Don Denkinger Was More Than Just "The Call"

As the former umpire is laid to rest, it's time to stop obsessing over his famous mistake and instead focus on his amazing life before and after it.

The pain is still fresh. 

I woke up Saturday morning in my condo here in Citrus Heights, California. It was a flawless day, a “spring” day that, as us Sacramento residents know, is really just more like an overture to another scorcher of a Central Valley summer. I went about my usual morning routine: a bowl of hot oatmeal, drive out to get my morning coffee (straight and black, nothing added), play Minecraft to get my mind going, and tend to some writing before heading to a John Fogerty concert with my family. Then, get an early rest for another shift at the Sutter Health Park control room the next day.   

Another fulfilling installment of a life that I love and live to its fullest every day, and will for decades. Yet, a huge part of why my life is so resplendent was gone, and I hurt all day over it. Even as I finish this piece right now, I still feel grief. Don Denkinger, who served as an MLB umpire from 1969 to 1998, passed away at Cedar Valley Hospice this past Friday at the age of 86. 

 If you are even the most casual of baseball fans, the very sight of that name assuredly fishes out one image in your mind. Two hints: Jorge Orta and Todd Worrell. Denkinger’s missed call on Jorge Orta’s grounder in the bottom of the 9th of Game 6 of the 1985 World Series was not only a key moment in that tight Interstate 70 battle between the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals. To boot, not only does it remain one of the moments that shaped baseball as we know it. 

On a deeply personal level, it was effectively the impetus for the book project that has changed my life. For the past three years, I have been writing an in-depth chronicle about the Show-Me Series and its concomitant history entitled Interstate ‘85: Whitey’s Cardinals, Howser’s Royals, The Call, and the Battle for the Heart of Missouri Baseball, which I will be finishing and submitting for publication this summer. While the goal of the book is to illustrate that there is far more to that World Series than just Denkinger’s blunder, it would be dishonest for me to not detail it and its legacy all the same.  

In order to capture the opera of humanity long overshadowed by “The Call,” I have interviewed 26 people from 1985 to date, including Denkinger himself, my third interview overall after Buddy Biancalana and Mark Gubicza got things rolling in February 2021. In a moment that I am now more grateful for than ever, I had the pleasure of speaking with Don, as well as his wife Gayle and two of their daughters (Denise and Dana), over the phone on Valentine’s Day that same month.   

While I put the emphasis on more unique questions like how he got into umpiring and how he met Gayle, we of course talked about his errant declaration on Orta’s grounder. It’s a story he spent nearly half of his life having to tell over and over again, from reunion events in Missouri to speaking engagements in Nova Scotia, yet he still told certain details as freshly as ever. 

And why not? For as much as sports fans and writers love to immortalize individuals for singular triumphs, there are indeed those who live eternally thanks to their greatest failure, whether fair or not. Perhaps no one embraced that more than Don Denkinger, who never tired of owning his mistake and acknowledging his jaundiced place in World Series history. He’d even sign pictures of the moment with an “Oops!” 

Naturally, I am not going to write about “The Call” at all here on Substack.

You read that right. Not at all. I’m not recounting the deep details of the moment, its aftermath, the hate Denkinger got for years afterwards…none of it. Not just for the obvious reason that I’m exhaustively doing so in my forthcoming book. Not just for the fact that it wasn’t even the first blown call in Game 6, the first of which came in the 4th inning and cost the Royals a run. Not just for the fact that the Cardinals could and should have won the game (and World Series) anyway, which even 1985 St. Louis reliever and current broadcaster Ricky Horton said to me when I interviewed him.  

Rather, it’s for a reason far more important than any of that: 

Don Denkinger was so…SO…much more than just “The Call.” 

In a manner eerily similar to Bill Buckner, an elite first baseman whose sterling accomplishments were overshadowed by his own immortal folly the very next year in the 1986 World Series, Denkinger’s miss in 1985 has often reduced him to a one-off punchline in a manner that belies his strengths. The passage of time has almost ossified “The Call” as the essence of Don Denkinger, as if his humanity is eternally subservient to one single moment. 

Thus, with many obituaries and articles naturally orienting around the Orta ruling and giving lip service to other details, I want to devote this piece to going against that predictable grain. Instead of glibly rehashing that moment and filling the rest of the word count with basic details, I want to do something far greater. 

I want to celebrate Don Denkinger’s singular, layered, exceptional humanity. At least, as much as I can in one piece. Now that he is no longer with us, we should love and celebrate him for his triumphs, rather than linger over one (admittedly common) umpiring mistake that happened nearly four decades ago. 

As opposed to just making one mistake in a heightened scenario, Don Denkinger was many magnificent things. 

To begin, he was a son. Born to German immigrants, Donald Anton Denkinger entered the mortal coil on August 28, 1936, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He was a member of the Silent Generation, the “Lucky Few” Americans born during the macabre intertwined horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. 

Denkinger joined the human race during an especially tumultuous, albeit culturally resplendent, year. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for his second of four consecutive terms as U.S. President. One of the biggest achievements of his “New Deal,” the Rural Electrification Act, brought electricity to legions of poor Americans, including many in Denkinger’s home state of Iowa. The BBC had its first ever television broadcasts. The Spanish Civil War commenced, with Francisco Franco assuming power as Head of State in Spain. 

In American sports and culture, the Lou Gehrig/Joe DiMaggio-powered New York Yankees won their first of four straight World Series titles. Bing Crosby’s “Pennies from Heaven” was the most popular musical recording of the entire year, as ranked by Billboard Magazine’s first ever pop music chart. The musical drama The Great Ziegfeld, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, would be selected by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences as the year’s Best Picture. Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster novel Gone With The Wind was published, later becoming a world-conquering Hollywood classic that won Best Picture three years later. 

As one of the few bequeathed the gift of life during the harrowing nadir of the Great Depression, Don Denkinger made the most of that rare opportunity. After graduating from Cedar Falls High School in 1954, he attended Wartburg College, where (true to his Hawkeye heritage) he learned wrestling. After three years of college, he became a man of his country. Denkinger enlisted in the United States Army, and was stationed at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. 

There, in the expanse of the southern New Mexico desert, he taught wrestling to his fellow soldiers for competition. Yet it was but a precursor to his ultimate calling life: baseball umpiring. After helping out as a youth baseball umpire in the White Sands area, Denkinger followed his superior to Al Somers Umpire School in Daytona Beach, Florida. The burly Iowan thrived in this new, oft-overlooked profession, graduating at the top of his class.  

After that, he became one of the best umpires in the American League. After matriculating through the minor leagues during the ‘60s, Don Denkinger officiated his first major league game on April 8, 1969, between the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins. He consistently earned many prestigious assignments after that, including four World Series (1974, 1980, 1985, 1991), three All-Star Games (1971, 1976, 1987), six American League Championship Series (1972, 1975, 1979, 1982, 1988, and 1992, four as crew chief), and two AL Division Series (1981 and 1995).

Additionally, he is one of a handful of umpires to work multiple perfect games. After working second for Len Barker’s spotless turn for Cleveland on May 15 1981, he manned first for Kenny Rogers’ one for Texas in 1994. His 6’1” frame also loomed behind home plate when Bucky Dent hit the home run over Fenway Park’s Green Monster in the 1978 AL East tiebreaker that made him the undying impetus of curse words across New England for generations.  

In addition to being an umpire of many experiences, he was a man of resilience. After his mistake in the 1985 World Series earned him hate mail and even death threats, he not only continued to umpire for more than a decade, but managed a “redemption” in another World Series. In 1991, he earned another crew chief assignment in the Fall Classic between the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins. Once again working home plate in Game 7, he called a near perfect game, ensuring the integrity of a 10-inning classic that capped off what remains the greatest World Series ever played.  

 

Just as much as he was a model sportsman and official, he was a role model of love and devotion. When he and Gayle Price took their vows at Methodist Church in Humboldt, IA on November 24, 1962, they fulfilled those vows in a way every married couple should aspire to. They remained together for more than 60 years, and raised three daughters: Darcel, Denise, and Dana. Only death did bring them apart, as Gayle ultimately outlived her husband upon his passing last Friday. 

In addition to his devotion to umpiring and his family, Don Denkinger was also a model of service to his community. For decades of residence in Waterloo, IA, Denkinger was a fixture around town. He was a loyal Rotarian in both Waterloo and his vacation home of Sun Lakes, AZ. The Shrine, Elks Club, and Zion Lutheran Church of Waterloo also welcomed him. Until he sold it after his retirement from umpiring in the late ‘90s, he tended to the bar of his Silver Fox restaurant on 910 W. 5th Street.  

Of course, this is not the extent of Denkinger’s value as a human. Nor is this meant to portray him as flawless by any means. It is, after all, obvious to say that none of us are perfect. If anything, life is a constant state of imperfection. We live holistic lives rife with complexity and interconnected goals and consequences. Sometimes, our lows beget our greatest triumphs. Some failures leave regrets and emotional battle scars that take a long time to heal, if at all. 

Yet it’s the relentless tension between inherent imperfection and aspiration to perfection that is the very essence of why baseball is the team sport that best encapsulates the human condition. As I have often said to others, it’s a sport where people who fail seven times out of ten are immortalized as childhood heroes and enshrined in the Hall of Fame. It’s what you do with those rare successes that counts most. 

Don Denkinger wasn’t perfect, and certainly his biggest mistake will always be a defining moment in the history of baseball. But it doesn’t define him. Not even close. Not in a career that lasted almost three whole decades in professional baseball’s premier league. Not in a life that spanned nearly nine decades. Not in a life that he shared so long with his true love and the family they created. 

In baseball terms, Don Denkinger’s entire lifespan encapsulated Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, the Dodgers and Giants moving west, the expansion era, Hank Aaron hitting #715, the introduction of the designated hitter, Carlton Fisk waving his home run fair, Fernandomania, the 1994 strike, the McGwire-Sosa home run chase of ‘98, Ichiro Suzuki, Shohei Ohtani, the 2017 Astros cheating scandal, the 2020 60-game pandemic season, and much else. And that’s not including the history he directly judged as an umpire.  

In historical terms, he lived through the end of the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the entire Cold War and its concomitant episodes, the Civil Rights Movement, Beatlemania, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the creation of the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, the 2008 Great Recession, the first African American president, the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd rebellion, and the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine land war.   

For 86 years, Donald Anton Denkinger made the most of every opportunity, every development, every success, every setback…everything. Even as the game of baseball and the world at large changed rapidly, he was a man of quotidian diligence and success. He dedicated his life to overseeing the integrity of perhaps the most old-fashioned, procedurally archaic sport known to mankind. It naturally begat a full, honest life on and off the baseball diamond. 

In the grand scheme of things, “The Call” is an outlier in his legacy. When he is laid to rest this Friday in his birthplace of Cedar Falls, he will be sent off after fulfilling an opulent spell in the mortal coil.

Rest in peace, Don Denkinger. You lived your truth and succeeded marvelously in your dream profession. We should all hope to do the same in our own lives.