{"id":5450,"date":"2011-11-08T16:39:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-08T22:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/?p=5450"},"modified":"2011-11-08T16:39:33","modified_gmt":"2011-11-08T22:39:33","slug":"hank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/5450","title":{"rendered":"Hank"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hank Molina was my first, and best, boss.\u00a0 Hank had been the Farmington Amateur Baseball Congress Umpire in Chief since before I was born, and he turned eighty years old the year I started working for him as an ump.\u00a0 Never a large man, Hank\u2019s body had shriveled considerably by the time I met him, and the top of his hunching head just reached my shoulders.\u00a0 But he carried a spirit the size of the Bambino in that little old frame, and his mind was sharp as a spiked cleat.\u00a0 He once told me, \u201cI\u2019ve forgotten more about baseball than you\u2019ll ever know,\u201d and his authority on the diamond was unquestionable. Whenever a game got ugly or coaches got belligerent disagreeing over a rule, all you had to do was call Hank.\u00a0 Actually, all you usually had to do was threaten to call Hank.<\/p>\n

But if threats didn\u2019t work and you had to go through with the call, Hank would pull up in his old Chevy Blazer (always stuffed with so much umpiring gear that it couldn\u2019t hold more than one passenger), make himself a parking spot as close to the gates as possible, and mosey up to the field.\u00a0 He would meet with the umpires, away from any coaches\u2019 earshot, and after a quick discussion, he would calmly inform the concerned parties that the right call had been made, and the umpires\u2019 decision stood.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter if you had made the correct ruling or not, Hank always had your back and that was that.\u00a0 No coach, parent, or player ever tried to argue with him about it.\u00a0 Or if they did, Hank never bothered to listen.
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Hank Molina was my first, and best, boss.\u00a0 Hank had been the Farmington Amateur Baseball Congress Umpire in Chief since before I was born, and he turned eighty years old the year I started working for him as an ump.\u00a0 Never a large man, Hank\u2019s body had shriveled considerably by the time I met him, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[292,2899,1300,8],"tags":[2900,2901,242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5454,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450\/revisions\/5454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}