Ronald Reagan, RIP: "Jurges Popped Out on the First Pitch"

The Catbird in the Nosebleed Seats ^ | June 6, 2004 | Blues Duke

[nunya bidness]

"A grace that comes from humility," is what President Bush said of Ronald Reagan, whose decade in Alzheimer's purgatory ended mercifully in his death 5 June. And perhaps that humility was leavened well from a lifetime's professional and personal affiliation to the Chicago Cubs, on behalf of whom did Mr. Reagan first enter the public life.

To America's political conversation he restored the concept of government as the agony and not the ecstasy of her citizens' lives; to the sinking ship of the Soviet Empire he handed an anchor. And that was surely philistine's work compared to flying by the seat of his pants on WHO Des Moines, while Dizzy Dean was pitching to Billy Jurges, and the telegraph wire gave out. Surely the frequency with which he told the tale suggests Mr. Reagan knew he spent no hour nobler than when he understood spontaneously that the usual disclaimer simply would not do.

WHO lacked the budgetary weight to send an announcer to Wrigley Field to call them live, so they engaged Mr. Reagan to perform a play-by-play based on a teletypist's translation of game acts from Morse code. This he is said to have done with virtuosity enough that fans enough were believed to prefer listening to his re-creations than to the real thing coming out of Wrigleyville. (Mr. Reagan actually polled fourth in 1936, when The Sporting News asked readers to name their favourite baseball announcers.)

"(J)ust picture that the fellow sat on the other side of a window with a little slit underneath, the headphones on, getting the Morse code from the ballpark, and he typed out the play," Mr. Reagan remembered, in An American Life. "And the paper would come through to me saying something like, 'S1C.' That means strike one on the corner. But you're not going to sell Wheaties yelling 'S1C!' So I would say, 'So-and-so comes out of the windup, here comes the pitch…and it's a called strike breaking over the outside corner to a batter that likes the ball a little higher."

Then came the day in 1934 when Mr. Reagan's teletypist, whom he named as Curly, prompted him to start calling another pitch heading for the plate. Or, so he thought. But Curly shook his head. Mr. Reagan thought first that a miraculous play was done on the pitch, until the slip came through the slit saying only that the wire was dead. "I knew," Mr. Reagan recalled, "that if I said, 'We will pause for a brief interlude of transcribed music until they get the wire fixed,' everybody would switch to other stations." And then he remembered one of the few acts which never appears in the box scores: the foul ball.

"I knew I was on my own. And I looked at Curly on the other side of the window and he was helpless…I made Dean use the resin bag and shake off a couple of signs to take up time. Then he threw another one, and another…Jurges was at bat, and when he hit a foul I described kids in a fight over it. Then he fouled one to the left that just missed being a home run."

By Mr. Reagan's count this transpired for six minutes and forty five seconds, a possible world's record for a batter at the plate if such records had been kept. Then, he saw Curly sitting upright and typing. And, shortly enough, came a slip through the slit.

"I started to giggle, and I could hardly get it out," wrote Mr. Reagan. "It said, 'Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched'."

To the Cubs must go the inadvertent credit for Mr. Reagan's move from the broadcast booth to the film world that prodded him toward the political world. Persuading WHO to send him with the Cubs to 1937 spring training, on Catalina Island (Cubs owner William Wrigley had owned the island off Los Angeles), he was persuaded in turn to take a Warner Brothers screen test. Back in Des Moines, he received a more imperative wire than even Jurges popping out on that first and rudely interrupted pitch: a $200-a-week contract, launching a film career which put him in due course into Grover Cleveland Alexander's shoes.

"He was very graceful and easy to teach," said the future Hall of Famer who taught Mr. Reagan how to pitch for the film: Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians, speaking to Bob Roberts for Hardball on the Hill. "I had this little quirk in my own motions where I did a little leap after I released the ball, so I would be in position to field a ball back to me. By the time they started shooting the movie, Reagan was doing exactly the same thing."

Such training proved more than useful when invited to throw out the first pitch on one Opening Day in Baltimore. One should not live believing George W. Bush the first and only President who could find the plate, as he did throwing out a first pitch for the 2001 World Series. Escorted halfway between the rubber and the plate, Mr. Reagan waved off that idea, went right up onto the mound, toed the rubber, and provoked a voluminous crowd roar when he threw one right down the pipe.

But he could provoke Hall of Famers to awe that in turn provoked his own, as Lemon's Hall of Fame teammate Bob Feller would learn in 1949, when he received a letter from a hospitalized Mr. Reagan (he had fractured a leg sliding into first in a charity game, while bunting off Bob Hope). The future president had befriended a ten-year-old boy hospitalized for psychological treatment, after the boy's father had shot himself and the boy's mother. The boy took even more to Mr. Reagan when learning the older man had known Feller since interviewing him as a high school pitcher for WHO.

Mr. Reagan wrote to Feller asking for an autographed ball from the Indians for the boy's birthday, the pitcher remembered in his own memoir. Feller kept the letter, not because it was from a movie star who once interviewed him, but because the letter's intent and tone had touched him deeply: "You'd contribute a lot toward pulling this little guy out of a dark world he's making for himself. I know this is an imposition, Bob, and I would hesitate to bother you if I didn't believe it could do a lot to really help a nice little kid who can very easily end up going haywire."

Feller and his mates (including, we presume, Satchel Paige himself) acceded to Mr. Reagan's request. In 1981, a White House dinner for Hall of Famers granted Feller and the President a chance to chat, during which Feller mentioned that ancient letter. "I told him I remembered it well and that I even kept the letter over the years," Feller wrote in his memoir. "He couldn't believe it. There wasn't anything in 1949 to believe it was a letter from a future president, but that wasn't why I kept it anyhow. I kept it because of what Ronald Reagan did, taking the time to write out a two-page letter in longhand to help a kid he hardly knew. That seemed to me to be a special act of human kindness, and the memories of deeds like that are worth preserving."

Mr. Reagan asked Feller to send him a copy of that letter and, after receiving it, sent Feller another, on White House stationery:

Thank you again for sending the baseball more than 30 years ago. I'll confess I'm more than a little overwhelmed that you kept the letter.

I'll sign this one the same way. I remember in '49 I did it in case you didn't remember me. Now I'll do it for "Auld Lang Syne."

Again, thanks and best regards,

Ronald Reagan
"Dutch"

Befriending Feller, Lemon, Vin Scully, Tommy Lasorda, never obstructed that his baseball heart belonged forever to the Cubs. Toward his Presidency's end, he threw out a first pitch at Wrigley Field and shared the booth with Harry Caray, doing a rather delightful inning and a half of play by play. "You know," Mr. Reagan told Caray, "in a few months I'm going to be out of work, and I thought I might as well audition."

Nothing prior to or following his four years calling the Cubs for WHO prepared Mr. Reagan better for life in and out of politics, observed the longtime Washington Post pundit David Broder: "As a Cub fan, he learned that virtue will not necessarily prevail over chicanery, that swift failure follows closely on the heels of even the most modest success, that the world mocks those who are pure in heart, but slow of foot, but – (and here's the famous Reagan optimism) – that the bitterest disappointment will soon yield to the hope and promise of a new season."

And as he passed at last to safe at home, the ballparks offered moments of silence, and then the team he loved most gave him the appropriate sendoff. The Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-1. Only the kiss of his wife could have been a sendoff more devoutly to be wished.

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For the 40th President...

[discipler]

Thank you President, Reagan. Our world is a better place because of you. Thank you for showing loyalty and goodness.

[Max Combined]

What a man!

[Bob J]

Please go to the FR Reagan Vigil thread and pledge to organize/attend a vigil for Ronald Reagan in your area!