I was a member of the Toronto Blue Jays ground crew from 1981 to 1985, the years in which the team went "From Worst to First." In fact, I still have a bottle of champagne from the clubhouse celebration when Toronto won the AL East in 1985.
Of all the players I met over my five years with the team, Jim Gott was by far the nicest. He was the only player in all that time who ever bothered to learn my name.
During August of 1983, Gott promised to get four tickets for my family to a Blue Jays road game at Tiger Stadium. It turned out that this series was right in the middle of a stretch in which the Blue Jays lost four of five games in the other team's last at-bat and fell out of contention in the AL East.
Gott had promised to get me tickets for Saturday afteroon, but Friday night he was the starting pitcher and was left in for 10 innings because the Blue Jays bullpen had become so unreliable. With two out in the bottom of the tenth, he gave up a home run to Alan Trammell to lose the game 4-3. However, first thing the next morning, he called to assure me that he had not forgotten about the tickets and that they would be waiting for me at the box office.
No one in my family has ever forgotten that phone call.
The reason I have submitted this memory of Jim Gott is that I have just seen the movie "The Rookie." Gott served as a pitching coach for Dennis Quaid, who plays Jim Morris in the film. Though Quaid is a lefty, his pitching style in the movie is VERY similar to Gott's!
» Eric Zweig is an author/editor and sports historian in Toronto. A former member of the Toronto Blue Jays ground crew, he edited the team's Official 25th Anniversary Commemorative Book in 2001.
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Posted April 17, 2002.
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