Billy Evans

William George Evans (February 10, 1884 – January 23, 1956), nicknamed "the Boy Umpire", was an American umpire in Major League Baseball (MLB) who worked in the American League from 1906 to 1927. He became, at age 22, the youngest umpire in major league history, and later became the youngest to officiate in the World Series at age 25.

Upon his retirement at age 43, his 3,319 career games ranked fifth in major league history; his 1,757 games as a home plate umpire ranked third in AL history, and remain the eighth-most by a major league umpire. He later became a key front office executive for the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers of MLB, the Cleveland Rams of the National Football League, and president of the minor league Southern Association. as well as two books, Umpiring from the Inside (1947) and Knotty Problems in Baseball (1950).

Formative years Evans was born in Chicago. In Youngstown, the Evans family joined Westminster Presbyterian Church, where Billy Evans attended Sunday school. As a youth, Evans was active in YMCA programs and participated in a neighborhood baseball club called the Youngstown Spiders, a team named in honor of the regionally popular Cleveland Spiders. Evans returned to Ohio and accepted a job as a sports reporter at the Youngstown Daily Vindicator.

Unlike many umpires, Evans never made claims to infallibility. "I missed a lot of decisions", he once said. "At the time of making such a decision there was no doubt in my mind as to its correctness. However, a second or two later I felt that I erred and wished I could change my original ruling". On September 15, 1907, in the midst of a doubleheader between the St. Louis Browns and Detroit Tigers, Evans suffered a skull fracture when a bottle hurled by an angry spectator knocked him unconscious. The New York Times described the incident as "one of the most disgraceful scenes ever witnessed on a ball field". According to sports writers Okrent and Wulf, Johnson responded to news of the incident "with uncharacteristic humor", saying "only that he was sorry that he missed it". His staff featured well-known sportswriters Jimmy Powers and Joe Williams. In this capacity, Evans was credited with taking the Indians from a second division to a first division team. and while it dipped slightly in 1944, the threshold of one million people attending league games was again reached the following year.

On December 16, 1946, Evans accepted a contract offer from the Detroit Tigers to become their general manager.