Twenty-five years ago I wrote a story for a national magazine on Major League Baseball’s umpire school in San Bernardino, California, which was owned and run by Joe Brinkman, an American League umpire who recently made his last visit to the Metrodome before he retires next year. Brinkman grew up in Holdingford, outside of St. Cloud.

The visit to the umpire school and subsequent article went well. The article was even collected in The Sporting News’ Best Sports Stories for its year. Brinkman was also pleased with the article, and we ended up becoming friends. I never imagined I would be an umpire groupie when I grew up, but anything related to baseball fascinates me.

My wife and I visited him once during our vacation in Florida. He and his gracious wife, Karen, took us out to a restaurant, and I felt like I had ascended into the seventh heaven.

The next several times Brinkman was in town, he offered me his umpire’s passes to get us into the game free, and we got to sit in the second row right behind home plate. On one trip he brought Karen along. He called me that time, and asked me if my wife and I would like to be his guests again, especially since Karen was here. To me this was a rhetorical question: of course I would like to be his guest.

That night, we sat with Karen in the second row behind the plate. We were so close to the field that we could hear the players sweat. We had an entirely pleasant time chatting with Karen and watching the Twins play Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles. Joe was working the plate.

The man on the other side of Karen, who turned out to be a grade-school principal with season tickets and a stack of scorecards beside him dating from the beginning of the season, struck up a conversation with Karen, asking her why she was there, who she was, and where she was from. Karen blithely answered all his questions. The man was very friendly and disarming, and a fanatical Twins fan.

At one point in their conversation, however, he leaped up and ran up the stairs to the press box. The next thing we knew, the Twins-O-Gram flashed out a giant message that read, “Karen Brinkman, wife of home plate umpire Joe Brinkman, is visiting today from Largo, Florida.”

I abruptly looked down on the field and could see that Joe had seen it and was exuding embarrassment from beneath his equipment. An umpire’s greatest desire, especially when behind home plate, is invisibility. Once the home plate umpire starts getting noticed, only bad things can happen.

At that moment, Orioles slugger Eddie Murray was at the plate with a 2-2 count. The Twins pitcher went into his windup, and Murray suddenly called time. Joe yelled, “Time out!” The pitcher, however, continued to throw the ball to the plate. It was right down the middle and Joe called, “Strike three!” while Murray stood off to the side taking practice swings.

I could almost see a little thought bubble above Joe’s head, saying, “Oh my God. Now I’ve done it.” Murray refused to leave the field and started jawing at Joe. Joe had told me earlier, during the interview, that the worst thing an umpire can do is to acknowledge a mistake, or else the managers will ride him for the rest of the game, insisting that he made another mistake and they should get another chance on every subsequent close play.

Murray still refused to leave, and Earl Weaver ran out from the dugout and planted himself in front of him. Murray was his star player, and he didn’t want him to get thrown out of the game, which is likely if you argue a called third strike. Weaver stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking like a bantam rooster in a baseball uniform.

Finally, after about five minutes of Murray yelling, Weaver standing, and Joe just taking it, because umpires are trained never to show any emotion, the incident was over, and Murray reluctantly and angrily returned to the dugout.

The rest of the game, Joe wasn’t showing any emotion, but I had a pretty good idea of which emotion was predominant in his head.

Afterwards, the umpiring crew, Karen, and my wife and I all went out to a restaurant. Joe, who is usually an extremely pleasant and good-natured guy, was very subdued. Marty Springstead, another umpire on the crew eating with us, asked Joe if he was O.K.

“Well, I lived,” Joe said. He had told me earlier that it all happened for an umpire behind the plate. They don’t even notice you when you’re working the bases, but behind the plate was where you lived or died.

I timorously asked Joe what had happened.

“Well, Murray had called time out, and the pitch came in and I just automatically said, ‘Strike three,’ he said. “I was wrong, but you can’t admit you’re wrong, or the other team will forever say, ‘Well, you admitted you were wrong on that play, why won’t you admit you’re wrong on this one?’ And I’ll say, ‘I wasn’t wrong on this one,’ and that will open a whole can of worms.

“And you can’t ever even the calls up—the next time Murray comes up, for example, you can’t call a pitch that just catches the corner a ball, so Murray can have the extra swing back that you took from him. It comes back to haunt you.”

Springstead, a jolly, affable man, tried to lighten the mood. “Well, it’s the old automatic,” he said. “Like whenever I have a batter with an 0-2 count, the next pitch is always a ball.” He gave an impish smile and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t need the grief.”

Still, it was a pretty somber dinner, and after that evening I saw a lot less of Joe when he was in town. A lot less as in zero. He never called me again.

I finally decided that he thought it was I who had brainlessly dashed up to the press box to blow his cover in front of 20,000 people. I couldn’t figure out any other reason.

So 25 years passed. I saw Joe at some Twins games during that time, but I never gave a shout-out down to him from the stands after the game. I could take a hint.

Thus it was by incredible coincidence that I recently made a trip to the Dome for my annual outing with the baseball-fanatic relatives in my extended family. My uncle had bought the tickets, and I was supposed to wait for him and my cousins at the Will Call window, our designated meeting place.

I got there early, so I was waiting a long time beside what was apparently another family in the same circumstance. The youngest family member was a highly active boy of about three with a voice like a foghorn, who announced everything he was doing to everyone as he did it. His name was Alex.

I was leaning against the concrete wall listening to Alex while standing next to his mother. I turned to her and said, “That boy is going to be a baseball announcer when he grows up. He’s already doing a play-by-play.”

“He likes to talk,” the woman understated.

Another woman on the other side of me, a few years older than I am, said, “He’s my grandson.”

“Cute kid,” I said.

We leaned against the wall for another seven or eight minutes, and I turned to Alex’s grandmother and asked, “Your person’s late, too?”

She said, “No, I’m waiting here for the umpires’ passes. They don’t give those out until closer to the start of the game.”

“Oh, do you know an umpire?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Which one?”

“Joe Brinkman,” she said.

I was dumbfounded. “You know Joe?” I asked incredulously.

She nodded. “He’s my brother.”

“He’s your BROTHER?” I nearly fell over. “So do you still live in Holdingford?”

“That’s where Joe and I grew up, but I live in Buffalo now. I used to have Joe and his crew over to my house for dinner whenever he was in town, but it finally got easier for us just meet at a restaurant downtown.”

She asked me how I knew Joe, and I explained to her about the article I’d written 25 years before.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember that article.”

“You DO?”

“Yes. Joe sent me a copy, and he and Karen kept a copy on their coffee table for years.”

This was my chance, I thought. I poured out my whole tale of woe to Joe’s sister, ending with, “and I think to this day that Joe thinks I’m the one who had Karen’s name flashed on the Twins-O-Gram.

“Tell you what,” I said. “When you see Joe after the game, tell him that the writer named Paul who wrote the story on his umpire school was not the one who had Karen’s name flashed up on the scoreboard.”

She assured me that she would tell him, and we eventually all entered the Dome to watch the game.

I’m expecting a call from Joe the next time he’s in town, which may be for a visit to his sister rather than to umpire a game. He doesn’t have to apologize for thinking I was the one who blew his anonymity that day; I just want to ask him how things have been going for the past 25 years.

Joe, if your sister ever sends you this, my number is 952-942-7333. We’ll talk.