Posted: 4:14 am
June 29, 2008
MY FAVORITE person in sports right now is not a baseball player, not a basketball rookie, not a manager on the way in or a coach on the way out. He is not one of those soccer players bouncing their way through the Euro Cup, or any of the recognizable names that have been dropping out of Wimbledon at such an alarming rate.
He is not Shawn Chacon though you do have to admire the courage of a man with such imperceptible baseball gifts to so blatantly throw his life in The Show in the nearest toilet.
He is Brian Runge, a third-generation umpire who behaved like a first-rate jerk Tuesday night at Shea Stadium, who embodied all that people despise about the umpiring/refereeing profession, who inserted himself in a place he had no business inserting himself, who goaded the Mets' mild-mannered manager and then goaded the Mets milder-mannered center fielder, ejecting both of them, making a general nuisance of himself.
But this week, right now, today, Brian Runge is OK by me, because he did something that is supposed to be downright un-Constitutional in sports this week.
He apologized.
He said, "I'm sorry."
He said, I'm wrong, my fault, my bad, my mistake.
For that, to me, he deserved better than the one-game suspension Major League Baseball hit him with. Runge had a bad moment, had a bad night, and paid for it by having his outburst played and replayed on every highlight show, every wraparound show, every Loudmouth-Around-the-Wheelhouse-Live screamfest on cable and broadcast television. He even made the "Today" show.
Now, if Runge had acted the way most umpires act, then one game would have been an outrage. Most umpires, most referees, act as judge, jury and omniscient narrator to their own lives. Just get one of them to admit for public consumption that they blew the call at first base, that they missed the foul, that they whiffed on that holding penalty. Mostly, they are indulged, too: See what happens when a coach criticizes a ref's decision. See how quickly that fine is slapped on their heads.
They don't have to apologize. Runge didn't have to apologize. He could have taken his punishment, faded back into umpire oblivion, and we would have forgotten about him until the next time he was forced to make a close call at second base in Cleveland or St. Louis or Pittsburgh or Kansas City.
But he did. He apologized to Jerry Manuel on Wednesday night, when Manuel walked out to exchange lineup cards before the game. It wasn't Runge himself who made that public.He plainly was embarrassed when approached by reporters that night, referring the matter to the Commissioner's Office, and that elevates him even higher on my list. It was Manuel who filled everyone in:
