Who Called Randy Johnson's Pitches In 1993?

I literally have about a dozen different things that I want to write about right now, including three that have been sitting in open tabs on my browser as reminders since Saturday. Right now, however, I figured I'd address a story that caught my eye earlier today, and attempt a little detective work to get to the bottom of things.

Every week for the last seventeen years, I have received a copy of Sports Illustrated in the mail. As it has become easier to access information online, however, my reading habits have changed. Where once I used to get the magazine a Thursday afternoon and read it by Thursday night, making sure to save Rick Reilly's column for last, I now get it on Thursday afternoon and read it...whenever I get to it, really. The reason is simple: most of what I actually read, the letters and feature stories, isn't extraordinarily time-sensitive, so I can leave it until I have a few minutes. Today, for example, I misplaced the book I had been reading, Stephen King's newest collection of short stories, so I grabbed SI.

The first thing I came to worth reading, besides the letters and a short obituary for Wayman Tisdale, was a story about Randy Johnson and his road to three hundred wins. I like baseball and have recently had conversations about The Big Unit with a couple friends, so I read it.

Near the beginning, Dave Valle told a story that I guess was supposed to highlight Johnson's dominance in the early 1990s. It went like this:

So dominant was Johnson that before a game in 1993, the home plate umpire told Mariners catcher Dave Valle, "They don't even need you with Randy pitching."

"What are you talking about?" replied Valle, who would not name the ump.

"He's so good they don't need you. Let me call the pitches tonight."

"I let him call every pitch," recalls Valle, to whom the umpire whispered pitches under his breath.

An overpowering Johnson went the distance in a Mariners victory.

Before deciding to post, I did a Google search for "Randy Johnson, umpire." Two results came up regarding this story - one from a blog that basically said, "This story HAS to be made up...right?" and another that did some of the same leg work I had also done, and will talk about in a minute. The point is, this is a pretty big deal. This is an umpire, the guy who is supposed to be an impartial arbiter, directly injecting himself into the events on the field.

This, in my opinion, is a much bigger deal than Alex Rodriguez tipping pitches to opposing middle infielders. Pitch tipping has gone on forever in baseball - I just read Peter Golenbeck's history of the Red Sox. At one point, he wrote about how when Jimmie Foxx, a well-liked player around the league was chasing Ruth's homerun record in the 1930s, pitchers would give him easy pitches to hit, trying to help him out. I'm almost positive I've never heard of an umpire trying to do something like this before (although there's this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I once read something similar. If anyone can help me out, please do so).

So I decided that this story deserved some attention. To Baseball-Reference!

1. The game was a complete game victory for Johnson.

Randy Johnson pitched ten complete games in 1993, winning seven of them. The dates and umpires for those games are as follows:

April 21 – Jim McKean
April 26 – Tim Welke
May 16 – Dale Scott
August 20 – Ken Kaiser
September 5 – Joe Brinkman
September 21 – Ed Hickox
October 1 – Drew Coble

2. The umpire said, "Let me call the pitches tonight."

It's a pretty common thing for people in baseball to refer to every game as "tonight." It's one of those little mind-melting things that comes from playing 162 games and traveling all over the country in a six month period. For the sake of the argument, however, I'm going to assume that the umpire was actually referring to a night game. If that's the case, we lose two day games and the list looks like this:

April 21 – Jim McKean
April 26 – Tim Welke
August 20 – Ken Kaiser
September 21 – Ed Hickox
October 1 – Drew Coble

3. Valle refused to name the umpire.

Most likely, Valle didn't want to name names because he realized this could become a complicated story and he didn't want to make life any more difficult than necessary for the umpire in question. Another possibility is that he didn't want to name names because the umpire in the story is still active and might be subject to some sort of censure by Major League Baseball (well, assuming MLB was willing to punish people for past sins).

There's a good chance that Valle was protecting the reputation of someone like Ken Kaiser or Drew Coble, respected umpires who would only be hurt by having their names mentioned in connection with a story of questionable ethics. I'm more inclined to believe that it's the latter, that the umpire is still active, which leaves the list looking like this:

April 26 - Tim Welke
September 21 - Ed Hickox

This is all pure speculation on my part, of course, and relies on Valle's story being truthful from the start. I hope he's exaggerating quite a bit. But if Major League Baseball cares at all about integrity, it should look into this some more and address it, even if only internally.