Nearly a quarter of a million people attend Chattanooga Lookouts games each spring and summer at AT&T Field.
Many come to watch tomorrow’s Major League stars. Others enjoy the entertainment acts, such as the Famous Chicken or the Zooperstars, and most everybody appreciates a postgame fireworks show.
Yet nobody is there to film and grade the performance of the umpires. Nobody, that is, except Dusty Dellinger.
Dellinger is in his fourth year as the head evaluator and field instructor for the 45 umpires who work at the Double-A level, including the 15 assigned to the Southern League. He ranks the umpires from 1 to 45 at the end of each season and again in the middle of the season, and those at the top are first in line to advance to Triple-A when openings occur.
A former umpire who spent 11 years in the field, Dellinger worked in the Southern League from 2000-02 but never ejected former Lookouts manager Phillip Wellman. He advanced to work 33 big-league games from 2005-07, and he was on a crew in Atlanta that tossed former Braves manager Bobby Cox in the bottom of the first inning.