Author’s Flashback — Perry Barber: You Gotta Love the Ump!
8 min readMar 12, 2021
By Stephen Hanks
Published on August 5, 1986 in The Village Voice, New York City
I first heard the phrase “You gotta love the game” during my college baseball days. It was uttered with a combination of sincere passion and mock self-justification by my coach, Nick Testa, who is still the prototypical baseball lifer — late ’50s, former…
