The Pecan Park Eagle

Former NL Umpire Satch Davidson in a 2005 oil piece by Opie Otterstad.

Sad news fills my heart today. Former National League umpire and ongoing good friend to baseball, Satch Davidson, passed away in his Houston home this past Saturday, August 21, 2010. He was 75.

Word came here from Satch’s widow, Lynn, shortly after I had completed and published the column I wrote yesterday on The Father of All Umpires, Bill Klem. Details of his death and memorial service plans were still pending at this writing deadline. Keep checking with the Houston Chronicle online for further information.

I was blessed to get to know Satch a little better on a personal basis during my four years as active Board President of the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame from 2004 to 2008. As a longtime Houston resident from his service years through retirement, Satch Davidson was most deservedly, and most enthusiastically, inducted into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame on November 11, 2005. Texas people, and especially Houston people, are most appreciative of all that Satch did and continued to do as a representative of baseball to the community at large.

“Satch” acquired that only first name he accepted as his own during his boyhood years in his native home town of New London, Ohio. As a young fan of the old Bowery Boys movies, Davidson’s favorite character from the gang was “Satch,” the comedic sidekick to gang leader Leo Gorcey, whose own character shifted in name over the years from Mugs McGinnis to Slip Mahoney.

Mugs was my guy. If only I had grown up in Satch’s neighborhood, we could have both gone on from there to our various careers as Mugs McCurdy and Satch Davidson, but it wasn’t to be.

As an adult, Satch Davidson actually met and became fast friends with actor Huntz Hall, the fellow who played Horace Debussy “Satch” Jones in that almost endless stream of Bowery Boys/East Side Kids films that poured out of hollywood as Saturday afternoon kid’s fair stuff from the late 1930s into the 1950s.  As part of Satch’s TBHOF induction “goody bag,” we also gave him a DVD set of Bowery Boy movies that hit home harder than the plaque or artwork of himself that he also received, but that was Satch. He never lost track of what was really important.

Speaking of such, Satch’s attraction to sports soared early. After playing as a three-sport man at WIlmington College and Ohio State University, Satch played a little professional football and baseball before settling into his major life work as a National League umpire from 1969 through 1984. During those years, Satch spent the baseball off-season a referee in the midwest for NCAA Division I basketball games.

Davidson embraced his umpiring job with great fairness and a unmistable flair for the dramatic call. The expression captured in the accompanying 2005 painting here by artist Opie Otterstad says it all.

Satch bristled when people tried to draw him into discussions about items like the “phantom gimme out call” on second base during double plays. “There is no such thing as a ‘gimme’ on any out call,” Satch would state firmly. “A runner is either safe or out – and he is really neither until the umpire gives the signal.”

Sounds a lot like Bill Klem and “it ain’t nothing until I call it,” Don’t you think.

Stach was no fan of game time instant replays on the big screen of big league ballparks and was a leader in fighting for their elimination on crucial play situations. Satch had some help into that position when a Cincinnati fan once hit him in the head with a flying soda can after instant replay on a  Davidson call was made to look doubtful on the big screen.

Satch Davidson saw some memorable action as a big league umpire. He was behind the plate for five no-hitters – and he was also there when Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run to surpass Babe Ruth in April 1974. Davidson also was behind the plate for the famous home run by Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox in Game Six of the 1975 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

In addition to his Texas Baseball Hall of Fame induction, Satch received the Al Somers Man of the Year Award, an honor  granted for outstanding service to Major League Baseball and also the Sports Professionals Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Satch also has served as an instructor for the Southern Umpires Camp in Atlanta, Georgia and the Harry Wendlestedt School for Umpires in Daytona Beach, Florida.

During the 1994 baseball season, Satch even saw duty as the pitching coach for the San Antonio Tejanos of the Texas-Louisiana baseball league.

When you come down to it, Satch Davidson was a baseball renaissance man. He loved the game. And he loved teaching people about the game and how to care about it. He also approached life with the kind of fairness and certainty of outlook that made him successful as both an umpire and tight friend of the game. He was the total package of the only kind of teacher worth having: He came. He saw. He learned. He taught what he learned to others. And then he went back to earn some more.

Baseball has again surrendered one of its true-blue family members. And we’re all going to miss him.

Say hello to the other “Satch” and old Mugs for me, Mr. Davidson. Our loss is their gain.

Late News (8/31/10): A memorial to celebrate Satch’s life will be held on Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 10:00 AM at Geo H. Lewis & Sons 1010 Bering Drive, Houston, Texas 77057. Please visit the website www.geohlewis.com for further details.