Pumping the brakes on a remarkable life during which he used to literally rocket close to 300 miles per hour, Jay Miner takes stock of himself as he comes to a conclusion that is both astonishing and satisfying. His fertile mind ebbs and flows with a steady stream of thoughts, but when pondering his own mortality, Miner makes a flat declaration with his still resonant voice.
“I’m 75 f- – – – – – g years old!” Miner exclaims in a tone that suggests he can’t believe where all the time has gone.
There’s been so much time to think since Jan. 12, 2018, when this man of many hats, the most prominent of which might have been his role as a softball rules interpreter in New York state since 1976, was stricken with a heart attack. He has since been recovering in the Jackson, N.J., home of his only daughter, 51-year-old Jaydene Drew, after undergoing a procedure to replace a valve in his heart and there have been other ailments that have slowed a man who is used to living life with the proverbial pedal to the metal. The hope is for him to eventually return to his statistics-cluttered home in Albany, N.Y., 200 miles to the north, because this ultimate tough guy isn’t big on sitting around. Consider Labor Day 1973, when a 30-year-old Miner was badly burned while drag racing in Jacksonville, Fla., yet insisted on bypassing immediate medical attention so his beloved late wife, Lohre, could drive him 1,000 miles north along the eastern seaboard back home to Albany.
Say just about anything about the complex and fascinating James Hugh Miner and it likely will carry some weight. The chief clinician and rules interpreter for the New York State Softball Officials Association (NYSSOA) is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to rules. He’s cutting edge with his thinking, he’s a perfectionist and he can be an ornery cuss when it comes to weighing in with his opinion. He is exceedingly brave considering a 10-year passion for drag racing. But it also can be said he veered into some recklessness by investing about $16 million into that sport yet walked away for good from his machine with career earnings that were about half that.
Miner is a master storyteller but be prepared for a demolition derby rather than a drag race when it comes to conversing with him. He will verbally skid to a stop, take an abrupt turn, drive the wrong way down a one-way street and then get back into the flow of traffic. That’s no criticism. The point is that Miner’s mind is not unlike an endless stream of thoughts, many of which elevated softball umpiring to the level it has attained.
“Are you ready for a quote?” asked Jim Berkery, president of the NYSOA. “When Jay hangs it up, he will have forgotten more about softball and baseball than any of the rest of us will ever know.”
As Miner devoted much of his life to elevating softball and baseball umpiring to new standards, he walked the walk.
This is a man who preached perfection while demanding it from himself.
“He did not want to get anything wrong,” said Bill Levy, who worked numerous softball and baseball games with Miner. “In fact, that was one of the good things about working with Jay. I knew if I screwed up a rule, he’d be able to get me out of it. The feeling was always there that, ‘We’re not going to screw this up.’ We were not going to have a protest because he knew the rules better than anybody and he still does.”
Back in his Albany home, he used to have multiple baseball games tuned in on his television sets. Whenever there was a controversial play, umpires would call to ask whether the ruling was correct. And Jay always offered an informed answer. His expertise was found regularly on the pages of Referee almost since the first edition went to press in 1976.
Jay of Many Trades
Miner’s colorful life off the field has included diverse jobs. After drag racing, he drove a school bus, a job he speaks of to this day with deep pride. He owned and operated a rock-and-roll bar in Albany in the 1970s and was tough enough to serve as his own bouncer.
It was not wise to cross Miner in those days because while he insists he never looked for trouble, he didn’t hesitate to rely on his muscles to settle things. Just how tough was he? One legend is that someone once hit him on the head with a baseball bat, only to see the bat break.
But he is also a compassionate man who friends say will do anything for people he likes. He is a loving man who never remarried after Lohre, his wife of 11 years, died unexpectedly Feb. 4, 1975.
“Yeah, he definitely has, that’s for sure,” Jaydene responded when it was suggested that her father has lived the fullest of lives. “Going from being a star athlete (Miner excelled in baseball and basketball in high school) to a race car driver and then getting back into umpiring after his race car driving was over, that brought him back to his first love, which was sports.
“He became a guru, per se,” she continued, “and then obviously writing for the magazine for that many years plus being considered a leader and an authority on the sport in the United States, especially in the northeast, where he’s very well known.”
As Miner recovers in his daughter’s home, he devotes himself to cardiac therapy, reads newspapers and might immerse himself in some sporting event on television. He also occasionally turns up at the sporting events of his two grandsons, Jett and Chance, but Jaydene laughingly believes his attention is diverted during their baseball games.
“I honestly believe he watches the umpires when he goes to watch them play baseball more than he watches the game,” she said.
Jay’s the Name
Miner was born into a comfortable family in Albany on March 4, 1943, to James and Mildred Miner. He had one natural sibling — older sister Kay — and his family adopted two of his cousins, Fay and Gay, following the death of their parents when Jay was about 8.
“It was a happy household,” he said. “I just treated them like my sisters.”
So the children answered to Jay, Kay, Fay and Gay, but Jay was not interested in rhyming with the rest. The truth is that he despises his real name (“It makes me sound like I’m a butler,” he says) and those who know him long ago learned to stay away from addressing him as James.
“I prefer to be called Jay and I say it with authority,” he said. “And it’s worked over the years. Everybody knows me as Jay.”
Miner was close to his father, who taught at Russell Sage College in Troy, N.Y., and had an additional income through real estate and insurance. Money was never an issue while Jay was being raised, and his father would go on to bankroll much of Jay’s career in drag racing. James Miner frequently took his son to Yankees games and served as his baseball coach through much of Jay’s development into a hitting sensation. It was during those years when Miner made himself the tough guy he would be through much of his life.
“I had a few fights,” he said. “I definitely had a few fights in the bar business when you had drunk people who wouldn’t back down. But basically, I earned my stake. The day I went to orientation when I was in the sixth grade, I saw some kids getting pushed around and I said to myself, ‘That’s not going to be what happens to me.’ So I turned into a tough guy — not a lawbreaker or anything like that. But if anybody (messed) with me … I’m that way to this day. If anybody wants to mess with me, they’ll wish they didn’t. And if you want to be my friend, I’ll be the best friend you’ll ever have.”
That macho image was enhanced all the more with his sports exploits at South Colonie High School, from which he graduated in 1961. Miner was a three-year starting guard in basketball. But his best sport was baseball, playing third base and outfield.
“I hit .400 for my high school career and I had one year where I hit .526. I just hit everything,” he said. “We were 13-0 in freshman baseball and we beat the varsity twice. I became a switch hitter because of Mickey Mantle.”
Miner also made his father proud with the grades he brought home, but that was destined to change. “Then I discovered girls, cars, fun things, rock-and-roll bars,” Miner recalled.
He and best friend George Oliver used to bluff their way into the bars of Colonie, a suburb of Albany that Miner fondly recalls as, “a panacea of partiers.” It was strictly life in the fast lane for a young man who embraced dabbling on the edges of life, which would literally become the case when he got into drag racing.
Miner was inspired by his father, a race car enthusiast who drove a Corvette. In 1958, Miner built his first car with the assistance of his dad. He was 15 and not old enough to legally drive it.
“We raced at the old Fonda race track,” he said. “That was the start of my drag racing career and then other tracks started opening because other tracks really, really started catching on. It became huge to me and my father actually made it possible. And he drove me to Fonda dragstrip because I wasn’t old enough to drive. I didn’t have a driver’s license and I guess they (the operators of the race track) never thought I wouldn’t have a driver’s license because I was driving race cars. So I guess I was breaking the rules.”
Miner was accepted by the Chrysler Corporation into its racing program and he was trained in its race car engineering school in Center Line, Mich. But struggle usually matched the sensation he experienced being behind the wheel. Fuel cost upward of $800 for a quarter-mile run. He won substantial money, but he invested even more into continuing in a business he remembers as, “if you want to play, you’ve got to pay. You do it because it’s in your blood and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Up in Flames
Then on Labor Day 1973, with Lohre and 7-year-old Jaydene in attendance, a nitro explosion occurred in Miner’s car and he suffered severe burns. More than 45 years later, the memory still resonates with Jaydene.
“It was a night race and his car blew up going down the track,” she said. “All I saw were flames where my father’s car was. He jumped out and was lying on the track with a burned fire suit. The car crashed into the guardrail and burned completely up. I remember being in the ambulance, there was skin hanging from his arm where the fire suit had burned through. He stuck his arm into an ice chest and all I remember is hearing the sizzle. He got into the front seat of the ambulance and sat with his arm in an ice chest.”
But that’s only part of the story.
“I was such a hard head,” Miner said. “My dear wife Lohre was with me and my daughter. I went to the hospital and they were cutting off all the skin. I was really, really hurting. I’ll never forget there was a great big nurse in there and she brings a stretcher to take me to my room. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘You’ve got to go to the hospital! You’re seriously burned!’ I wouldn’t be admitted and my wife had to drive me back. My wife had to change my bandages in the truck. We went to my family doctor and he said, ‘Drag racing caught up with you? I’ll tell you right now — I can’t work on that. You have to go to a specialist.’ I had to go back to a hospital because he said this can’t be done in a doctor’s office.”
Miner’s drag racing career was rapidly winding to a close, especially after his father, who was largely financing this undertaking, died on Thanksgiving Day 1970. Money was slowly drying up.
Then he lost Lohre on Feb. 4, 1975. “He’s still lost without her and it’s been almost 50 years,” Jaydene said.
Said Jay, “It was extremely painful to lose my best friend, my lover, the girl who kept encouraging me and was probably the most important person in my life. It was very, very difficult. I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, I didn’t go talk to anybody, but I really went through a bad time. And I had a little girl.”
A New Career
But then his career started to evolve into what it remains today in officiating. He didn’t get where he wanted to go on a race track. But when he immersed himself into what has truly defined his life — his role as a mover and shaker in softball and baseball umpiring — that’s when he found his fulfillment. By 1976, he became involved in softball in New York state as an assigner, instructor and rules interpreter. Starting in 1977, he doubled in baseball in those same roles. He memorized rulebooks until it almost became an obsession with him. It was a way for a new widower to support himself and his daughter and Miner loved everything about it.
More than 40 years later, softball and baseball umpiring have Miner’s fingerprints all over their mechanics as he has tried to modernize them.
“What we did a lot of times is we made the game more playable — and not with just rules, but with mechanics,” he said. “The biggest thing I’m responsible for in New York state is have shared coverage and not have too much responsibility dumped on one umpire and massive responsibility dumped on another umpire. So basically in my system, we don’t want one umpire to go to both ends of a ground-ball double play. That’s like using somebody in the office for nearly all the work and somebody else is only doing eight or 10 percent of the work. If we’re going to use three umpires and pay three umpires, we might as well get three umpires to do the job.”
Miner continues to recover in his daughter’s home, wondering if he’ll ever be able to get back into softball. He has retained his titles as the interpreter for softball rules in New York, but he sometimes feels left behind by his lack of activity. Where Miner can feel assured is that his place is already secure. Even if he never works another day, the contributions he has made have been resounding. And from the start, he practiced what he preached.
“We had a couple state Babe Ruth tournaments that were held in Albany and Jay, myself and two other guys were the four umpires,” Levy said. “We never worked four-umpire crews and we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know where to go. So the afternoon of the game, the four of us went on the field and Jay would say, ‘All right, you’re here, you’re here and you’re here. This is where you would be with nobody on. If this happens, you move here, you move there, you move there and the plate umpire comes here.’
“And then we would walk through it and then do another play. We were there for a good hour and a half before we even got to the game. But by the time we got to the game, we knew where we were supposed to be. He didn’t like to leave anything to chance. He was not going to have somebody say, ‘You mean there was four of you out there and nobody saw that?’ That was his nature, He was an umpire’s umpire.”
Aileen Durant, who preceeded Berkery as president of the NYSSOA, counts Miner as one of her closest friends. One of her favorite memories of Miner at work in his home offers a glimpse into just how much of a force he became in softball umpiring.
“This was maybe 20 or 25 years ago,” she said. “He has three TVs going and the Yankees are on one, the Red Sox on another and the Mets on another. He’s got all three games going. There would be a controversial call and all of a sudden his phones would just start ringing off the way with people calling. It was, ‘Jay, do you think that call was correct?’ I don’t think there’s anybody who knows the rules of softball and baseball, whether it’s Federation, Major League Baseball, USA, NCAA … he just knows them all and he can tell you. I don’t think there’s anybody else who can do that. Sometimes the rules are different, but he knows all the differences.
“Officials by nature have a foxhole mentality,” Berkery said. “And in a tough game, I want Jay in the foxhole with me.”
Peter Jackel is an award-winning sportswriter from Racine, Wis.
