BALLPLAYERS | TEAMS | CHRONOLOGY | TODAY | BOOKS | NEWSLETTER | ERRATA | FAQ
|
What's New?
Browser Button
Get Published!
Team Pages
The Ballplayers
Bookshelf
The Chronology
BaseballLibrary.com
|
1|2|3|4 excerpted from the Introduction
If you came to my house in south St. Louis County, grabbed a beer out of my Anheuser-Busch refrigerator -- it looks just like a six-foot can of Budweiser -- and sat down for a cold one, you'd notice something in my den that I enjoy a hell of a lot more than beer. I've saved a good wool baseball cap from every big-league organization I ever worked for. They're hanging on pegs, all in a row, right across the top of my bar. The room is filled with stuff I love being around -- black-and-white and color photos, plaques and pennants, drawings and lithographs, even uniforms I wore in my forty-plus-year career. Right on that wood-panelled wall is a picture of me with Casey Stengel -- the first mentor I had in the big leagues, and the best -- sitting on a Honda motorcycle. Casey scribbled something on there about me looking like Evel Knievel hurdling a canyon, but he spelled it 'hurtle;' the Perfesser never was too good with English. Above those glass doors is a shot of me in a rowboat with Jack Buck, the Hall of Fame broadcaster, spoofing Jaws in a Budweiser commercial everybody had a great time making. Everyone's on display here, from Ted Williams to Nolan Ryan to Harry Caray. It's a hell of a tour.
If there's anything I like most, it's the caps. There are, if you can believe it, ten of them.
By the time you finish hurtling through these reflections, you'll know what all those caps are, and there might even be one or two more before I'm through. They stand for a long life spent in a wonderful game -- travelling all over America, living in big cities and backwater towns, getting to know some of the damnedest people you could ever meet (including some of the craziest), matching wits with the best in the world at what you do year after year. They also stand for the different hats I've worn in the game -- as a player, a scout, a coach, a development man, a manager, a general manager, and a front-office guy. Talk about ways to find out what you're made of; the game's been that to me and then some, and I don't give a damn if you're a CEO or a car mechanic, you can't ask much more of your profession than that.
I'll be honest with you: A lot of things about the big-league scene today make me want to throw up. (I've turned down so many managing offers since I retired in 1994 I can't keep track of them all. Most would have made me the highest-paid manager in the history of the major leagues -- which is what I was when I left the St. Louis Cardinals in 1990 -- and top dollar for managers is three times what it was then.) But that doesn't change what a privilege it's been. I grew up a southern Illinois kid, worshipping that world from a long ways off -- a New Athens wiseacre who skipped school to hitchhike to games in St. Louis and see some of the best talent in the major leagues. Times would change in ways I could have never seen coming, and I ended up making more money than Williams, DiMaggio or Musial probably ever dreamed of. Sitting here with a cool drink -- I'm favoring Lite lately; I'm slimming down -- a glance at those caps makes the hops and barley taste just that much sweeter.
|
