Bonds Hits 600!!!

KNBR radio | August 9th, 2002 | Sabertooth

[bootless]

Hank was great. I have his last game on audio tape ... I should put it on DVD while I still can. I'm almost done with his autobiography - very interesting. His sense of humor just tickles me. For instance, Hank taught me that the Alou brothers, of course, had other siblings: Boog, Bebop, Skip to My, among others.

[BluesDuke]

Hank Greenwald was a heck of a announcer! I grew up listening to him, his knowledge of the history of the game was astounding, much like Bluesduke's.

I should only equal Mr. Greenwald's knowledge.

One of my library's treasures is Mr. Curt Smith's Voices of the Game, which speaks wonderful volumes of the great baseball announcers through the 1980s. I was privileged to grow up still having Red Barber on the air, albeit on the Yankee team: the Ole Redhead was the sole reason I did listen to Yankee games at all growing up in the 1960s, and I happened to be watching the game that ended up getting him canned - the Yankees had hit their nadir in 1966 (they finished...you can look it up...dead last in the American League) and Yankee Stadium was practically empty; Barber called for a camera pan of the empty ballpark saying that was the real story of the game. When the lords of CBS, who owned the team at the time, got wind of it, they all but rousted Barber off the announcing team.

I grew up as a Met fan from the day they were born (I saw my first Met game in the Polo Grounds in 1962 - the game in which Marvelous Marv Throneberry, as a pinch hitter, whacked a walkoff three-run homer...and ended up taking a curtain call from the old center field clubhouse for the bleacher fans in nothing but his underwear and his uniform stirrups!) and, thus, listening to Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy (who still does Met games on radio, bless him), and Ralph Kiner. I was watching on television when Lindsey Nelson did three innings of play-by-play from the ceiling gondola in the middle of the Astrodome the year it opened (Casey Stengel: My man Lindsey's become a grounds rule!; a batted ball hitting the gondola was ruled a grounds-rule double). Later, though in the Midwest with the Air Force, my cable system brought me WOR as a superstation and I got to hear the second truly great Mets announcing team of Tim McCarver, Steve Zabriskie and Ralph Kiner (it was in this period that McCarver coined "grand salami" to indicate a grand slam). I also got to listen to Harry Caray and Steve Stone doing Chicago Cubs games on WGN.

Over the years, I got to hear Bob Prince of the Pittsburgh Pirates (on some nights on Long Island you could actually pick up the faint signals of the Pirates' radio station and Prince was a gem - one of the only shameless homers who actually knew what he was doing on the air and didn't make you feel like you were just being beaten to death with the root-root-rooting; Pirate fans were blessed to have him) and Mel Parnell of the Boston Red Sox (the old pitcher made a Red Sox fan out of me when I picked up on UHF television - remember?! - Red Sox games at my home on Long Island, during that wonderful 1967 pennant race). And, to me, World Series time meant Vin Scully. I would, if ever they were fool enough to name me baseball commissioner, decree that Vin Scully should broadcast the World Series until the day he dies. Some gifts are too precious to squander.

(...after Joe Garagiola said he would "have to bet the house - he's got to bunt" of Met relief pitcher Jesse Orosco, batting with two men on in the eighth inning of Game Seven, with the Red Sox using the rotation or "wheel" play to foil the bunt with first and third basemen charging the lines and shortstop and second basemen hustling to third and first)...they're going...Swinging! and a ground ball into left center field...in comes Knight, it is 8-5, Mets, and Joe, you just lost your house! - Vin Scully, Game Seven, 1986 World Series.

But then I came to southern California and I have the pleasure and privilege of listening to Vin Scully on television down here.

[bootless]

Vin Scully = World Series. Period.

(...after Joe Garagiola said he would "have to bet the house - he's got to bunt" of Met relief pitcher Jesse Orosco, batting with two men on in the eighth inning of Game Seven, with the Red Sox using the rotation or "wheel" play to foil the bunt with first and third basemen charging the lines and shortstop and second basemen hustling to third and first)...they're going...Swinging! and a ground ball into left center field...in comes Knight, it is 8-5, Mets, and Joe, you just lost your house! - Vin Scully, Game Seven, 1986 World Series.

I still have that on videotape. Perfection.

Last summer, as my son was starting to learn the inner game of baseball, we had a "moment." Watching the A's in the 8th inning, who were behind by about four runs, Chris said that he didn't think they'd win. I told hin that I had something to show him after the game, which the A's did win.

I put in my aging videotape of Game 6 of the 86 World Series. I did fast forward through some parts of the game, but when we got to the end game, I checked in with him to see what he thought would happen. Right before the Mets rallied, he was pretty sure they were going to lose. 1 out? 2 out? "Mom, it doesn't look too good." By the time the Mets completed theircome from behind win, his eyes were the size of 45s, and his mouth was open.

My boy was a believer.

Of course, the Indians' 12-run comeback against the Mariners sealed it.

Now, when things look bad for him, and he doesn't think he can do it, all it takes is, "Remember the Indians?"

I love this game!

[BluesDuke]

*heheheheheh* I learned the truth of what I call Berra's Law (it ain't over until it's over) watching that doubleheader in the Polo Grounds, where Marvelous Marv ended the second game with that pinch-hit, walkoff three-run blast. The inning began against the Pirates' (and, then, still the National League's) best relief pitcher, Elroy Face. You'd have about expected the Mets to be cooked (especially this being the 1962 Mets) and, then, single, single, single, three-run jack.

Speaking of the Polo Grounds, one fine day Willie McCovey of the Giants ripped two jacks into the right field seats off hapless Met pitcher Roger Craig. Commiserated Casey Stengel at the mount, pointing to the right field seats: Do you know they are going to take down this ballpark after next year? Well, you keep pitching like that to that guy and you're gonna give 'em a head start on the right field stands.

Classic Stengel moment, Polo Grounds, first-ever Met home game: Hailing first baseman Jim Marshall before his first at-bat: Blanchard! (Note: Casey confused Marshall with Johnny Blanchard, backup catcher and pinch hitter deluxe, whom Stengel managed during his final season running the Yankees; Marshall understood quickly enough and snapped to, saying "Yes, sir!")Do you see them white lines? They are there to hit the ball on. An' them fellers in the middle are called fielders. (Marshall promptly ripped a double and eventually scored the first-ever Met run before the home folks in the game.)

Come to think of it, my Mets retaught the lesson earlier this season against the Braves - way down to the Braves with John Smoltz coming in to pitch the ninth, the Mets jumped him for nine runs to put the game into extra innings (the Mets eventually won the game). Fouled up poor Smoltz's ERA for most of the season, he's pitched better than his 3.00+ ERA would suggest. And didn't my Red Sox prove likewise in the 1986 American League Championship Series against the California Angels and poor Donnie Moore - one strike away from an Angel pennant, and Dave Henderson took Donnie Moore over the left field fence for three and the game and back to Fenway to come back and win the pennant.

[bootless]

We keep learning Stengel's Law, don't we?

God bless Donnie Moore - that was heartbreaking.

Thanks for your recollections... I love it! Best...

[BluesDuke]

God bless Donnie Moore - that was heartbreaking.

Thomas Boswell wrote a very good listen-up essay in the wake of Donnie Moore's suicide which is collected in his book Game Day. I recently wrote about Bill Buckner, that postseason's other overbeaten (and unwarrantedly so) goat, on my baseball blog/zine. The point being that, ok, ballplayers either screw up, or fall short, in the worst of possible times, but maybe it's time we quit making their lives hell for it unto perpetuity? Because not a damn one of us knows what we would do, or how we would do it, if in the same situation with millions of eyes upon us we happened to make a bad mistake.

I had enough being both a Mets and a Red Sox fan when the 1986 World Series rolled up with the matchup it did have. But when I learned subsequently of Bill Buckner's first thoughts as he walked off the field following that error, I could not help thinking: God, but what some people would rather fasten on one luminous goat than look at the whole game. (Something similar happened to Ernie Lombardi, the Cincinnati Reds catcher, who was tabbed and reamed for years as the goat of the 1939 World Series when Yankee Charlie Keller crashed into him at the plate and knocked him out stone cold. Lombardi was a huge man for his time and seemingly unlikely to be a knockout victim on such a play, but why nail him as the goat when the 1939 Series was a mismatch in itself - the Yankees took easy care of the Reds in four straight - and, as Lombardi himself subsequently revealed, he was already feeling dizzy behind the plate on that particularly overwarm day, well before Keller (who wasn't called King Kong because he was a wisp of a man) came calling.)

Donnie Moore was never allowed to live down the Henderson pitch, never mind that the Angels still had two more chances to nail that pennant even if Henderson teed off with the Red Sox a strike away from wait-till-next-year. Buckner in many ways still isn't allowed to live it down. Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams was getting death threats and nails under his vehicles at his home even before Joe Carter took him downtown to win the 1993 Series. Loving the game deeply and passionately is one thing, but even baseball fans and baseball writers can go several bridges too far and too often do...

To this day, people think I'm the biggest piece of shit on earth because of the 1946 World Series. - Johnny Pesky, an ancient Red Sox goat.

On the other hand, there were (and are) occasional bursts of light. I asked why this happened to me, and my (priest) said, 'God chose you because He knew you would be strong enough to bear the burden of it.' - Ralph Branca, on Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning playoff home run in 1951.