chased all the women I want to chase. You’re the woman I want to be married to.” And I kept my promise to her. It’ll be fifty-three years this year.