Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in reviews, social media posts, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Big Loosh: The Unruly Life of Umpire Ron Luciano (Nebraska, 2025) by Jim Leeke.
About the Book:
Ron Luciano was a college football star, baseball umpire, TV broadcaster, and best-selling author. He barged through the world with an outsized personality, entertaining many, offending a few, and hiding behind a cheerful and outrageous persona until life somehow proved unbearable. Everyone knew him, but nobody really did.
In Big Loosh Jim Leeke recounts Luciano’s unlikely career, detailing his life as athlete, arbiter, sportscaster, writer, and mythmaker while separating fact from fiction amid the fanciful stories he loved to spin. As a friend said of Luciano, “If you didn’t like this man, you didn’t like people.”
A Word from the Author:
Big Loosh, my look at the life of MLB umpire, broadcaster, and author Ron Luciano, was my first full-length biography. Earlier I’d written The Best Team Over There (2021), a partial bio that focused on Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander’s military service during World War I. I didn’t know what to expect this time and was slightly nervous.
Happily, the critical reaction was positive. Spitball magazine named Big Loosh a finalist for the 2025 CASEY Award for baseball book of the year. Next came a lengthy review in the Wall Street Journal. Then columnist Dan Shaughnessy gave the bio a nice mention in the Boston Globe. I also spoke to numerous podcasts, radio programs, and SABR events. Friends and acquaintances offered congratulations, a major online retailer (you know the one) ran out of books for quite some time, and I enjoyed it all.
It was clear from the outset that fans of a certain vintage (myself included) remembered Luciano fondly, whether through his work on the diamond, in the broadcast booth, or from his bestselling books. The thought that younger readers were now getting to know him as well was gratifying too. Few readers recalled, however, or perhaps never knew, that Luciano took his own life, a tragic end for an apparently cheerful and ebullient man.
I had interviewed him once, years before, during his promotional tour for The Umpire Strikes Back. After his passing I felt that journalists like me had missed something important, which was one reason I wanted to write his biography. I concluded Big Loosh with his suicide and its aftermath. This chapter was the most difficult I’d ever written. No one can know precisely what compelled Luciano to leave this world, or his thoughts during his final hours.
“Perhaps as a lifelong lover of Shakespeare,” I suggested, “he felt a kinship with both Hamlet and Yorick, a melancholy prince clutching the skull of the fellow of infinite jest, pondering whether to take arms against a sea of troubles.” A historian friend agreed, writing to me that “Loosh and Yorick would have been kindred spirits, maybe even twins.”
Despite its downbeat ending, Big Loosh isn’t depressing. I like to think that it’s often as funny and outrageous as Luciano had been himself. I don’t know what he would’ve thought about my book, but I’m positive he would’ve been delighted to know that fans still appreciate everything that he brought to life and to the game of baseball. Happy Book Birthday, Ronnie.
—Jim Leeke
Reviews:
“But for all that clowning, Mr. Leeke tells us, Luciano was dead serious about keeping the game safe.”—David M. Schribman, Wall Street Journal
“In just 159 pages, Big Loosh manages to capture the breadth of Luciano, a towering assignment that Jim Leeke makes look easy.”—Marshall Garvey, Marshall Arts
“While this is a brief work—approximately 160 pages not including notes and bibliography—Leeke is like an ideal umpire, calling it straight down the middle.”—Bob D’Angelo, The Sports Bookie
“Big Loosh: The Unruly Life of Umpire Ron Luciano provides interesting insights into the embattled world of the cloistered life of a professional umpire.”—Charlie Bevis, Bevis Baseball Research
“Leeke also handles Luciano’s tragic end judiciously, making Big Loosh one of the best biographies of the year.”—Spitball
Awards:
Finalist for the 2025 CASEY Award
In the Media:
Excerpt in Behind the Book
From the Desk of Jim Leeke: Ron Luciano would thumb ABS out of the game
UNP blog 