Kickball Umpire Sues South Carolina Mayor, Saying He Was Fired Over a Call

The home team, trailing 5-1 in a recreational league kickball game for adults, had put runners on first and second with two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning.

There was a bang-bang play at the plate: Out was the call.

But there was nothing routine about the play or the base runner, the son of the mayor in Moncks Corner, S.C., a small town north of Charleston.

The umpire who made the pivotal call on Aug. 6, Graylnn Moran Jr., said that he was out of his part-time job two days later, and that it was an act of retribution by the mayor, Michael A. Lockliear, whom he sued on Friday.

The mayor plays second base and the police chief pitches for the team, named Recreational Hazard, according to Mr. Moran, who said in an interview on Friday that Mr. Lockliear had stormed out of the dugout and started haranguing him over the call against his son, Andrew Lockliear, who is in his 20s. The visiting team, the Toe Jammers, won.

Now Mr. Moran’s lawyer is calling on South Carolina’s governor and attorney general to open a misconduct investigation into Mr. Lockliear.

“I didn’t even know he was the mayor,” Mr. Moran said. “He said, ‘This will be the last time you ever represent this town.’ He said, ‘I own this town.’”

The town, its recreation director and the owner of the company that assigns umpires to recreational league games in Moncks Corner are also named as defendants in the lawsuit, which was filed in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court in Berkeley County, S.C.

Mr. Lockliear did not respond to a request for comment on Friday, but in an interview with The Berkeley Independent he denied having Mr. Moran removed from his umpiring duties. He also disputed that he had grabbed a fence, kicked a water bottle and thrown a tantrum, as Mr. Moran’s lawsuit contends.

The parks director, Becky Ellison; the town administrator for Moncks Corner, Jeff Lord, who is not named in the lawsuit; and the owner and chief executive of Charleston Officials SC,William Hamm, did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Mr. Hamm told The Post and Courier of Charleston that Mr. Moran would be able to return to the umpire rotation next season.

Mr. Moran, 43, a forester and Moncks Corner resident who works part time as an umpire and disc jockey, said he was in disbelief when his boss, Mr. Hamm, told him that he should not return to the town’s recreation center.

He said people had argued calls before in his five years of umpiring, but it had never escalated to something like this.

“I’ve never had it taken so far that they had me fired,” Mr. Moran said.

Mr. Moran said he makes $25 for each game that he umpires and $75 a night when there are triple-headers, as was the case on Aug. 6. He makes about $1,200 a year umpiring kickball and also umpires Dixie Youth Baseball games. The lawsuit does not specify a dollar amount for actual and punitive damages that are being sought. It also seeks reimbursement for the cost of litigation.

“He called me stupid and just kept right on arguing the play,” Mr. Moran said of Mr. Lockliear. “He was yelling. I told him to calm down.”

In a letter Friday to Gov. Henry McMaster and the state attorney general, Alan Wilson, Mr. Moran’s lawyer, Thomas M. Fernandez, urged them to open a misconduct investigation into Mr. Lockliear.

“If this is not crooked good ol’ boy politics, I do not know what is,” Mr. Fernandez wrote. “As you both know, our public officers must be watertight when it comes to corrupting influences.”

The governor’s office and the attorney general did not respond to requests for comment on Friday, but a spokesman for Mr. Wilson, the attorney general, told The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., that the office would not take up the matter and that any investigation would have to be done by local law enforcement.