Major League Baseball Career
He was on the full-time umpiring staff for Major League Baseball in the National League from 1982 to 1999. He resigned in 1999 as part of a labor negotiation strategy. However, Davidson has returned to professional umpiring and now is again part of the MLB staff. Davidson, who has been nicknamed "Balkin' Bob" or "Balk-a-day-Bob" due to his frequent balk calls, currently wears number 61 but wore number 31 during his career in the NL. When the AL and NL merged their umpiring staffs in 2000, number 31 was assigned to Mike Reilly who wore the number in the AL. Upon his return to Major Leagure Baseball in 2006, Davidson was assigned number 61. For the 2011 season, he wore number 6, later changing back to 61. He is consistently voted by players and managers as one of the worst umpires in Major League Baseball, placing fourth-worst in a Sports Illustrated poll in 2011.
For 2012, Davidson's crew includes crew chief Jerry Layne, Hunter Wendelstedt and Dan Bellino.
He officiated in the 1992 World Series, as well as the National League Championship Series in 1988, 1991 and 1996. He also worked in the National League Division Series in 1995 and 1998, and in the 1987 and 1993 All-Star Games.
Read more about this topic: Bob Davidson (umpire)
Famous quotes containing the words major, league, baseball and/or career:
“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)