An umpire's tale

All baseball fans hate umpires at one time or another. On occasion, that hatred lasts for years or decades. I still haven't gotten over Larry Barnett's failure to call interference on the Reds' Ed Armbrister when he collided with Carlton Fisk in Game 3 of the '75 World Series.

Yet a lot of umpires also seem like the guys you'd want to have a few beers with, or invite to your backyard barbecue. Not just because they're probably pretty good guys, but because the stories they could tell are priceless.

On the MLB.com umpires' page is a link to a series of Q&A from fans. Tim McClelland, a 25-year MLB veteran who'll be calling balls and strikes behind the plate in Denver tonight for the Rockies-Padres wild card tiebreaker, gave a case-in-point answer to the following question:

As an umpire, what's the funniest thing anyone has ever said to you during an argument?

McClelland: Oh boy. A long time ago at a game in Triple-A, Jack McKeon was the manager in Omaha. He came out and said "I know you got that call right, but I have a big, full house here and my team isn't playing very well. Can we just stand out here and argue a little bit? I am just going to stand here and bob my head and raise my hands a little bit, but I am not mad at you. I just want to put on a little bit of a show. When I'm done you run me and I'll go to the dugout."

I said, "That's fine, whatever you need to do, go ahead and do it." So I told him I had a good dinner last night at a restaurant and asked if he's ever been there. He said no, and started kicking the dirt and raising his hands and said "but maybe I should try it out sometime! Well, I think this was enough, why don't you run me now." So I did and he walked away.