Will Leitch is the author of six books — including the new novel “The Time Has Come” — a contributing editor at New York magazine and was founder of the sports website Deadspin.
Don Denkinger, who died last week at the age of 86, was an American League umpire who worked four World Series and the infamous “Bucky Bleeping Dent” game in 1978, but no one thought about any of that upon learning of his death. We all thought instead of Denkinger’s notorious mistake in the 1985 World Series, when, in the ninth inning of Game 6, with the Cardinals holding a 1-0 lead and just three outs from a championship, he called Royals pinch-hitter Jorge Orta safe at first base despite Cardinals reliever Todd Worrell clearly reaching the bag before him.
The Cardinals dugout exploded — in his autobiography years later, Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog, who would quickly become the first manager ejected from a World Series game in a decade, wrote that he should have pulled his team off the field right then and there — and everything imploded: The Royals scored two runs in the ninth to win, they won 11-0 the next night (before Game 7, Herzog groused: “We got that guy behind the plate tomorrow. We got about as much chance of winning as a monkey”) and Denkinger’s name, and his call, were etched in baseball history. Broadcasters Jim Palmer and Al Michaels said of the call:
Palmer: “Looks like he was out.”
Michaels: “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”
Palmer: “Only in one person’s mind.”
Denkinger would find out for sure after the game, when then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth stopped him as he left the field. “Did I get it right?” Denkinger asked. Ueberroth shook his head. “No.”
Nothing else Denkinger had done in his life, and nothing he would do, would eclipse that moment. The angry, often-threatening calls and letters he received — which started when two St. Louis DJ’s gave out his address and phone number on the air — hounded him the rest of his life. The FBI investigated multiple death threats against Denkinger and his family for years. The name “Denkinger” became shorthand for a blown call, in sports other than just baseball. Denkinger and his family were open with how much it affected their lives. And it did, after all, lead his obituary.
As Denkinger was fully aware, this all could have been avoided. Today, it would be. “I just know that if the same thing happened now,” he said in 2014, “they’d get it right on replay and it’d be over with.”
Not only would the Orta play go down differently today — an anonymous official in a booth would buzz down that he was out, the Cardinals might have won their second World Series in four years and Hamm would have to find a another jersey to wear alongside Sudeikis and Rudd — but the very fact that it would go down differently has made Denkinger’s fate an impossibility for future umpires. Denkinger’s immortality — he and Herzog would later make peace, but Herzog, who will turn 92 this year and is as ornery as ever, still brings up the call at every opportunity — will never be repeated. That sounds like good news, and in some ways, it certainly is. But one of the primary lessons of sports — a lesson umpires and referees for centuries, good and bad, have consistently taught us — is that life is not in fact fair, and it’s how we react to that unfairness that reveals our character. As lousy as Denkinger’s call was, it was not the reason the Cardinals lost the 1985 World Series.
The reason the Cardinals lost that Series was how they reacted to the call: Herzog blew his top; the Cardinals made an error on the next play; the entire team melted down; they were shut out 11-0 in Game 7. That’s why they lost; not because Denkinger missed the call. As a once-9-year-old Cardinals fan watching that game, it took me nearly 40 years to finally admit this aloud. (Please don’t tell my dad.) That stress test, of processing the unfairness of the world and being resilient and steadfast in response, is a test the Cardinals failed. This is one of the best lessons sports has for us.
And it’s one that robot umpires will eradicate. If, as is widely anticipated, Major League Baseball moves to an automated strike zone at some point in the coming years, Don Denkinger will be remembered as one of the last umpires we ever learned this from. Yelling “kill the umpire” has been a staple of baseball since Norman Rockwell was drawing pictures of umps and managers screaming at each other on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. But in an age of technology, we might do it: We might actually kill the umpire.
But again: Are we sure this is good? The umpire Ron Luciano once joked, “If they create a robot umpire that calls every strike exactly right, hitters will never let it survive. Whenever it makes a call against them, they will beat it to death with a bat.”
A world without Don Denkingers is an oddly sterile, and even amoral, future. Will having a robot to blame for our failures, rather than ourselves, make us better sports fans? Or worse ones? After all, if you’re going to be furious at something, is it really better if it’s a robot?
Nobody writes an obituary for a robot. And nobody will regret how they treated the robot when he is gone.
