Ump 'offered them love in the form of rules
Your hat didn't match your shirt? You couldn't play.'
Mary Schmich | Tribune columnist
August 10, 2008
Drew Jones slipped into his chest protector, snapped on his red shinguards, pulled down his face mask and stepped behind home plate at Wells and Goethe Streets for the last time Tuesday evening.
It was the Zulus vs. the Bakongos, the championship game of the Near North Little League. But this wasn't just the end of a season. It was the end of an ump.
The field that evening was damp from thunderstorms. Little boys batted, tossed, ran, booed, cheered and cursed in the soggy air.
Paul O'Connor, a real estate broker and coach, looked over at the umpire, at the big body pummeled and slowed by years of balls that missed the catcher's mitt.
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"Drew was the heart and soul of the league," he said. "There's nobody to replace him."
Jones has officiated the league's games every summer since the one 16 years ago when he walked out of the Oscar Mayer plant and saw some kids from the Cabrini-Green housing project playing ball.
He missed baseball. As a boy, raised by his grandmother on a North Carolina garden-farm, he'd honed his pitches by tossing rocks through a hanging tire.
He played in high school, then for the Army. He dreamed of going pro. Instead he came home from the military to the 1960s South and a future of jobs that paid $1.25 an hour.
When a cousin who worked at Oscar Mayer said, "Want to come to Chicago?" he didn't. He came anyway.
He was 26, had kids and a woman he thought about marrying. Chicago was too cold for her, so he came alone, beckoned by the promise of $4.61 an hour to shovel meat for hot dogs, salami and baloney onto a chopper belt.
In the beginning, he played ball out on the West Side, but the guys drank during the game, so he quit. Where he came from, baseball was as serious as your soul.
And that was the spirit in which he volunteered to umpire for the kids who played next to Oscar Mayer.
The Near North Little League wasn't famous in those days. This was before Keanu Reeves incarnated the founder, Bob Muzikowski, in the movie "Hardball." It was back before the luxury condos, when the Cabrini-Green neighborhood bubbled with kids who had few pastimes but trouble.
"The kids had a lot of anger in them," Jones said. "They felt like they weren't loved."
He offered them love in the form of rules. Your hat didn't match your shirt? You couldn't play.
"The kids are automatically kind of tough," said Korvell Curry, 17, who grew up in Cabrini and the league. "They're built for the worst to happen. But everybody look at Drew like: Don't play with him. If you back talk, he's going to throw you out the game."
Jones' rules could rankle adults too. Steve Bridges, a broker at Aon who coaches the Bakongos, remembers the time Jones wouldn't let one of the kids play because his pants were torn.
"My guy was crying," Bridges says. "Drew and I really got into it."
But even coaches who didn't always like his rules or calls came to respect his heart and dedication. After a rain, Bridges would drive over to check the field and find Jones there, raking.
Coaches have come and gone. Some left when they realized they weren't going to change the world, maybe not even many kids. Jones stayed, even as the Oscar Mayer plant closed and he got a job as a valet parker.
Now he works the overnight shift at a parking garage so that he's always free for games. He umps for the girls' league too. But a lot of Cabrini has been torn down. Kids have moved away. The league has shrunk.
Jones had surgery on a shoulder assaulted by a few too many wayward balls. He leans against the fence more now, can hardly crouch. He'd promised the aunt who helped raise him that he'd take care of her when she was old. She's 81, and so, at 61, he's going home to North Carolina to live with her.
"I don't know what the heck we're going to do next year," said Bill Seitz, who manages the league. "Who would come out here, do doubleheaders on Saturdays when it's 90 degrees?"
The Bakongos beat the Zulus Tuesday night, 12-10. Jones lumbered over to a 9-year-old Bakongo.
"I'm going to let you have this," he said.
With a sober look, the boy reached out for Jones' mask and chest protector. Then the ump walked alone into the summer sunset.