Tim Ellsworth

From “More Tales from the Dugout: More of the Greatest True Baseball Stories of All Time,” by Mike Shannon:

Besides offering its fans a good brand of baseball at very affordable ticket prices, the Frontier League has always been peopled by its share of characters, none more interesting than Max McLeary, who umpires in the league despite having lost an eye in an accident. A one-eyed umpire sounds like a joke, and McLeary has certainly heard them all (and then some) about him and his brethren in blue having bad eyesight, like “Hey, ump, you’re blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other one!” Yet McLeary tries to use his handicap to his advantage by outworking, outpreparing, and outhustling everybody else, and he is actually regarded as one of the very best arbiters in the league. He also has a great sense of humor and loves to tell stories about his glass eye that show he doesn’t take himself and his unique predicament too seriously. His best story is the one called “The Mask Story.”

“My first year in the league I was umpiring in Chillicothe on the next-to-the-last night of the season,” says Max, “and one of my buddies, a guy named Bob Hughes, had come along to the game with me. The visiting team was batting in the fifth inning when the batter fouled one back. The catcher didn’t even get his glove on the ball, and it came straight back, and went through the bars of my mask!

“The ball actually got stuck in my mask. And I mean it was stuck! Nobody could pull the ball out of my mask with his hands, and it took two of the strongest players on the Paints to hammer the ball loose with a bat. We figured out later that the ball had to have been tipped perfectly with the bat and that it had to have hit the mask dead-on perfectly. It was just a freak accident.

“Of course, when the ball when through my mask, it hit me in the face. I went down like I’d been shot. My nose was broken, there was blood all over my face, and I had a concussion. I remember the Chillicothe catcher standing over me, saying, ‘Max is bleeding!’ He was saying that to the Paints’ trainer and the team doctor, who were rushing onto the field. Then I passed out.

“My buddy Bob Hughes was coming back from the concession stands when this happened. At first he thought the batter had gotten plunked, but then he realized that it was me on the ground being attended to. The medical people were really worried. They didn’t think I was going to make it there for a while. There’s no trauma center out there in Ross County, so they called Columbus, the state capitol about an hour north of Chillicothe, and had an emergency helicopter on standby.

“The trainer, who didn’t know me real well yet, took out one of those small flashlights, and when he shined it in my eye, he didn’t get the reaction he was looking for. He said, ‘We’re losing him! His eye is glassing over!’

“And Bob Hughes, who’s standing behind the backstop with a Pepsi in one hand and a bag of popcorn in the other, shouts, ‘Check his other eye!’”