Reggie Jackson always wanted his own candy bar ... but this glob would never make the candy hall of fame. The commercial below, circa 1978, couldn't have helped much.
In its Reggie Jackson entry, the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture sums up the product thusly: "The Reggie! bar was a crumbly lump of chocolate, peanuts, and corn syrup sculpted to the approximate diameter of a major league baseball. It cost a quarter (quite a bargain in the age of inflation) and came packaged in an orange wrapper bearing the slugger's likeness. Sportswriters had a field day with the unpalatable confection. One wag wrote that when you opened the wrapper on a Reggie! bar, it told you how good it was. Another derided it as the only candy bar that tasted like a hot dog."
"The Bronx is Burning" has made me much more curious about Thurman Munson than I've ever been, and as a result I've been scouring the Web for relevant action from the late, great Yankee catcher. The results have been slim, I'm sad to report. One of the greatest catchers of my lifetime, and MLB cracks down on anyone who dares to post a minute or two of in-game action that features him (or just about any great historical baseball figure). But a couple of decent clips have surfaced in the past few weeks (watch 'em while they last!). This first is simply Keith Jackson talking a little about Munson during a 1979 broadcast.
Here's one of Howard Cosell replaying, a week after Munson died, a very brief interview he had done with the Yankee captain.
Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager and a columnist for 108 Magazine, is noted for being a baseball ambassador, a true asset to the game, even after his "official" retirement. But sometimes his passion for baseball (or, perhaps more accurately, for winning) overcame his internal censor, and after a ballgame he would let loose with a stream of profanities during his mini press conference with reporters.
I've been to a few of these informal exchanges: they take place almost immediately after the end of each game, in the manager's office. Relatively small enclaves of reporters, equipped with pens and notepads and often tape recorders, surround the manager, who's sitting at his desk. Usually he's still in his uniform, and after a long day of work, like the rest of us, he just wants to get the hell home. But first he's got to give the media guys something.
It usually starts with the the TV folks. They've been perched in the office since the eighth inning, taking up the first "row," so they can get their short clip in time to be slotted into the 11 p.m. or midnight local newscast. After a question or two, they're gone. Those are usually softball questions with easy answers, and that's all they need.
Then the radio guys move in. They want something better, smarter. Something that can add real substance to a 2-minute audio report. And the manager knows the routine, and tries to provide it. They've also got an ASAP deadline, and get out of there as soon as possible.
Which leaves the print reporters. The majority are local beat reporters, a few cover the opposing team, there's a "neutral" but local AP scribe, and maybe a feature writer or two. And that's when things get a little looser. The manager knows that the video and radio guys are good PR and he tries to help them by giving them something that's not too tough to edit. But newspapers generally don't print profanities, so if he's inclined toward that type of language, especially when upset, angry, or tired, he feels free to use it. He knows most of the reporters surrounding him, talks with them frequently, and is around them for hours a day, every day. The level of familiarity must provide a certain comfort.
I'm generalizing, of course; some managers are more buttoned down than others. Some say as little is as necessary to satisfy the press. Some may use profanity on occasion -- say, one f-bomb per sentence, one polysyllabic sex-act descriptor per paragraph. Others may be the meanest SOBs in the world, but don't curse, either for religious reasons or because corporal punishment was the penalty for cursing when they were children.
Lasorda was one of the best at integrating profanity into all kinds of responses to reporters' questions, which ranged from the simple (and therefore ridiculous), to the smart (and therefore ridiculous), to the complex (and therefore ridiculous).
Some of those old reporters' audiotapes have survived. This collage includes one of my favorite audio clips, about Kurt Bevacqua, whose name provides some great hard consonants to complement full-blown fescennine belittlement. Lasorda also has some interesting things to say about Steve Garvey. The video is well done, with appropriately synchronized still shots underscoring Lasorda's sentiments.
It's also NSFW, unless you're wearing headphones. Lots of cussing.
No doubt you've heard by now that the Rangers set a modern major league record last night by scoring 30 runs in a game, defeating the Orioles, 30-3. Here's the box score, in the style most contemporary fans will view it.
Texas broke the old major league record, which was shared by two teams. On June 8, 1950, the Red Sox beat the St. Louis Browns, 29-4. Below is what most fans saw in the next day's paper.
About five years later, the White Sox drubbed the A's, 29-6. The original, newspaper-style box is below.
Yeah, I know that you can find the old box scores over at Retrosheet, which is terrific, but sometimes it's cool to see the originals. At least I think so.
Two posts for the price of one today. I had planned to write about how ferociously MLB, in a bizarre attempt to squash free viral marketing of the game, is pulling videos of even short and relatively trivial action from sites like Google Video and YouTube, but I'll save that for another day. Although it hurts.
Somehow or other, I missed last week's publication of Roger Angell's excellent short piece on the new all-time career home runs record set by Barry Bonds. Thank you, the New Yorker, for continuing to improve your Web site, making archival material available and relatively easy to find.
As usual, Angell, in "Deathly Numbers," provides a unique and elegantly-written perspective on things; you may think differently about the "sacrosanct" mark after reading it. I do.
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On an entirely different note, those who are either watching "The Bronx is Burning" or reading the book (or both, which I recommend), may find the conversation below, between 1977 Yankees Fran Healy and Sparky Lyle, of interest. It's interspersed with some vintage footage of the type we're seeing in the miniseries. At one point Lyle says, "I think a lot of us didn't understand Reggie," but unfortunately he doesn't explain further in this clip (perhaps he does elsewhere), and seems to indicate that they understood Reggie just fine -- but probably shouldn't have cared so much about what he said about them -- and himself.
Below is a Rizzuto-themed panel penned by the ageless New York Daily News cartoonist/columnist Bill Gallo, who recalls The Scooter's encounter with a cow on "Phil Rizzuto Day" at Yankee Stadium in 1985.
crumbly lump of chocolate, peanuts, and corn syrup sculpted to the approximate diameter of a major league baseball. It cost a quarter (quite a bargain in the age of inflation) and came packaged in an orange wrapper bearing the slugger's likeness. Sportswriters had a field day with the unpalatable confection. One wag wrote that when you opened the wrapper on a Reggie! bar, it told you how good it was. Another derided it as the only candy bar that tasted like a hot dog."
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