Bill Klem Marquee Hall of Fame 1953

Hank O'Day is next at 2,731. Klem's first was on April 14, 1905 and his last on October 6, 1940, thirty-five seasons apart, and the count is a floor rather than a total: it is only the games he worked at the plate, and Retrosheet's coverage of the 1910s is incomplete.

He never played professionally, so the statistical record this archive keeps has nothing else of him, which is true of every umpire and is its own kind of silence. What survives instead is the way the job is done. He is credited with the hand signals for balls and strikes, with straddling the catcher rather than standing to the side, and with the line drawn in the dirt that a manager crossed at his own risk.

He said he never called one wrong in his heart. The Hall of Fame elected him in 1953, two years after he died, in the first year it took umpires at all, alongside Tommy Connolly.