https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/sports/baseball/ken-kaiser-dead-colorful-american-league-umpire.amp.html
Ken Kaiser, a no-nonsense umpire who was unafraid over his colorful 23-year major league career to confront players and managers, but who lost his job during a misguided labor action by his union, died on Tuesday in Rochester. He was 72.
His son John said the cause was most likely congestive heart failure. Kaiser also had diabetes.
Kaiser called more than 2,800 regular season games in the American League and was part of the umpiring crews for the 1987 and 1997 World Series and the 1991 All-Star Game.
An old-school man in blue, he tried to control the game through force of personality and command of the rule book. He could be tough, funny, loud and belligerent. Ron Luciano, a fellow umpire, once likened Kaiser’s physique — 6-foot-2 and nearly 300 pounds — to a “barrel on which two arms had been stuck on backwards.”
David Fisher, who collaborated on Kaiser’s autobiography, “Planet of the Umps: A Baseball Life From Behind the Plate” (2003), said in a telephone interview: “Kenny was big, boisterous, tough and arrogant. He walked with a strut. And he took nothing from nobody — never.”
In umpiring school, Kaiser said, he learned that players and managers were the enemy, although his son said that he developed friendships with players like George Brett, Nolan Ryan and Don Mattingly.
Another lesson: “Whatever call you make is the only right call,” he wrote in his memoir. “Never explain, never apologize.”
Like many umpires, Kaiser detested Earl Weaver, the diminutive, cantankerous manager of the Baltimore Orioles, who frequently battled umpires. He also loathed Eddie Murray, a power-hitting first baseman who played for the Orioles and other teams. Near the end of his career, Murray protested a strike-two call by Kaiser.
In his memoir, Kaiser recalled his response: “We ain’t talked in 15 years. Don’t start now.”
When Murray tossed his bat in the air after Kaiser had called him out on the third strike, Kaiser ejected him (one of 75 players or managers he tossed out in his career). Murray, a future Hall of Famer, challenged him to a fight. Kaiser agreed, telling him, “Eddie, you can even bring your bat with you because the way you’re swinging this year, you couldn’t hit me with it anyway.”
Umpiring was not an easy life, especially during Kaiser’s years in the minor leagues and the early ones after he was called up to the American League. Salaries were modest, the travel was grueling, the long seasons took him away from his wife and children for weeks at a time, and umpires generally could trust only one another.
“An umpire will only take criticism from another umpire,” he told The Washington Post in 1978. “It’s your job to change other people’s minds, to bend them to your way of thinking.” In the off-season, he said, his family told him that he could calm down and stop telling them what to do.
Kenneth John Kaiser Jr. was born in Rochester on July 26, 1945. His father was a military policeman in North Africa during World War II and later became a security guard at Eastman Kodak. His mother, the former Annette Moyer, ran a television repair shop.
In 1964, after graduating from high school, Kaiser tagged along with a friend who was heading south to Al Somers’s umpiring school in Daytona Beach, Fla. — attracted more by the warm weather than by any clear ambition to calls balls and strikes.
“Umpire school was definitely not part of my fantasy,” he wrote. “I had never umpired a game of baseball in my life.”
And while he did not excel in school, he got a job in the Florida Rookie League, beginning a 13-year odyssey through increasingly higher tiers of the minor leagues. “I thought about quitting 50,000 times, like we all do,” he told The Post. “In my last year in the minors, I was making $650 — a month, not a week — that’s for five months a year.”
He moved up to the American League in 1977 and called his first game that April between the California Angels and the Seattle Mariners at the Kingdome in Seattle. His first ejection came that September, when he thumbed out Ken Henderson, a Texas Rangers outfielder.
Becoming a major league umpire ended a two-year off-season stint as a professional wrestler. Kaiser had donned an all-black outfit and a mask to become a bad guy known as the Hatchet. (He toted a hatchet into the ring with him.)
He never won a match, he said. He recalled that Haystacks Calhoun, who weighed in at around 500 pounds, once “bounced off the rope and flopped on top of me.” In another match, Kaiser’s opponent unmasked him, revealing his true identity to Eric Gregg, another baseball umpire, who was in attendance. Gregg was so surprised, he dropped his popcorn.
Kaiser’s wrestling detour led to long friendships with the wrestling personalities Big John Studd, Mr. Perfect and Bobby Heenan, known as the Brain. “Those relationships lasted because they loved hanging out with my dad,” John Kaiser said.
He would adopt another mask — one that protected his face when he worked behind home plate — to call 707 of his 2,815 regular-season games.
But he lost his job in 1999 when he and more than 50 other umpires submitted letters of resignation as part of a strategy conceived by their union leader, Richie Phillips, to force Major League Baseball to negotiate a better labor agreement. Twenty-two of the resignations were accepted, including Kaiser’s. And while several of the men were rehired, Kaiser was not among them.
“He never really got over that,” Ted Barrett, an umpire who was a friend of Kaiser’s, said in a telephone interview. “He and the others didn’t get to go out on their own terms. He resented baseball for the way he was treated.”
It took five years after his resignation for Kaiser to receive severance pay, reported to be $400,000.
In addition to his son, Kaiser is survived by his companion, Cheryl Bogner; his daughter, Lauren Kaiser Nelson; and his half brother, David. His marriage to the former Brenda Coccia ended in divorce.
Kaiser conceded that he was not perfect at his job, something that he was regularly reminded of by fans, players and managers. But he insisted that he had never lost control of a game.
“If I didn’t have the respect of the players and managers, I definitely had their attention on the field,” he wrote. “When I was on the field, they knew that if anyone was going to be intimidated, it wasn’t going to be me.”