Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  George actually got into a bit of trouble with his sister when she found out that Ballantine Beer sponsored Yankees’ broadcasts. “I can’t believe you’re singing on television for Ballantine Beer,” she scolded him. Betsy and I saw George in 2011 in North Carolina, and he was still telling that story.

  Our entire family went out on the field for the ceremony. Robby and Ron looked grown-up in their dark suits, and Christie and Jeannie looked so cute in their red dresses and white gloves. Christie, with her sweet and gentle personality, stayed by Mom’s side. Jeannie, two at the time, was a daddy’s girl. When we walked out on the field, Jeannie pleaded that I carry her, so I held her in one arm during most of the ceremony.

  Steve Hamilton, my roommate that season, gave me a beautiful oak gun case on behalf of the players. I was also presented with a brand-new Dodge Monaco station wagon.

  When my turn came to speak, little Jeannie still didn’t want me to leave her, so we walked to the microphone hand in hand. When I began to speak, I could hear an echo reverberating throughout Yankee Stadium. It was then—not the first time I visited Yankee Stadium as a seventeen-year-old or when I played my first game in the House That Ruth Built—that I had my first “Wow, this is Yankee Stadium!” moment. The echo of my voice reminded me of when I’d heard Lou Gehrig’s gripping farewell speech on this same field in The Pride of the Yankees.

  Using the words Gehrig had used and Mickey had echoed in a similar Yankee Stadium speech, I concluded by telling the fans, “How lucky it has been for me to have been a Yankee.”

  Then I added, “To God be the glory.”

  Later Betsy’s mother good-naturedly corrected me for saying “lucky.” “We’re not lucky,” she said. “We’re blessed!”

  Even though I was spending more time out of the lineup by that point, Ralph had told me he wanted me to play the final game at Yankee Stadium and the final game of the season in Chicago.

  On Sunday, September 25, I said farewell to the old Stadium in a 3–1 win over Boston by going 1 for 4. I cleanly fielded two grounders in the last inning, both times flipping to the shortstop for a force-out at second. Why couldn’t that have happened in the ’64 Series?

  Then on Sunday, October 2, I said farewell to the majors in a 2–0 win over the White Sox by again going 1 for 4.

  My last game was not an emotional day for me. By that point, I was so ready to go home to my family that I wasn’t really thinking about anything else—or the fact that this would be the final game of my career. It is sad to say now, but I felt more relief than anything. The season I thought would never end had finally ended.

  When I look back on that last day in Chicago, what stands out most to me is something that happened off the field. A couple of weeks earlier, when Ralph Houk had said he wanted to play me in the final game, he also invited me to do something else on my last day as a Yankee. I hope it was an indication of what type of impact player I had been for all my career.

  Ralph looked at the schedule and saw the game was on a Sunday. “Let’s have a team devotion,” he said. “And you be in charge of that devotion.”

  Chapter 15

  No Regrets

  I feel blessed to have walked away from my career with the Yankees still loving the game of baseball. The major league lifestyle—mostly the road trips—had become a sacrifice I was no longer willing to make, and the many losses in ’66 had us all looking to the calendar to see when that miserable season would mercifully end. But I left major league baseball with no bitterness toward the game.

  Baseball had been great to me. However, I also knew my retirement was coming at the right time. There had been no drop-off in my skills over the previous two or three years. How many more seasons could I have played at that level? I don’t know. But I had no regrets about how I left the Yankees, nor did I ever regret retiring.

  By giving me four years on my contract beyond my final playing season, the Yankees did me a great service. Although the fifteen thousand dollars per year was a reduction from what I had made as a player, the Yankees basically allowed me four years to decide what I wanted to do with my life.

  As a special assignment scout, my job was to visit with the minor league teams to encourage the players and share principles of the Yankees’ organization. With no other required duties, I was able to devote the first portion of my retirement years to staying home year-round, doing things around the house and with the kids that I hadn’t been able to do before. (I spent some time hunting, too, of course.)

  I was pleased to receive plenty of opportunities to speak and share my faith. Being a former Yankee did nothing to decrease the number of offers I received. I traveled and spoke quite a bit, in fact. But I was in control of my schedule, and the trips away were short—nothing like the two weeks at a time I’d been away in the majors.

  I also took advantage of my free time to play in Old Timers’ Games, even though at age thirty-one I made for a young old-timer. It was a special treat to play in the exhibition games with legendary players I had grown up watching. Those games allowed me the opportunity to get to know the likes of Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, Bob Feller, and Allie Reynolds, to name just a few of the friends I made.

  There was a pecking order for how players were introduced before Old Timers’ Games, and I still remember how the fans’ cheers would increase as the announcer worked his way to the biggest names in baseball. There was nothing quite as thrilling as being in Yankee Stadium when the end of the list was reached and it was Joe DiMaggio’s time to be introduced. The announcer would begin, “The greatest living Yankee . . .” and the cheering would become so thunderous that we could not hear the announcer say DiMaggio’s name.

  When I was thirty-three, I played shortstop at an Old Timers’ Game in Atlanta, and the Braves asked if I would consider coming out of retirement to play for them. Even though it would have been fun to play close to home, I told the Braves, “No, if I were going to play again, I’d play for the Yankees.”

  But, truly, I never had any desire to return. I’ve never said, “I wish I had played four or five more years.”

  A New Challenge

  Paul Dietzel, the athletic director/football coach at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, had asked me right after I retired whether I would be interested in coaching his school’s baseball team. I told him no.

  “I’ve got four years left on my contract,” I said. “So I’m not ready to do anything like that yet.”

  When I later spoke at an athletic banquet at the school, Dietzel made the same offer. Again I declined.

  Some time after that, he asked for a third time. “I’m not going to bother you anymore, but I’d really like you to be the baseball coach.”

  The third time was the charm.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m ready to try it.”

  Then Coach Dietzel told me what my salary would be.

  “I can’t live on that,” I told him.

  Dietzel upped the offer.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll come and try it.”

  That was in 1969, and I was still under contract to the Yankees. NCAA rules would not allow me to coach if I had a contract with a professional team. So before I could sign my contract with USC, I had to talk to the Yankees about getting out of my contract with them.

  I called Lee MacPhail. Lee had worked in the Yankees’ front office when I joined the franchise and had gone on to be general manager and club president of the Baltimore Orioles during part of my playing days. His younger sister, Jeannie, was a close friend to Betsy and me who often visited our home in Sumter. Now Lee was back with the Yankees as the GM.

  “Now wait a minute,” Lee told me. “If you want to come back, you can be our Triple-A manager, or you can be a broadcaster, or you can be one of our major league coaches.”

  “No,” I told my old friend, “the reason I got out was the travel involved.”

  Lee said the team would be happy to pay off what remained of my contract so I could coach at South Caroli
na. “When you get settled,” he closed, “give us a call, and we’ll bring the Yankees down to play your ball club.”

  My first season at USC was 1970. I was the school’s first full-time baseball coach, and my assignment was “to put Gamecock baseball on the map.” One of my first moves was to add pinstripes to the uniforms.

  I continued to live in Sumter and commuted the forty-five miles to Columbia. In my first year at USC, Betsy and I had the whole team out to our house for a meal. I wanted to pull off a practical joke on my players. So I arranged with a friend who was a highway patrolman to pull over the team on its way out of Columbia. I had tipped off one of the players—Eddie Ford, Whitey’s son—and told him that the patrolman would give the players a hard time and might even handcuff a player or two.

  Eddie was a lot like his father when it came to jokes and pranks, so I knew he would play along perfectly. Sure enough, when the guys were stopped, Eddie started mouthing off to the patrolman. Some of his teammates began to panic. They kept trying to calm him down and get him to be quiet, but he continued to play along with the patrolman. “What are you doing?” the players asked Eddie. “He’s going to put us under the jail if you don’t stop.”

  Finally, the patrolman started laughing, and Eddie couldn’t hold back his laughter any longer either. The patrolman let the boys off the hook, but they sure had a good story to tell when they arrived at our house.

  Our USC team wasn’t very good that first season, finishing 14–20. We were better the next year, with a 19-13 record. We steadily improved, until in 1974 we compiled a 48–8 record. That season ended with a 2–1 loss to the Miami Hurricanes in the NCAA regional tournament.

  Before the next season, with a strong team coming back, I called Lee MacPhail.

  “I’m ready for the Yankees to come play us,” I informed him.

  “I have a little problem,” Lee told me. “We’re traveling north with the Mets out of spring training. Would it be all right if the Yankees and the Mets come and play your club in Columbia?”

  It didn’t take me long to assure Lee that would be okay. And once the teams arrived, I made sure they received first-class treatment—except for the bus ride, that is. I picked up both teams at the airport in a red-and-white school bus, and I was driving the bus.

  Our USC team chartered Greyhounds for our road trips, but it seemed like a waste of money to arrange charter buses just for a short ride from the airport. At least I knew the Yankees and Mets would have a friendly bus driver with me behind the wheel.

  I had obtained a license to drive buses before we began chartering the Greyhounds. Up to that point, we often had a driver from the motor pool who would hop into the driver’s seat with a cigarette dangling from his lips and pretty much staple the accelerator to the floor. I’d been so uncomfortable with that driver that I decided to get a license and drive the team myself.

  The Yankees and Mets might not have had the fanciest mode of transportation, but we did treat them to a wonderful steak dinner—and a packed stadium. As if hosting both major league teams wasn’t attractive enough to our fans, we had the added benefit of Yogi Berra, who was serving as the Mets’ manager at the time. We filled every seat, and there were people standing anywhere there was a space.

  We played three innings against the Yankees and three against the Mets, and then the Mets and Yankees played against each other under our stadium lights. To level the playing field, Yogi pitched against our team. It was a fantastic night for our players, our fans, and our program.

  The big leaguers seemed to enjoy the exhibition too. Before the teams left, Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, who had played collegiate ball at the University of Southern California, said he had never seen a facility as nice as ours. That almost made me pop a few buttons on the chest of my jersey—I was so proud of what we were building at South Carolina.

  In ’75, we swept a late-season doubleheader against Georgia Southern, with whom we had built up a pretty good rivalry. Ron Polk, Georgia Southern’s coach, resigned after that doubleheader. Because Ron left, fans of his team began hanging me in effigy. I asked myself, What have I gotten myself into? Is it worth all of this?

  I tried to hire Ron as an assistant coach, but he became head coach at Mississippi State, where he would become known as the Father of Southeastern Conference Baseball. Ron retired in 2008 as one of college baseball’s all-time winningest coaches, with a 1,373–702 record.

  We finished the ’75 season with a 51–6–1 record and reached the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, for the first time in school history. We advanced to the championship game but then lost 5–1 to the University of Texas team under coach Cliff Gustafson.

  The following year would be my last at South Carolina. We again reached the postseason, but Furman eliminated us. We ended the ’76 season with a 38–14 record. That was the end of my run with the Gamecocks.

  Teaching Baseball

  I enjoyed teaching baseball to younger players, and I coached some fine young players at South Carolina. One special ballplayer was the son of my former teammate Whitey Ford. When I became coach at USC, I needed a shortstop, and Eddie Ford was the first player I recruited for that spot. I had watched Eddie work out occasionally at Yankee Stadium and knew he was a good fielder. Plus, he was a switch-hitter. Whitey and Eddie came in for a visit, and Eddie decided to join our program.

  Whitey would visit to watch his son play, and if my team was in a little slump when he came in, Whitey would joke with me, “Let me take them out this weekend, and I’ll get ’em loose for you.”

  “Aw, no, Whitey,” I’d tell him. “You can’t do that!”

  That was Whitey—always cracking a joke.

  Eddie once tried to pull off a hidden-ball trick that I actually foiled myself. I didn’t like hidden-ball tricks, partly because of the one Puddin’ Head Jones pulled on me during that exhibition game in 1956. I just didn’t think trickery was the right way to defeat an opponent.

  We were playing Clemson, an in-state rival. I also had a fun little coaching rivalry going on at the time with Clemson coach Bill Wilhelm.

  A Clemson player doubled, and Eddie took the throw back into the infield and walked toward the mound. When he got to the back of the mound, he picked up the resin bag and handed it to our pitcher instead of the ball. Then, with the ball hidden in his glove, he started walking casually toward second base, where the base runner was standing away from the bag.

  I recognized what Eddie was up to. “The shortstop’s got the ball!” I shouted. “The shortstop’s got the ball!”

  The Clemson runner heard me and stepped back onto the bag before Eddie could tag him out. Eddie threw out his hands to ask what I was doing. Bill Wilhelm, who was in the third base coach’s box in front of our dugout, turned and looked at me as though I were crazy. Perhaps I was crazy, but I hated that trick play so much that I wasn’t going to allow even one of my players to pull it off.

  I saw Eddie recently in New York City, and he brought up that play. He told me what he’d said when he learned that my son Rich and three of my grandchildren had graduated from Clemson: “I knew it! He was a double agent for Clemson.” I’m still loyal to the USC Gamecocks, but I need a divided license plate to support both universities! Clemson is a fine school and an asset to our state.

  Eddie became as good a defensive shortstop as there was in college baseball. He could drag-bunt as well as anyone I had seen since Mickey Mantle. Eddie had been our batboy, so he probably learned how to bunt like that from watching Mickey.

  In 1974 Eddie was drafted in the first round by the Boston Red Sox and advanced up to the Triple-A Pawtucket team. The Red Sox wanted to send an infielder down to Pawtucket, and that would have temporarily bumped Eddie back down to Double-A. But he didn’t want to go down, so he left baseball to work in a business that Whitey set up for him. Even if Eddie had gone to Double-A, I am convinced he would have quickly moved back up and played eight to ten years in the majors.

  Eddie definitely stands o
ut in my memory from those days at South Carolina. My favorite player of that era, though, was a right fielder named Robby who was there only one semester. His last name was Richardson, and he liked to call me Dad.

  Robby started out at USC in the fall of ’75, and it looked like he was going to be our fourth outfielder. We also knew by then that I would be leaving the next year, so Robby decided to go ahead and transfer out after one semester. As a transfer, he would have to sit out a season at his next school, and he wisely thought it would be best to do that as a freshman so he could still have three consecutive years to play. Robby transferred to Taylor University in Indiana and played there. He was a great player and a captain of his team.

  I never got to coach my second son, Ron, who played at Wheaton College in Illinois. Like his brother, Ron was a great player and a team captain. He was also an Academic All-American. Robby teases Ron by saying that he made Academic All-American because his school gave him a better public relations push than Robby’s school did. I was (and am) tremendously proud of them both. I was happy that they were able to earn what I never had: a college education.

  During recruiting, I always emphasized the importance of that college education. When I came out of high school, there were no college scholarships for baseball, and back then, going to college did not really prepare a player for professional baseball. By the time I was a college coach, the level of play among the large college programs had improved so dramatically that they served as great preparation for professional baseball while allowing student athletes to receive free schooling.

  I told recruits that if they came to South Carolina, they would play a sixty-game schedule against competition comparable to any minor league they could play in at their age, and after three years they would be eligible to be drafted by a major league franchise. I encouraged them to go to college, play in a great program, and receive an education that would open doors for them. Then if the opportunity presented itself to sign into professional baseball, that would be a great life. I still encourage young players to do the same today.