Jim McKean, seen here with Detroit Tigers' Dean Palmer, left, and manager Larry Parrish, who has died at 73, certainly endured his share of castigation and defamation in a 27-year career as an arbiter in the major leagues. Along the way, he also earned a grudging admiration for the sagacity of his verdicts.DUANE BURLESON/The Associated Press
Jim McKean was that rarest of umpires: He was liked.
It is an umpire’s lot to be abused and to have dirt kicked on their polished shoes. Angry players call into question their paternity. Half-berserk managers stand so close as to reveal the contents of their most recent meal. Excitable fans exercise a thesaurus of vulgar and unprintable epithets.
Mr. McKean, who has died at 73, certainly endured his share of castigation and defamation in a 27-year career as an arbiter in the major leagues. Along the way, he also earned a grudging admiration for the sagacity of his verdicts.
“McKean is the best of our 24 umpires,” his boss said in 1976. “He has the perfect temperament. He can listen, he can dish it out, he can be serious and he can be humorous.”
Mr. McKean worked three World Series (1979, 1985, 1995), three All-Star Games (1980, 1982, 1993) and was on the field for 10 no-hitters, including a perfect game thrown by Len Barker against the Toronto Blue Jays in Cleveland on May 15, 1981.
He was calling balls and strikes when rookie Roy Halladay of the Blue Jays, in only his second big-league appearance, pitched 8⅔ innings of no-hit baseball before giving up a two-strike, pinch-hit home run to Bobby Higginson at the then-SkyDome in Toronto on Sept. 27, 1998. The pitcher retired the next batter to preserve a 2-1 lead and record his first career victory. (Mr. Halladay, who died in 2017, was posthumously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., last month.)
“My premise is, if the umpires are not good the game is not good,” Mr. McKean said a decade ago.
At 6-foot-2, 225 pounds, the nimble former athlete belied the image of the overweight umpire.
Among the notable games in his career, he was part of the crew when colleague Don Denkinger infamously blew a call at first base in the ninth inning of Game 6 of the 1985 World Series. On a brighter note, Mr. McKean, who spent most of his career in the American League, was assigned to home plate in the first regular-season interleague game on June 12, 1997, at Arlington, Tex.
He was the crew chief during a notorious incident in Toronto when Roberto Alomar spat on home-plate umpire John Hirschbeck. Later, after learning about Mr. Alomar’s comments on the death of Mr. Hirschbeck’s young son, the aggrieved umpire threatened the player and had to be restrained from seeking him out. Mr. McKean decided the angry ump would not work a game with Mr. Alomar on the field, a wise decision under the circumstance.
Mr. McKean was a rare major-league umpire to have been born in Canada. He only decided to wear an umpire’s traditional dark blue uniform after an injury ended his career as a professional football player.
James Gilbert McKean was born in in Montreal on May 26, 1945, to the former Georgina (Jean) Smith and George McKean, a chartered accountant. He grew up on leafy Mariette Avenue in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, where he was the top athlete at Monklands High while starring on the basketball court, the baseball diamond and the football gridiron. He was also a scratch golfer.
As a 17-year-old, the right-hander threw a perfect six-inning game for an amateur youth team as he struck out 11 of 18 batters he faced.
He earned 35 scholarship offers from American colleges for his play with the junior NDG Maple Leafs amateur football team. He rejected them all to turn professional with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League, becoming a third-string quarterback at the age of 19.
“The boy is a wonderful prospect,” Montreal Gazette columnist Dink Carroll wrote, “but he should be about three years away.”
He shared punting duties for the Alouettes for two seasons before signing with Regina as a punter, defensive back and third-string pivot behind the great Ron Lancaster in 1966. He was cut from the team shortly before it went on to win the Grey Cup.
Mr. McKean patrolled the Mexico pavilion at Expo 67 as a security guard before spending the winter as a referee in junior-hockey games in Ontario. A poor skater, he judged himself unlikely to qualify for the National Hockey League.
At a Montreal Expos game in 1969, he approached umpire Billy Williams about the profession. The veteran ump had two questions: Do you have a criminal record? Do you need glasses? When Mr. McKean answered in the negative, he was advised to attend an umpire’s school in Florida. He proved there to be a natural at the position, though he found it an adjustment to go from athlete to official.
“You’re the big star, everybody’s patting you on the butt while you’re doing well,” he once said, “and then in officiating they’re all screaming at you.”
After leaving the field in 2001, he worked as a supervisor of umpires. He later was a popular analyst for television broadcasts for ESPN and other sports channels.
In 2004, the umpire was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at St. Marys, Ont. He was also enshrined in the Quebec Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Florida State League Hall of Fame in November.
Mr. McKean died of cardiorenal syndrome on Jan. 24 at Bayfront hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., while recovering from an infection contracted while in hospital for a kidney ailment. He leaves sons Jamie McKean, a Florida lawyer who was second baseman and captain of the national champion University of Tampa Spartans in 2006, and Brett McKean, a law-enforcement officer and former outfielder for the Spartans. He also leaves his girlfriend, Dodie Forsyth, and a granddaughter. He was predeceased by his wife, the former Ann Beatrice Carey, known as Annie, an emergency nurse from Montreal, who died of liver cancer in 2007 at age 55. He was also predeceased by half-brother Ian (Mac) McKean, a U.S. Air Force veteran who died in Texas in 2005.
Mr. McKean only learned as an adult that he had a brother from his father’s previous marriage when Mac contacted him while he was in Arlington, Tex., to umpire a Texas Rangers game.
News of the death led many baseball writers to praise the umpire’s honesty, graciousness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.
Baseball is a game of statistics, so it is worth noting that in his career, Mr. McKean ejected 62 players, coaches and managers, as well as one cheerleader. In a 1993 game at SkyDome in Toronto, Mr. McKean gave the heave-ho to plushy avian mascot BJ Birdy for inciting the fans. The mascot had grabbed his nose – er, beak – to indicate the olfactory offence caused by an umpire’s call.