MLB Umpire Supervisor Steve Palermo Dies

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I won't ever forget it. That day, in October 1991, when American League umpire Steve Palermo walked to the mound at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis to throw out the ceremonial first pitch for the World Series. There were tears gushing out of me as if a dam had broken. Four months earlier, Steve Palermo was shot and told he would never walk again. Palermo, who had been in Dallas, Texas for a series, had been out to dinner with friends when he witnessed two women being robbed at gunpoint. The three men intervened and paid the price. One of Palermo's friends was shot in the jaw. Palermo took a bullet in the back, hitting his spine. That man was a hero to me. In the days of just standing by and not wanting to get involved, Steve Palermo decided to get involved...and, in the process, lost his career. If the bullet had been one millimeter larger, the doctors told him, he would have lost his life. Today that man who thought of others first passed away after a battle with cancer. Although Palermo never umpired another game following the July 7, 1991 shooting, then-commissioner Fay Vincent appointed him the "Supervisor of Umpires." Part of his work included helping establish the groundwork for the replay system (making baseball the last of the "big four" sports to utilize technology to review controversial calls). "Nobody has a right to play God with a gun," Palermo said in his acceptance of the 1994 Arthur Ashe Courage Award. He repeatedly said that he would again have stepped in to try to help the women being robbed, even knowing the outcome. Steve Palermo was 67. Steve Palermo discussing the shooting and his recovery (I love it when he called the physical therapists "physical terrorists" -- if you've ever had PT, you can relate):