108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  This one year, Milken was making the rounds with a venerable former manager, one of the great characters of the game, which led to another unflattering story—and I share it here to offer the full flavor of the not-so-glamorous life of a baseball color analyst, and the sad ways we sometimes coax our baseball legends from their homes into a spotlight that might have become a little too harsh for them. I ducked out of the booth and left these guys to make their pitch over the next half-inning, offering my chair to the former manager as I left as a way to kind of cover up my distaste for Milken. When I returned to take my seat to start the next inning, I discovered it was soaking wet. Sad to say, our visitor couldn’t control his bladder and had pissed all over my chair.

  It wasn’t the poor guy’s fault, of course. And I’m betting/hoping he wasn’t even aware he’d had an accident. But the discovery set in motion this ridiculous comedy of errors: first, nobody could find a replacement chair, so I had to call the whole rest of the game while standing up. Next, after one of our assistants had wheeled the chair away, presumably out of the booth, we noticed it had merely been pushed to the corner. After it was wheeled away a second time, again presumably, we spotted it again, stuck in the opposite corner.

  And then, sure enough, there it was again the next afternoon, as we filed into the booth to go over our notes for the pregame, wheeled right back to its usual spot, pressed beneath the counter, looking out onto the field—still soaking wet from the night before.

  Try as we might, we couldn’t get rid of that chair. It kept coming back! Like it was haunted! A living, breathing reminder that we should each make an appointment to get our prostates checked.

  * * *

  Jordan was with me for another close encounter with another big league manager—Tigers skipper Sparky Anderson. We were up in Cooperstown for this one. Dennis Eckersley had invited me up to join him for his Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and I brought Jordan along to get another glimpse of baseball history—appropriately clad, I hoped.

  At a dinner the night before the ceremony, we ran into Sparky, who couldn’t have been nicer to Jordan.

  Sparky mussed Jordan’s hair—said, “How you doin’, little guy?”

  Jordan was used to having his hair mussed by these ballplayer-types, so he took it in stride, but Sparky wasn’t done with him just yet. Sparky seemed to want to tell Jordan a little bit about his old man, which I thought was very generous of him—still do. He said, “I can remember the first time I saw your dad play.”

  He went into this long, elaborate story of a doubleheader Yale had played against Purdue, at the Tiger Town complex in Lakeland, Florida. Ruly Carpenter, the owner of the Phillies, was a Yale alum, and he used to arrange for us to come down to Florida every spring for a preseason trip. We spent most of our time in Clearwater, where the Phillies trained, and where they eventually established a minor league franchise. Sparky had just started managing the Tigers, after steering the Cincinnati Reds to a couple World Series championships, and he’d come by the stadium to take in these games—and now, more than twenty years later, he remembered them like they’d been played just a couple days earlier.

  I’d had no idea Sparky was even in the ballpark that day, and here he was telling Jordan how I’d thrown a four-hit shutout and stroked a couple doubles in the opener, and then came back to hit a couple home runs and a couple more doubles in the second game. He said, “He played shortstop, your old man. Did you know he used to play short?”

  I remembered that doubleheader, of course. It had been a magical day. But to hear a guy like Sparky Anderson recite those line scores all these years later made it even more special—really, Sparky was just so terrific about it, so generous with his memory.

  Jordan was listening intently, his eyes agog, and my heart fairly filled.

  When the moment passed and Sparky moved on to share his deep well of baseball history with another lucky someone at the dinner, Jordan turned to me and said, “Who was that old guy?”

  Sparky wasn’t that old at the time—about fifty—but he’d had that shock of white hair since he was a relatively young man. I said, “That was Sparky Anderson, used to manage the Detroit Tigers. And he’s not as old as he looks.”

  Jordan thought about that some, and was soon distracted by someone or something else at the dinner.

  Later that night, he turned the conversation back to Sparky—said, “That stuff about that Yale doubleheader. How much of that did he get right?”

  I said, “Every single thing.”

  Jordan said, “No way.”

  Way.

  * * *

  A couple footnotes to that “wasted” season with the Tidewater Tides. The first takes me back to Jack Aker. We ran into each other years later, after he had been out of the game a good long while and I was working as a broadcaster. And get this—he couldn’t have been nicer! He even made like he was glad to see me.

  I couldn’t understand it, but then I thought about it, some, and it started to become clear. Absolutely, Jack Aker could have done a little more to make me feel welcome down in Tidewater. He could have found a way to connect with me over … something. But he probably had an entirely different perspective on that season as a hardened old baseball veteran than I did as a soft baseball newbie. It’s likely he was just doing his job, which was to keep track of the very many moving parts that find you as the manager of a Triple-A ball club, with players coming and going all season long, and to somehow find a way to win a bunch of ball games.

  It probably never even occurred to him to hold my hand, or to smooth the way for any of his players.

  The second footnote was that I went home at the end of that first year in Tidewater and wanted to hang it up. I hadn’t pitched all that well, hadn’t made a whole lot of progress, didn’t see signing on to a life of being treated so shabbily by my supposed superiors. That first year in Tulsa, I’d been shunned by my teammates, which was about what I’d expected, and now here in Tidewater I’d been shunned by my manager—and de facto pitching coach—which was not at all what I’d expected. So I went back home and said to my father, “I don’t want this. This is nonsense.”

  My plan was to apply to law school. Or business school. Or to get a job where I could hopefully excel and people wouldn’t treat me like shit—not exactly a plan, I now see, but there were a lot of different ways I could lean, once I leaned away from baseball.

  My father had a different plan in mind. He said, “We don’t really quit around here.”

  I was thinking, Yeah, tell me something I don’t already know. But I pushed back just the same—said, “I’m not having any fun.”

  He said, “We’ll worry about fun later.” Like he was holding the word out in front of him so he wouldn’t have to smell it.

  Later that first night after I’d returned home, my father sought me out to continue the conversation—said, “Look, I know you have options. And I know you’re smart enough to realize that playing this game to the best of your ability is something you not only owe to yourself, but to this ball club that just traded for you.” He went on to tell me that I’d made a commitment to the game, and that I needed to honor that commitment—at least until I could look myself in the mirror and know I’d given baseball my best shot.

  “Not just a shot,” he clarified, “but the right shot.”

  I thought about this conversation a lot that winter, and as I thought about it my dad was working behind the scenes, doing this little mind-trick he had where he would get you in shape or in the right frame of mind to face a difficult challenge—only you’d never know he was working you over in this way. He could be a great manipulator, my dad. In this case, he had me playing racquetball. Lots and lots of racquetball. He’d just taken up the game, had made himself into one of the best players in the area in his age group, and he’d take me to the gym with him every afternoon and spank me up and down the court for a couple hours. Oh, man … he schooled me! Sometimes, one or more of my brothers would come along, but I w
as out there every day, taking my lumps in this regimented way.

  I was putting in a ton of other work at the gym, too. I was lifting, running … eating right. But mostly I was doing these things so I could stand up to my father on the court, never really thinking about stepping up my game and getting in shape for spring training. It was about getting quicker and stronger, so I could compete with my dad. It was about pushing myself to get better. It was about trusting the process—that’s a line my father started using on me. It was a military thing, he said. I had only to give myself over to the process to achieve the desired result.

  “Trust the process,” he started to say, at some midpoint during the off-season.

  And so I began to trust the process. I had no idea I was being coached, no idea I was being manipulated by this man who only wanted the best for me—who only wanted me to discover the best in myself. In my mind, I was just passing the time, hanging out with my dad, figuring out some kind of next move. In his mind, he was giving me the space to get my mind right and my body right, and to put that dispiriting Tidewater season behind me.

  By the end of the winter, I could pretty much keep up with my father on the racquetball court. And somewhere in there I had pretty much come to the determination that the life I was living that winter in Millbury, Massachusetts, wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. I’d go out with my friends some nights and roll in at two or three or four o’clock in the morning, just as I’d hear my father getting ready to start his day. He was out the door every morning at four-thirty for work. He lived a disciplined life, and it was a good life, but it wasn’t for me. Understand, I hadn’t really lived in my parents’ house for any length of time since I’d gone off to college, so this was a revelation to me, the life that was waiting for me in this town, in this house, in my old room.

  Without really realizing it, without really meaning to, I’d gotten myself into shape to face another baseball season.

  Without really realizing it, without really meaning to, I’d come to a decision. I would report to spring training that February and work like crazy to put myself in position to take that shot my father talked to me about—not just a shot, but the right shot.

  Because, hey, I wasn’t done with the game just yet.

  9

  In the Booth

  I was only dimly aware of the Mets’ broadcasting history when I joined the team in 1983, although I understood full well the impact a long-tenured announcer could have on a ball club and its community of fans. As a lifelong New Englander, I’d grown up listening to the legendary Ned Martin, who was known for his signature exclamation—“Mercy!”—as well as his tendency to quote Shakespeare or Updike, just to keep us Red Sox fans on our toes.

  As Boston fans of a certain age will surely remember, Ned Martin replaced the also-legendary Curt Gowdy, who’d been the voice of the team for fifteen years before leaving to do his thing on the national stage for NBC Sports. I was only five years old when Gowdy called his last game as a Red Sox announcer, so I have no firsthand memories of his time with the locals, but every time he came on to call the Game of the Week someone would invariably remark how he’d been one of ours, so the connection was always made clear.

  Ned Martin’s voice is the one that attaches to my boyhood memories of my beloved Sox, just as it does for my brothers, and anyone else who came of baseball age in that part of the world in the late 1960s, in time to tap into those Yaz-fueled teams that took us (at last!) to a couple World Series. There’s a famous story about Ned Martin’s death that belongs in these pages for the way it reinforces his lifelong connection to this team and its rich history. In 2002, at the age of seventy-eight, he traveled to Boston from Virginia to attend the funeral of the apparently mortal Ted Williams, who had been the face of the Red Sox since 1939. It was only fitting that the voice of the franchise pay his respects to the face of the franchise, right? But while he was returning to Virginia the following day, Ned Martin suffered a fatal heart attack on a shuttle bus at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, suggesting to the legion of Boston’s faithful fans, not yet known as Red Sox Nation, that the heartache they all felt over the passing of “Teddy Ball game” was all too real.

  The Mets had their own rich history on the broadcasting front, but it took me a while to appreciate it. The team was famous for its rotating trio of announcers—Ralph Kiner, Bob Murphy, and Lindsey Nelson, who traded off duties on radio and television. For seventeen years, this group stayed together, from Day One of the Mets’ inaugural season, through the team’s unlikely “worst to first” run to the 1969 World Series, all the way to 1979 when Lindsey Nelson left the team to call games for the San Francisco Giants. It was Lindsey Nelson who was the star of that group at the outset, and even though it turned out to be one of the longest-running teams in the game, with an equal division of labor, he was meant to be the lead broadcaster because he was the one with years of experience. Ralph Kiner only had a single season in the booth, working for the Chicago White Sox the year before, and Bob Murphy had a stint alongside Curt Gowdy in the Red Sox booth for a couple seasons before calling games for the Baltimore Orioles for two seasons, replacing the great Ernie Harwell.

  But it was Ralph Kiner who turned out to be the team’s enduring star—in part, because of his longevity, but mostly because of his deep well of knowledge and transparent affection for the game and the hopelessly young team he was assigned to cover. (Or, perhaps I should say the haplessly young team he was assigned to cover—those first couple Mets teams were historically lousy!) He called games for the Mets until his death, at the age of ninety-one, capping an incredible fifty-three seasons as a broadcaster, which in turn capped his own Hall of Fame career as one of the game’s preeminent sluggers. He was also beloved for his malapropisms. He was famous for screwing up people’s names, including his own. For years, he called Gary Carter “Gary Cooper,” and his eventual colleague Tim McCarver was often introduced as “Tim MacArthur.” But Met fans didn’t care—they took his point, and Ralph really knew his stuff, even if he didn’t always sweat the details.

  Once, after Tim McCarver joined the broadcast team, the Mets were in St. Louis for a game against the Cardinals, when a young right-hander named Brent Gaff was called on to pitch. I’d played with Brent in Tidewater, and shortly after I was called up on September 1, 1983, he got his own September nod. The guys in production had made sure to let Ralph and Tim know this kid’s backstory, because it offered the kind of detail that made the game more personal. In those days, covering another dreadful Mets team, the production office was always looking for ways to keep things interesting. The hook here was that Brent Gaff was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he had family all over the Midwest, and they were all Cardinals fans. He had about sixty people out at the stadium to watch him pitch, and they were all rooting for him against their hometown team. It was a good story line—the kind of thing the folks at home love to hear.

  Well, Ralph told the hell out of Brent Gaff’s backstory as he came into the game, but he never got around to saying his name. Ralph talked about Indiana, about the sixty tickets he left for friends and family, about how he’d grown up cheering for the Cardinals. Finally, the drum roll complete, he introduced the Mets rookie … as Brent Frank.

  This alone wouldn’t have been so remarkable, because Ralph was known for botching players’ names, even in midcareer—it was one of his signature charms. It’s what happened next that turned the moment from the merely ridiculous to the sublime, and what happened next was that Tim took out a piece of paper and scribbled a correction. Evidently, these gaffes happened frequently enough that they had a system worked out to set things right.

  He wrote: Gaff.

  In the retelling, it would appear that the “system” they’d worked out didn’t account for a pitcher with a name that at first glance might have also signaled a mistake of some kind.

  Ralph, quick on his feet, went into his version of auto correct mode. He apologized to the folks at home, explained ho
w it can sometimes get confusing for an old-timer like himself, with all these players coming and going this time of year, said he’d made a mistake. Then he introduced the kid pitcher a second time—saying, “Now pitching, for the New York Mets … Frank Gaff.”

  This time, Timmy didn’t bother to correct him, probably on the learned truth that this was close enough.

  * * *

  Tim McCarver was one of the best in the business. He joined the Mets the same year I did—him up in the booth, me up on the mound. As far as I ever knew, he and Ralph were the primary voices of the team on the television side. Bob Murphy was the lead voice on the radio side, paired at first with Gary Thorne—and then, toward the end of my time in New York, with Gary Cohen, my eventual partner when I started broadcasting games for the Mets in 2006.

  A lot of the guys who used to work with Tim often tell me how serious he was when he first took the Mets job—and how Ralph would try to loosen him up. Tim himself used to tell me that partnering with Ralph was the best thing that could have happened to him as a broadcaster, because it showed him the importance of lightness and laughter in calling a game. The two of them used to talk about this type of thing on the air, during a lull in the action. Tim would talk about the grind of the long baseball season, and Ralph would shoot back and say, “What do you know about the grind of the long baseball season? You never played every day.”