108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  One thing about Gary: like a lot of New York–born broadcasters of a certain age, he grew up listening to Marv Albert, the longtime voice of the Knicks and Rangers. In baseball, we always talk about these legendary managers whose coaches inevitably graduate to managerial careers of their own. We talk about the Scioscia effect or the Maddon effect. Well, in broadcasting, there’s an equally long line of talented broadcasters who are in the booth because of the Albert effect, and Gary stands at the head of that long line.

  Someday, soon, people will be talking about the Gary Cohen effect—hopefully, with a Queens accent.

  * * *

  My partners in the booth extend far beyond Citi Field, and I’ve been blessed during my time calling national games for TBS to share the microphone with three Hall of Famers I now get to call teammates.

  I’ve got a story to tell about each …

  Frank Thomas was the best hitter in baseball for a good chunk of his career—they didn’t call him “The Big Hurt” for nothing—but I only got to face him during my last couple seasons, when I didn’t have a whole lot of ways to get him out. The knock on Frank, even early on in his career, was that he was always pulling the baseball equivalent of a flop, in hopes of getting a call from the home plate umpire. He was famous among opposing pitchers for the way he’d jump back, almost out of the box, on any pitch that was even remotely inside—and, as often as not, he’d get the call. What this meant for me and my fellow pitchers was that we couldn’t really pitch him inside. That spot on the inside corner that would usually belong to me for a strike? It belonged to Frank, and it pissed me off.

  Just how much it pissed me off seemed to come to the surface on an August night in Oakland during my first full season with the A’s. We were making a push for the playoffs, and I was still feeling my way around the league. I’d had some success against Frank, first few times I’d faced him—but then, he’d had some success against me, as well. Not on this night, though. I’d gotten him out on a couple grounders and a popup to second, when he came up to face me for the fourth time—runners on first and third, one out. We were up 5–3 in the top of the eighth, and I’d only thrown about a hundred pitches to this point in the game, so Tony La Russa left me in to clean up my own mess.

  Frank cut an intimidating figure when he strode to the plate, especially when he represented the winning run, but as I stared him down all I could see was a big ol’ baby. Yeah, he was six-foot-five, built like the football player he was back in college, an incredible hitter, but to me he was just a major league pussy, the way he always cried to the ump for that call inside—oh, man, I hated that shit. I’d think, Are you kidding me? This guy played tight end at Auburn? But here it worked out that I threw a 2–0 pitch that ran inside on him at the last minute, and he could only fist it on the ground to short for a 6–4–3 double play to get me out of the inning.

  Frank was pissed! He threw his bat down as he ran to first and he started motherfucking me on his way to the bag. I pretended not to hear him—said, “What was that, Frank? You got something to say?”

  He turned to me and shouted, “You’re lucky I didn’t hit that ball five hundred feet.”

  We went back and forth for another few beats, as my teammates left the field, and while Frank was still in earshot I fired off my last salvo—said, “I didn’t just get you out, motherfucker! You made two outs, so fuck you!”

  (Happily, they didn’t mic the players in those days!)

  Dennis Eckersley, our Cy Young Award–winning closer (and MVP!), came on in the ninth to put the game away for us for his 37th save of the season, on his way to a league-leading total of 51, and that was that.

  I’d go on to face Frank Thomas a few times more in my career, and for the most part he had my number—other than this one 0–4 night in Oakland, he beat me up at a .437 clip, going 7-for-16 against me. But I don’t think we exchanged words until we met again as colleagues, when we were both working the playoffs for TBS, and here again I wasn’t shy about letting Frank know what I thought of him. Say what you will about us aging ballplayers—we have long memories. And say what you will about this aging ballplayer—I have zero tolerance for players who bitch and moan about nothing at all, especially when it messes with my game plan.

  The thing is, once I actually got to know Frank and started working with him at Turner, I came to like him. He was a pretty good guy. He was funny, smart, personable. We got along great, even though I still carried some of the same resentments from our time on the battlefield, along with a couple new ones that had nothing to do with Frank himself and everything to do with the ways a legendary ballplayer is treated alongside the ways a somewhat-less-than-legendary ballplayer is treated.

  So there I was, trying to reconcile the image I’d had of Frank as a whining giant alongside this somewhat more positive second impression that was beginning to form of Frank as a friend and colleague … and underneath those two images were these not-so-subtle reminders from the TBS brass that Frank was a Hall of Famer and I was not.

  It was Frank’s first postseason on the TBS crew, as I recall, working the pre- and postgame shift. The series I was covering had already wrapped. I was in limbo, my calendar on hold, waiting to see where I’d go next—the life of a postseason announcer. At two-thirty in the morning, the phone rang on my night table. It was Tim Kiely, who produced our pre- and postgame shows. T.K. was also the guy responsible for Turner’s award-winning pre- and postgame shows for the network’s NBA coverage, widely considered the best show in sports television, and here he’d been tasked with working some of that same magic on the baseball front.

  He said, “Whatchya doin’, Ronnie? It’s T.K.”

  I said, “Whaddya mean, what am I doin’? It’s two-thirty in the morning. I’m in bed.”

  He said, “Wake up, motherfucker. Our pre- and post- sucks.”

  I said, “Okay, but again, it’s two-thirty in the morning. What do you want me to do about it?”

  He said, “I’ve got you on a six a.m. flight. We’re flying you in. Need you to work the pre- and post- until the next round. Car’s coming for you at four.”

  I said, “I’ve never done pre- or post-.”

  He said, “I don’t give a shit. You’re a pro. I need you to figure out how to bring Frank into the conversation.”

  Frank Thomas had been doing the pre- and post- with Cal Ripken Jr. and Ernie Johnson—and T.K. was right, the show had yet to hit its stride. I certainly wasn’t the solution, but Frank and Cal were still finding their voice. Me, I had a whole other year on them at TBS, which I guess made me an experienced veteran. (Plus, I was on the payroll, so T.K. and company probably just figured they’d get their money’s worth.)

  The way T.K. had the show set up was that each of us had our own segment. Cal did his thing, then Frank did his thing, then I did my thing—with Ernie presiding. I wasn’t happy about being dragged from home on what I’d thought would be a couple days off, so I was a little on edge. As we went into a break, Frank came over to me and said, “Shit, you’ve got a lot of energy.” For some reason, it rubbed me the wrong way. It was a nothing line, just something to say, but I went off on Frank. It wasn’t my nature, and Frank certainly didn’t deserve to hear from me on this, but I was pissed that I’d been called in to fill in some of the gaps for these two great players—like they were messing with my game plan all over again. They just needed to sit there and look Hall of Fame–ish. Me, I wasn’t a great player, so I had to get out of bed at two-thirty in the morning.

  I should have let Frank’s comment slide, but I lit into him—same way I’d lit into him on the field that night in Oakland, when we were jawing on the field. I said, “Frank, what the fuck do you think we’re doing here? This is live television. You can’t just show up. You’ve got to bring it.”

  The folks in the booth, they looked at me like I’d lost a couple screws, but I didn’t care. For all those years, I wasn’t a big fan of Frank’s, and on this night I wasn’t a big fan of being there. S
o I let it rip.

  The kicker to this story came a couple days later, when we were in Colorado to do the pregame there. Here’s a learned truth about October baseball in Colorado: it can get pretty damn cold. I think it was about 25 degrees on the set, which was down on the field. I’d planned ahead and had on a jacket and scarf and gloves. Cal and Ernie were dressed for the weather as well. T.K. even arranged for Charles Barkley to “cross-over” from the basketball side and make a visit to the set to try and pump up the energy, and he was bundled up appropriately, too. But there was Frank, freezing his ass off.

  Now, in fairness to Frank, it was a cold, cold night, but somehow the rest of us knew to dress for the weather. And yet because he was the great Frank Thomas, the biggest baby to ever make it to the Hall of Fame, one of the game’s all-time moaners and whiners, the producers went to him after the pregame and told him to get himself a coat and charge it to the show. So he did. He went out to what had to have been the most expensive menswear store in Denver and bought himself a $12,000 mohair coat. No shit, no lie. And TBS just smiled and paid for it, while I sat there thinking, Damn, if I’d been a little more dominant as a pitcher, if I’d bitched and moaned a little more, maybe I could have gotten a $12,000 mohair coat.

  * * *

  The next Hall of Famer in the TBS lineup is John Smoltz. We’ve got different personalities, we sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but during the cozy confines of the game Smoltzie and I get along great. And he really knows his stuff—if they handed out graduate degrees for breadth and depth of baseball knowledge, he’d have a PhD.

  During his playing days, John and the other aces in that great Braves rotation were famous for the bond they shared. Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and them, they played golf together, had dinner together, did everything together. They were their own little fraternity. It wasn’t like that with my Mets brethren. We were close, in uniform, could talk pitching with each other deep into the night, but I was very happy not to see my fellow pitchers until we got to the ballpark, and I’m sure they felt the same way about me. I wasn’t close to Dwight or Sid or Coney or Bobby O or whoever else we had in our rotation—not in the way those Braves pitchers were close.

  What Smoltzie shared with his fellow aces was a rare and special thing, and I think it pushed all three of them to a level of enduring greatness that seemed just out of reach for us Mets pitchers. Even the Braves’ back-of-the-rotation guys, like Steve Avery and Kevin Millwood, were able to lift their games on the back of all that camaraderie. It wasn’t like that with our club. Like I said, we had our own killer esprit de corps thing happening once the game was under way, but these guys were tight, tight, tight. They’d even play golf on days they were scheduled to pitch—that’s how much they relished each other’s company.

  Our staff was the best in baseball for a stretch, but Dwight was the kingpin of our group. After his stunning first two seasons, that was the impression. He was our #1 starter, and the rest of us were #1-A, or #2, or #2-A. The Braves staff was the best in baseball for an even longer stretch, and those guys were all #1 starters, so maybe all that golf, all those dinners, all that time together away from the ballpark had something to do with it.

  * * *

  Cal Ripken Jr. was an icon of the game. Unlike Frank, I respected the hell out of him as an athlete and competitor. I loved the way he played. But I didn’t always love working with him. You see, Cal has forgotten more about the game of baseball than most people who played the game will ever know. He lives and breathes this shit. His instincts and his insights are among the best I’ve ever seen or heard. But his demeanor doesn’t really lend itself to live television. He’s meticulous, thoughtful, circumspect—qualities that don’t always come across in the booth, when you’ve got to think about things like timing, and moving the conversation along. Cal’s thing is to think about whatever he says before he says it, but there’s no time for that on-set. It’s like Ralph Kiner used to always tell Tim McCarver—you’ve got to loosen things up in the booth, can’t take things too, too seriously.

  One of the key things I’ve learned in my time in the booth is that when you open your mouth you should say something—and not just any something, but something insightful, something meaningful, something to enhance the viewers’ appreciation of the game. Cal’s got way more insights into way more meaningful shit than yours truly, but when he opens his mouth it doesn’t always come out, not straightaway. He takes a while to get around to making his point, so our timing is sometimes off. Nothing against Cal—I really like him as a person. But as colleagues, we don’t seem to click. That happens sometimes. Just look at my relationship with Keith. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Keith, but I love the guy. There are a lot of things I love about Cal, but we’re not really friends away from the set. At least, with me and Keith, we’ve got chemistry on the air. There’s a smooth give-and-take. Maybe it’s because we played together, because we won a World Series together, because we have this rich, shared history. Cal and I don’t have that. It’s not his fault. It’s not my fault. It’s just how it is.

  And yet the story I want to tell about Cal has nothing to do with our time as colleagues. It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with what is probably one of the finest, sweetest moments to ever pass between father and son on a baseball field. Now, I feel qualified to weigh in on such as this, because my father and I had a fine, sweet moment of our own, on the field at Fenway Park, before Game 4 of the 1986 World Series. The Mets were down two games to one in the series. I’d pitched well enough in the opener at Shea, but we’d come out on the short side of a 1–0 game, so it felt to me like I had the weight of our season on my young shoulders. That weight was particularly heavy on this night because the game was also a homecoming of sorts. I’d grown up as a baseball fan in the company of the Red Sox. When I closed my eyes and imagined myself a big league ballplayer, I was wearing a Boston uniform. And here on this grand stage, as I was warming up to pitch the biggest game of my life, I was surrounded by a couple hundred people in the stands who’d seen me grow up, who knew me or my family, who were variously torn between rooting for this local kid who’d made it to the World Series and for their local team which was in sniffing distance of a championship for the first time in sixty-eight years.

  Warming up in the Fenway bullpen is a tough assignment for any visiting pitcher, because the bleacher fans are right on top of you, taunting you, trying to get in your head and under your skin and alongside all the nooks and crannies of emotions that make up your … well, your makeup. It can be a real mind game out there, and for me it was tougher still because of the emotional connection I’d always felt to this place, to this team, to these fans. Hell, for the first twenty-one years of my life, I was one of them, and now I was the enemy.

  Perhaps because of all these mixed emotions, I had a lousy warm-up. It felt to me like I just didn’t have it, couldn’t hit my spots. Plus, it was cold af, as the young people like to say these days. My grip didn’t feel right. My release was off. I kept throwing the ball in the dirt, and each time I did the Boston fans lit into me like I’d just shown my hand … which, in a way, I had.

  So what did I do? Well, I cut my warm-up short. There was no point in abusing myself in this way, in front of this crowd. I told myself that either the game would find me, or I would find myself out of the game. I was resigned to it. But then, as I walked from the dugout in right field to take my spot in the Mets dugout, the most magical thing happened. I ran into my father. On the field! I was confused by this, at first, but then I remembered he was at the game with the Air Force Reserve, as a member of the color guard. He was on the field for the national anthem, in full dress uniform. It all came rushing back to me, as I just happened up on him.

  He said, “Hey.”

  He wasn’t much for words, my old man, but in that one word, spoken with his booming, no-bullshit voice, all the tension and uncertainty and pressure I’d been feeling during my warm-up seemed to fall away. I w
ent from wanting to be anyplace else but on this field for this game to wanting to be nowhere else but on this field, with the man who taught me the game.

  I’d been walking back to the dugout with Mel Stottlemyre, our pitching coach, but when I ran into my dad I turned to Mel and said, “I’m good, Mel. I’ll hang out here in the outfield for the anthem.”

  Mel didn’t want to leave me out in the outfield all alone like that, away from the rest of the team, but at the same time I don’t think he wanted to encroach on a private family moment. So he stepped away from the two of us, and planted his feet right there in the outfield as well. And that’s where we stood during the anthem—Mel, a little bit off to the side; me, alongside my father, feeling proud as hell and on top of my game.

  When the anthem wrapped and the fans started to whip themselves into the last of their pregame frenzy, my father turned to me and shook my hand and said, “Go get ’em, Ronnie.”

  As fine, sweet moments go, this one was right up there, the way it brought me together with the man who’d taken me to my first big league ball game, at this very stadium. It was more than I could have ever hoped for, more than I could have ever imagined. If a screenwriter pitched this scene to a Hollywood producer as a turning point moment in a Kevin Costner–ish movie about fathers and sons and baseball, he (or she!) would be dismissed as a hack.