Edward Lee Ballanfant: Major League Baseball Umpire and Scout (1895–1987)

Edward Lee Ballanfant, Major League Baseball umpire, was born in Waco, Texas, on December 27, 1895, to Jonathan Hunt Ballanfant and Ida Virginia (Wilsford) Ballanfant. He played semi-pro baseball from 1915 to 1919, with time out to serve in World War I, and minor league ball from 1920 to 1925. Ballanfant’s career as a player involved several low-level minor leagues—the West Texas League, the Texas-Oklahoma League, the East Texas League, and the Texas Association. His teams included the Abilene Eagles, the Ardmore Peps, the Sulphur Springs Lions, the Paris North Stars, the Palestine Pals, the Austin Senators, and the Greenville Hunters. In 1925, while serving as player–manager with Greenville at age twenty-nine, Ballanfant suffered a severe leg injury that ended his playing days. He remained in baseball as an umpire.

Given the friction often on display between players and umpires, it might seem that such a career change was highly unlikely. Nevertheless, it was a career path undertaken by a fair number of players, some of them prominent major leaguers (e.g., Bill Dinneen, Babe Pinelli, George Pipgras, and Eddie Rommel). This career transition has since disappeared; the last player to make the switch from major league player to major league umpire was Bill Kunkel, who pitched for the Kansas City Athletics and the New York Yankees from 1961 through 1963 and umpired in the American League from 1968 to 1984.

In 1927 Ballanfant debuted as an umpire in the Class D Lone Star League, a circuit with teams in Texarkana, Palestine, Tyler, Mexia, Corsicana, Paris, Marshall, Longview, and Sherman. In 1929 he moved on to the Texas League, a more prestigious circuit (Class A) with teams in larger cities, namely, Beaumont, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Shreveport, Waco, and Wichita Falls. After serving in the Texas League for seven seasons, he was hired by the National League for the 1936 season. He was the first Texan to umpire in the National League. Ballanfant remained with the National League through 1957. When he retired, he was the senior umpire in the league. Ballanfant had a stretch of eleven seasons without missing an inning.

Because of the respect he earned while practicing his profession, the National League chose Ballanfant for prestigious gigs. He officiated at four All-Star Games: 1938 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, 1942 at the Polo Grounds in New York, 1949 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and 1954 at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. He also umpired in the 1940 (Cincinnati Reds-Detroit Tigers), 1946 (Boston Red Sox-St. Louis Cardinals), 1951 (New York Giants-New York Yankees), and 1955 (Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Yankees) World Series. Ballanfant’s four World Series appearances are notable but far from the major league record held by thirty-seven-year (1905–41) veteran Bill Klem, who participated in eighteen World Series.

While baseball fans are not hesitant to question the eyesight of arbiters, they had little cause to do so with Ballanfant. During World War II he taught courses in marksmanship. To be sure, Ballanfant was not perfect. On June 2, 1954, he was behind the plate in Milwaukee for a Milwaukee Braves-Brooklyn Dodgers contest when he got the pitch count confused and waved the Milwaukee batter to first base after ball three. The mistake was not corrected, and the consequences were immediate. The next batter, Texarkana-born Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews, clouted a grand slam. The Dodgers were outraged. When Jackie Robinson came to the plate the next inning, he gave Ballanfant a piece of his mind and was thrown out of the game. As he exited the field, Robinson flipped his bat towards the bat rack, but the bat glanced off the dugout roof and hit a woman. Conveniently, her lawyer was sitting in the row behind her. The ensuing lawsuit proved to be an anticlimax, as the woman and her husband settled for a mere $300 each.

While good umpires may earn respect, they are never beloved. “I can truthfully say that I never did like umpiring,” Ballanfant admitted. “I stayed with it because I had to eat.” While umpires are more likely than players to have lengthy careers, even they find their stamina waning as the years pass. When Ballanfant announced his retirement after the 1957 season, he said, “The old legs just can’t take it any longer. And those doubleheaders just seem to get longer and longer.”

After retiring from umpiring at age sixty-one, Ballanfant remained in the game as a scout for the Chicago Cubs. As he made his year-round home in the Lakewood neighborhood of Dallas, he was assigned to scout Texas players. Houston was awarded a National League franchise to begin play in 1962. Ballanfant was hired as a scout in 1961 and served with the Colt .45s, the team’s name until 1964, and the Astros, as they were known after the opening of the Astrodome in 1965, until 1970. When the Washington Senators moved to Dallas-Fort Worth and became the Texas Rangers in 1972, Ballanfant went to work for the franchise and remained with them until 1981.

Ballanfant married Viola Darwin on October 22, 1919; she pre-deceased him in 1980. Edward Lee Ballanfant died on July 15, 1987, in Dallas. He was interred at Restland Memorial Park in Dallas. He was inducted into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame in 1980 and was posthumously inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Texas League Hall of Fame in 2009.