Retiring umpire is in a league of his own

Jerry Pennington doesn’t want to hang around the baseball diamond too long, like the great Willie Mays did, huffing and puffing until he’s a shadow of his former self.

He’s had reconstructive surgery on both knees, thanks to hundreds of games squatting behind home plate. And running out into center field to watch a home run clear the fence isn’t as easy as it used to be.

It’s hard being a 63-year-old Little League umpire.

So next month Pennington, a Valley fixture since the 1970s, will retire from Little League baseball and head back home to Indiana.

Pennington is one of those regular guys who does lots of small things that add up to something really grand. Their legacy is in the ordinary acts they’ve done so long, so consistently and with such care.

At the Encino Little League, which operates on six diamonds in the shadow of the Ventura Freeway, he is head umpire but also much more.

Everyone there seems to know his name. “Hey Jerry!” players and parents call out.

When he makes a call against a young infielder, he might temper it with a tip: “Get the glove a littler lower on that tag next time.” When a ground ball slips between a player’s legs, he’ll say: “You’ll get the next one, kid.”

They may not know it, but the boys and girls have gotten him through rough times too, he says, including his son’s three Army deployments to Iraq. Most of the players don’t know he’s been carrying a cellphone inside his umpire’s uniform for the last six years, just in case the Army calls.

“There’s times I’ve had to hold back my tears thinking about him,” said Pennington of his son, Sgt. Wesley Pennington. “But when I come out here and I see these kids, I realize what my son’s fighting for.”

Sometimes you can spot a hero because he has medals pinned to his chest. Other times, heroes wear chest protectors and call balls and strikes. Or they baby the infields so that pint-size shortstops can scoop up ground balls that bounce true.

I learned all this visiting the Encino Little League on opening day back in March. I saw 600 kindergarten T-ball players, adolescent “Dodgers” and “Yankees” -- 54 teams in all -- lined up for the National Anthem.

They were a multi-hued slice of America, L.A. style.

It takes a whole team of dedicated grown-ups like Pennington to keep a little league going. In Encino, as elsewhere, most are volunteers.

Along with a small paid staff and umpires working for about $30 per game, they keep the bleachers freshly painted and the flags flapping smartly from poles behind center field.

“With Little League you get a sense of family in a large city,” said Craig Hoyt, a remodeling contractor who is the league’s volunteer president.

They are united by baseball, a game of precision and decorum. It’s the umpire’s job to make sure the game stays a game.

“If it isn’t fun for the kids, they won’t show up,” Pennington said. That’s why Little League umpires -- and coaches -- have to be relaxed and patient.

Standing behind home plate, Pennington has seen some amazing things happen. Once a 12-year-old named Gabe Cohen -- now playing for UCLA -- hit a blast that sailed far beyond the flagpoles, to the power lines alongside the Ventura Freeway.

“He hit that ball so hard, it would have cleared the fence at Yankee Stadium,” Pennington said.

But it’s the ordinary kids who made umpiring fun. “To see them after the game laughing and eating pizza, when you can’t tell who won and who lost -- that’s what I’ll remember,” he said.

Over the years, Pennington has managed, coached, and run workshops for moms and dads who want to manage teams.

Most managers automatically pin their hopes on their “studs,” or best players. Pennington tells them that’s shortsighted. “It’s the kid who gets picked last because he can’t throw . . . that you have to put your effort into. That kid will win a game for you.”

The same is true in life, of course. Sometimes the son who lags behind just needs his potential unlocked.

Pennington learned this off the field as a single dad, when his son Wesley dropped out of high school after falling in with the wrong crowd.

At one point, he had to tell him, “If you keep going like this, you’re going to end up either dead or in jail,” he recalls.

Wesley straightened out. He did a little umpiring at the Encino Little League, completed a GED course and after 9/11 joined the Army. The former dropout is a leader of men now, supervising soldiers for the U.S. Army’s elite 101st Airborne Division.

Father and son are best friends -- which is why, after 39 years in Los Angeles, Pennington is moving back to his old hometown of Connersville.

He wants to be closer to Wesley, who’s stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., now but is slated to ship out to Afghanistan next year. Connersville is also home to his daughter and three grandchildren.

“It was time to go for a lot of reasons,” he said. His family’s gain is our loss, because Jerry Pennington, and all the others like him out there, help make Los Angeles a better place to live.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com