"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.
Hall of Famer. 1950 AL MVP. Five-time All Star. Slick fielder. And, most memorably for those of us under 60, stalwart announcer, who began on TV with Mel Allen and Red Barber as his broadcast booth teammates. Not a bad way to begin.
But Howard Cosell, then a radio announcer, gave him no chance: "You'll never last," he said. "You look like George Burns and you sound like Groucho Marx."
His stats don't pop out at you, especially for someone in the Hall. But Rizzuto was certainly quotable.
I dig the ESPN miniseries "The Bronx is Burning." John Turturro and Oliver Platt are among my favorite actors (RIP, "Huff"). The series seems fairly well-grounded in reality, at least as it's depicted in Jonathan Mahler's terrific book. As Mahler concedes, and as would be expected, ESPN emphasizes baseball over the other issues and events covered in much more detail in the book. While The Son of Sam angle is played up in the miniseries about in proportion to the way it's covered by Mahler, the blackout is given very short shrift, as is the mayoral race between Abe Beame, Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo.
The blackout and subsequent looting signaled a kind of cultural and social bottoming out in modern NYC history, and the rippling aftereffects continued long after the lights came back on. The mayoral race, it could be argued, was a turning point not just for New York, but also for national politics; both Cuomo and Koch, virtual unknowns outside the city and state, would soon become influential national figures.
In other words, if you haven't read the book, do. And if you've read the book but not seen the miniseries, put the series in your Netflix queue or watch out for what will probably be endless reruns on ESPN Classic.
Some goodies from elsewhere:
If you know how to do a few tricks with the Amazon Online Reader, you can read Robert Ward's entire June 1977 Sport magazine article, "Reggie Jackson in No-Man's Land," via the "Search inside this book" feature. The article is in Top of the Heap: A Yankees Collection, pages 259-271. You can start here but once you click on the page 259 link you'll have to log on to Amazon to read the entire article.
The Lower Hudson Online Web site reports that 1977 Yankee batboys John Caldararo and Joe D'Ambrosio think that ESPN has gotten just about everything wrong, except for what it's gotten right. "I haven't seen one thing where I said, 'Wow, that's exactly right,'" D'Ambrosio tells LHO. "All in all, the show is entertaining, and it's close to reality, but, you know. It's television."
Reggie Jackson can't imagine his story can be told fairly without his input; he apparently has forgotten that he originally had plenty of input and plenty of questions asked by reporters during the 1977 season (and after).
The New York Daily News has an awesome retrospective of the summer of '77. Imaginatively entitled "The Bronx is Burning" it includes fresh stories, video and audio takes on that summer, and scads of archival material material about the Yankees, the Son of Sam, the blackout, the mayoral race, and even the music of 1977 (think disco and CBGB). A real treat.
Finally, Google did its part not only by enabling me to find much of this material, but also by inviting Jonathan Mahler to speak in its "Authors@Google" series on July 7. That video, which includes some explanation by Mahler of the differences between the ESPN series and his book, what motivated him to write the book in the first place, readings from some passages, and an Q&A session.
It's a little disappointing (and intriguing) to see that Google has disallowed comments on the video of Mahler's talk. So you're not missing a thing by watching it here.
Back in the day, it was a mainstay of every household that emphasized (or aspired to) some level of intellectualism: the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica. We had the full set (and the year supplements) -- and it was just there, from the beginning, from the time I became conscious of such things.
But now we've got Wikipedia, which trumps the Encyclopædia Britannica, because it's more complete. It includes cool stuff! At some point, the good Britannica folks in Chicago will catch up.
The above is a long-winded introduction to a very cool article I found in Wikipedia, entitled, simply enough, "List of baseball entrance music."
What a wonderful idea.
Have fun perusing the entire list on your own. Some things struck me as ... odd or interesting.
Reds centerfielder Ryan Freel enters to "Tom's Diner," by Suzanne Vega. Maybe the most mellow song on the list. And it's just surprising that it's on any major leaguer's playlist:
Hideki Matsui is one homesick man. There's a few things he could do about this (besides going home). He could enter to some familiar Japanese tunes. Or he could let everyone know he'd prefer that Yankee Stadium be relocated on a site close to the Tokyo Dome. He prefers the latter, by coming to bat to the sounds of "Get Back," and "Day Tripper" by the Beatles and Led Zep's "Immigrant Song."
Nationals centerfielder Ryan Langerhans, who's making the Mendoza Line look lofty, brings music theory into the mix, according to Wikipedia. He enters to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" because "the opening chord sequence matches the syllables in his name." Which is true:
On April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715h career home run, eclipsing the mark of 714 set by Babe Ruth.
Three broadcasts, which you'll hear if you click on the link below, exist of that moment. The first is Curt Gowdy on NBC TV; the second is Milo Hamilton on the Braves radio network; and the third is Vin Scully on the Dodgers radio network. This is how they called the moment.
Mystery Man:
Teammates (Piersall & Lepcio)
by Jeff Merron
(This article appears in the current (Summer 2007) issue of 108 Magazine, which is available at many Barnes & Noble and Borders outlets. You can also find a PDF version of this article, with photos, at the 108 Web site.)
Boston Red Sox rookie second baseman Ted Lepcio walked up the stairs into Westborough State Hospital, accompanied by veteran Sox pitcher Ellis Kinder, a front office worker, and a man who worked in the ticket office. Inside the red brick walls of one of Massachusetts’s oldest institutions for the care of the mentally ill, Lepcio found the room of his roommate with the Red Sox since the 1952 season started in spring training. His roommate was pleasant enough to Lepcio; in fact, later he wrote about the encounter. “I recognized Lepcio from his pictures. I didn’t remember ever having met him. Nice of him to come — but why should he be particularly interested in me? ... As far as I knew, our paths had never crossed. But he acted as if he knew me well, and I greeted him warmly. He must have been close to me while I was sick. I’ll ask Mary.”
Thus, Jimmy Piersall, in his best-selling 1955 book, Fear Strikes Out, describes his first meeting in the hospital with his Red Sox teammate, Ted Lepcio. Memories of his roommate were not the only things lost to the rookie outfielder; he could remember virtually nothing that had happened in the preceding eight months. Piersall was probably the only one who could say that. Certainly no one who was around him would ever be able to forget, especially Lepcio.
***
In 1952, the Red Sox began the season with six rookies, starting a radical retooling of a team that had relied for years on the nucleus of the 1946 pennant-winning team. During the winter of 1951-52, Piersall read an item in The Sporting News reporting that Boston manager Lou Boudreau wanted to convert him to shortstop. The Piersall experiment would be part of this dramatic rebuilding of the team. Piersall, in moving from the outfield to the infield, faced a daunting challenge, to say the least.
This is not "The Pride of the Yankees," the 1942 silver screen Gehrig biopic for which Gary Cooper (Gehrig) and Teresa Wright (Eleanor Gehrig) picked up Oscar nominations. But it is a very good treatment of the end of Gehrig's career and life. This live teleplay, part of the Climax! series that ran on CBS from 1954 to 1958, stars Harry Carry Jr., the great Western actor, as Bill Dickey; Wendell Corey as Gehrig; and Russell ("The Professor") Johnson as the young fireballer "Rusty."
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.
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