They Called Me God

by Doug Harvey

  “To third base,” he said sheepishly.

  “Where did he throw?”

  “To third base.” He paused. “Goddamnit, Harvey.”

  “Get away from me, Buddy,” I told him.

  And Buddy walked back to the dugout.

  — 3 —

  One of the other managers I had in the California League was Dave Bristol, one of the real assholes of the world. Johnny Edwards, a catcher who went up to the Cincinnati Reds with him, was hitting when the opposing pitcher hit Edwards in the head with a fastball. Edwards went down like a big old oak tree. Bam, he hit the deck.

  I walked over to see how Edwards was. Bristol came over, slapped Edwards in the face, and said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” Edwards said.

  “Don’t you want to have him looked at?” I asked Bristol.

  “You mind your goddamn business,” was his reply.

  Edwards walked to first base.

  I turned around and walked back to my position in the infield, because we were working a two-man system.

  In the middle of the inning I called time. Edwards had fallen to his knees and was obviously in trouble. He was taken to the hospital, and it turned out he had a bad concussion. In those days, if you weren’t dizzy, you played. But that was typical of Bristol.

  — 4 —

  It was in the minor leagues that I began to develop some of my rules for how managers and players should conduct themselves with respect to arguing with umpires. One of my most hard-and-fast rules was that I would not tolerate a manager or player calling me a name.

  Managers and players know well the magic words when it comes to getting tossed. But my feeling was that being an umpire is like being a policeman in civilized society. You don’t go around calling policemen names unless you want to get arrested. I wanted managers and players to understand that you don’t call the umpires names, either.

  One day, when I was umpiring in the California League, there was a close play, and the manager of the team came out to argue with me. After he had his say, I told him he had better get away from me.

  “You’re going to get tossed if you don’t,” I warned him.

  He turned and started to walk away, and as he did, he put his hand behind him and made a shooing motion. In a voice loud enough for me to hear, he said, “You’re a fucking hot dog.”

  And I tossed him from the game.

  He stopped and came back to me and asked, “What the hell was that for?”

  “I don’t call you names,” I said. “You don’t call me a hot dog.”

  “All I said was that you were a hot dog,” he answered.

  “That’s a name,” I said. “You’re gone.”

  After a while the managers and players came to understand that if you called me a name—and it didn’t have to be a swearword—you’d be tossed.

  — 5 —

  After two years in the Class C California League, I was offered a chance to go up to Class B, the Carolina League. I had gotten a $25-a-month raise in pay to $275 a month, and the Carolina League wanted me to take a pay cut.

  “Why should I do that?” I asked.

  “Because it’s a promotion to Class B,” I was told.

  “I don’t give a damn what it is,” I said. “My mother lives here in California, and I’m not going across the United States to make less money.”

  “You’ll never make it with that attitude,” I was told.

  I should have bet him that I would.

  CHAPTER 6

  JOY

  — 1 —

  During my second year in the California League I met the love of the rest of my life. We met at a ballpark, Sam Lynn Stadium in Bakersfield, California. The ballpark was off one of the main drags of Bakersfield near the river. It faced west, which was really terrible for afternoon ball games.

  I was standing at first base, and between innings I was looking into the stands. I saw this pair of blue hips walking up the stands with her back to me, wearing a blue pair of shorts and a white peasant blouse. I watched this girl carrying a tray, and when she turned around and came back toward me, I gulped.

  Holy cow, I thought. That’s not too bad.

  Even though I couldn’t get her out of my mind, I didn’t mess up the ball game, and the next day I went looking for her. I learned that she was single, her name was Joy Glascock, and she was working at the ballpark selling scorecards and seat cushions before the game and refreshments during the game. She was making money to go back to Mills College, a hoity-toity all-girls college in Oakland.

  When I approached her, she was saying good-bye to one of the other girls working with her. She was straightening her money, getting it organized for when the game started.

  She was standing by a light pole, and when I saw she was about to walk away, I stuck out my arm to keep her there.

  I made up a story to get her attention.

  “Joy, what’s it been?” I said to her. “Six years? How have you been? I didn’t hardly recognize you.”

  She had no idea who I was, of course, and I kept on like we knew each other. She said hello, and I said, “I have to go to work. How about you and me getting reacquainted? Let’s have a cup of coffee after the ball game.”

  She agreed to meet me for coffee.

  Joy checked around and found out who I was. She knew she’d been scammed. And when the game was over, I looked around and she was nowhere to be found. Apparently she had gone home. What I didn’t know was that she had gotten a ride with her sister, who also worked at the park. When it took me awhile after the game to get ready, she decided I wasn’t coming, and because the ballpark wasn’t in the nicest part of town and because it was a long way home, she left with her sister.

  The next night I accosted her again, and I jumped all over her because I wasn’t used to being stood up. She apologized, lamely explaining that she just hadn’t waited long enough and so she went home.

  “I’ll be glad to go out with you tonight,” she said.

  And then I stood her up.

  We were supposed to meet after the game. Her sister left, and she hung around. Everyone dressed and left, and the lights in the park were going out. I could see her leaving the ballpark, walking alone down the road toward a little honky-tonk bar where she intended to call her sister to come and pick her up.

  When I pulled up beside her, she was mad as a wet hen.

  “So how does it feel?” I shouted out the window.

  And there, in the middle of the parking lot, Joy and I had a flaming fight.

  Finally I convinced her to get in the car.

  Once we got over the fight, we had a really good time.

  That’s how it started.

  We began dating, and I told Joy I had been married before and wasn’t interested in getting married again.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I’ve just broken an engagement with a guy, and I’m not interested in getting serious either.”

  We made an agreement that we were just going to date for companionship and fun, that we weren’t going to get serious, because she was going back to college and I was traveling almost every day all across the state of California, umpiring.

  I told her I was on an eight-year plan for my career. I figured going from C ball, to B ball, to A ball, to AA ball, to AAA ball, and then to the major leagues would take about eight years, and if I didn’t make it by then, I would do something else.

  Before expansion there were only sixteen major league teams. There were perhaps thirty-five umpires in each league. Back then, some umpires worked in the minor leagues for twenty years. It isn’t like it is today, when after a certain number of years they boot you out. To get one of those spots someone had to die, almost. Plus the fact nobody was making any money after they made it. I think the top umpires were getting paid $17,000 a year in the majors when I first arrived. It was barely a living.

  A year later I woke up one morning and said to her, “I better break this thing off.”r />
  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m getting serious.”

  “I am too,” was what she said.

  What was ironic was that Joy had refused to date the minor league baseball players because they made no money, and for the most part their prospects were bleak. Being her father’s daughter, she was looking for a husband with prospects. If only she had known what she was getting into! Even if I made it, this was no path to riches. Fortunately for me, Joy and I came from families where it was honorable to go out to work, make a living, and save and be careful how you spent your money. As we dated and got to know each other, we found we had a lot in common; a lot of value systems in common. She went back to college and I went on with my umpiring, and that winter I arrived at her home in Bakersfield and proposed.

  Joy was a lovely girl. Her mother had me over to their house enough for me to know Joy was a good cook. She was in her last year of college, so I knew she was intelligent. I also knew she was industrious. When I met her she worked daytime for her dad at his shop, and at night she worked at the ballpark to help pay her college expenses. Her dad was paying her tuition. She had to pay the rest.

  When we got engaged, she said she wanted to quit school to be with me, but I made her go back and finish.

  “I have my schedule, and you have yours,” I said. “Get your education.”

  She went on to graduate from Mills College, and we got married a year later.

  Joy likes to say I married her for her money, because when we got married I had a hundred dollars and she had two hundred.

  I told her, “Joy, I’ve played around and had a lot of fun. If you will have me for a husband, I promise you I don’t need to mess around. My dad wasn’t true to my mom, but I believe in marriage, and I will be true to you.”

  And that’s the way we lived for more than half a century.

  The marriage took place in Bakersfield, Joy’s hometown, just after the baseball season ended. We had a Methodist wedding. The morning before the ceremony I went out and played golf with my brother Nolan, Jim Pyle, my best friend, and my father-in-law-to-be, who owned a lumber supply company. We were on the tenth hole when someone came racing out onto the golf course and told my father-in-law-to-be, “You better get your ass back to the house and dress.” I can only think the message came from my future mother-in-law. He left. I was playing the best game of golf I had all year. I was nailing every shot, and pretty soon Nolan said, “Doug, I better go. I have things I have to do, and I have to pick up our other brothers.”

  Off he went. Jim and I were determined to finish the round. We almost made it. When we arrived at the eighteenth tee, we had only thirty-five minutes until the ceremony was scheduled to begin, and even though the church was on the same side of Bakersfield as the golf course, my motel room was on the other side of town.

  Jim—who was to be the best man—and I busted our hump, speeding across town and speeding back, and we walked into the church with exactly four minutes to spare. Talk about grace under pressure. They started playing “Here Comes the Bride,” and it wasn’t long before I was married to a wonderful woman. She couldn’t have been any better.

  Joy had said to me, “You can invite up to fifty people.” I didn’t know fifty people in Bakersfield. I was from San Diego and I wasn’t that sociable. I invited two managers from the California League. One was a good guy, honest and truthful. When he would come out to talk, he wasn’t throwing crap at you just to get you mad. When I asked my wife-to-be if it would be all right to invite him, she agreed.

  The other manager, whose last name was Perry, was the manager of the Dodgers’ farm team. He was called the Little Buffalo, and I knew I was going to eject him one out of three times. He and I just did not get along.

  “Send the son of a bitch an invitation,” I told Joy. I never thought he’d come. I invited him as a joke, but the little prick showed up. As he came down the reception line, he told Joy, “I hope you can do something with that meathead. I can’t do anything with him.”

  Joy and I drank champagne, and we headed out for a five-hour drive to Lake Tahoe. I was driving on a two-lane highway, and after about an hour we were in Fresno and I was too drunk to continue.

  “This is it,” I told her. “This is as far as I can go. No more.”

  I pulled in and we stayed the night. The next day we continued on to Reno.

  I had good friends living in Reno. Their sons were batboys for the Reno Silver Sox, and they would come to the games and take us out to dinner afterward. When you’re getting a salary of $212 a month and $180 a month in expense money for room and board, a good meal is a luxury. You have four helpings of everything, because in the minor leagues you’re running half-starved.

  After arriving in Reno we checked into a motel. We were having dinner with our friends the next night, and so Joy and I took $5 each and went into a casino to gamble a little bit. I was thirty and Joy was twenty-two. She had such a lovely face and was so fresh-looking that after we walked into the casino, security guards came over to us and hauled us into the office. They accused me of transporting underage girls over the Nevada border for indecent purposes. And they were deadly serious about it.

  Neither one of us had our IDs. We had left them in the hotel room, and they wouldn’t believe our story that we had just gotten married. They wouldn’t believe Joy was twenty-two years old. They were sure she was a minor, that she was far too young to be gambling, and that I intended no good as far as she was concerned.

  I did what I could to convince them I was an umpire in the California League.

  “Goddamn, get a baseball fan in here. He can identify me.”

  I told them to call my friends, the parents of the batboys.

  They called, and my friend assured the security guards that Joy was in fact twenty-two years old and that I wasn’t smuggling young girls across the border.

  That’s the way we started our marriage.

  After the guards released us, Joy and I took the $5 we each brought and gambled. Between the two of us we had two hundred and some dollars, and two hundred of it was Joy’s. We used that money to rent hotel rooms and pay for gas from San Diego to Bakersfield to Tahoe and back to San Diego.

  When we returned to San Diego I went to a fellow who sold real estate. I asked him, “What’s the chance of renting me one of your apartments?”

  “I can do that,” he said.

  “Here is my card,” I said. “This is who I am. I don’t have any money. I can’t make a down payment. Will you put my wife and me up long enough for us to earn some money and pay you?”

  He said he would.

  I had worked for the Aztec Security Company when I was going to San Diego State, and I went back to the owner and asked him if he could use me as a security guard. He gave me a job working from eight in the evening until eight in the morning, guarding motor homes that were sitting outside Balboa Stadium. They were having a show there, and he needed someone to walk around and check the doors of the motor homes. Joy got in touch with some real estate people and got a job going in and cleaning out rooms when tenants moved out of their apartments. Together we made enough money to pay rent and have a few bucks in our pockets.

  For most of my childhood I was short and scrawny, and it was only when I became college age that I grew to my present height of six foot two. When I met Joy, inside I still felt as though I was five foot four, and she had to explain to me, “You’re a large person. You have to change the way you see yourself.”

  It’s been fifty-two years now. I couldn’t do without her. She’s a wonderful woman.

  — 2 —

  In 1961 I was umpiring winter-league ball in Arizona—the Instructional League. It was like our honeymoon. Four clubs were down there, and there were four umpires working two games a day. There was a Texas League ump there and he was holding court. I had just gotten married three months before, and my wife, Joy, was there with me.

  “There was never an umpire who was taken out of
one of these Instructional Leagues in baseball,” he said. “I’ve been to six of these. I know that no one is going to move ahead, so I advise you to go through the motions, collect the money, put in your month and a half, and get the hell out of here.”

  On the ride home my wife knew something was bothering me.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Joy,” I said, “I don’t know how to umpire like that man was talking about.”

  “My first advice to you as your wife,” she said, “is that you should umpire the way you know how.”

  — 3 —

  In 1961 I was umpiring in Phoenix in the Instructional League for rookies. In Arizona I continued to study the rules for at least an hour every day. Joy helped me. She would hold the rule book and I would recite the rules verbatim, including commas, periods, and parentheses. I was really focused on making it to the major leagues, and I was hoping with hard work, determination, and luck that the right people would notice. I knew scouts were there to see the ballplayers, but we found out that they also noticed the umpires.

  Some of the Instructional League umpires had been there for years, and one of them said to me, “Why are you knocking yourself out? Nobody ever gets promoted from this league. We’re just here to pick up our paychecks.”

  That was also true of some of the ballplayers, I noticed. They knew they were outclassed and were there for the paycheck. As far as I was concerned, that was no way to be. I intended for my stay in Arizona to be an opportunity to better myself.

  Earl Weaver was managing the Baltimore Orioles rookies. The Orioles had the bases loaded and one out, and the batter hit a fly ball that the right fielder came in on. While he was waiting under it, I called the batter out, citing the infield-fly rule. When the outfielder dropped the ball, I still maintained that the batter was out. Earl came out to argue.