"Dolly" Stark

Man in Blue 

 

In a moment of confession, a great umpire once said, "Our greatest reward is silence." This was his way of saying that in baseball, one of the finest spectator sports, the only real reward of the man in the blue suit comes when no one is aware of his presence, his work, his ability and his fairness.

But there was one umpire who in his own way made baseball history. He was lauded as one of the finest umps in a demanding profession. He was given a car by a group of admirers; he won a title as the "Best Umpire" of a particular year and he was not an anonymous figure on a ball field studded with stars, for he was a star in his own right.

His name was Albert Stark, better known to all baseball fans as "Dolly" Stark.

The man who calls the plays seems to the baseball fan to be above the crowd, a man who is mysterious. Little is known about the ump. What's more, hardly anyone cares about him. He is the fellow they scream at, work their emotions on. When a home town player gets a bad break, they scream, "Kill the ump!" When a favorite pitcher, though wild, hears the ump call balls instead of strikes, the fans roar in unison against the ump. The umpire is the whipping boy of all the dictators and evil rulers and people in the world.

And the chief whipping boy in the National League for