My first baseball teachers

 

 

I don't have a lot of mini collections. I can't focus on that many hobby things these days anyway, but I've never been the mini-collection type.

If I did venture outside of my set/team/player-sphere, one of the collections I would set up is cards of players who later became broadcasters when I was starting to learn baseball.

They were my first baseball teachers. Yeah, sure there were youth league coaches and my dad and all that, but I wanted to know about Major Leaguers, not that "keep your eye on the ball" stuff. Fortunately there were guys on TV who told me all about major leaguers.

Sure, there were people like Vin Scully and Keith Jackson and Lindsey Nelson and Frank Messer. But the ones who knew all the inside stuff were usually called "the color commentators" and they were usually former ballplayers.

Ex-ballplayers like Joe Garagiola, Tony Kubek, Ralph Kiner and Don Drysdale were invaluable to me learning about professional ballplayers and what went on in the field or the dugout. They experienced it. They were there. Sorry, Bryant Gumbel, you're very good, but I don't remember you wearing a baby blue uniform on the field when I was watching Game Of The Week as a kid.

It's a hoot to wind up with cards of players who you only knew as announcers. Let's go through some of those guys who would be in my mini-collection of Former Players Who Were MLB Broadcasters When I Was a Kid:

TONY KUBEK (1 card in my collection)

I seriously need to do something about finding more Kubek cards. Kubek was part of the first national broadcasting team that I knew. He was the color man and Garagiola was the play-by-play guy. It was a great combo. Garagiola laid-back and super-goofy and Kubek hyped-up and deadly serious. Even watching old clips from that time and hearing Kubek pop up on the broadcast, it's like, "geez, Tony dial it back a little."

 

 

BOB UECKER (1 card in my collection)

Ueck does not have a lot of cards. He was a broadcaster on ABC's Monday Night Baseball when I was a youngster. I believe him and Howard Cosell did some games together and that's quite a combination. Ueck's shtick went over my head at the time.

Actually I saw Ueck more often on Lite Beer commercials and then on the Tonight Show (and Mr. Belvedere) than I did broadcasting games.

JOE GARAGIOLA (3 cards in my collection)

The titan of baseball broadcasters when I was a kid. NBC's Game Of The Week was the most visible baseball broadcast at the time and Garagiola was the face. He played it for all it was worth and unlike a lot of hams on TV, it never got old. He's still the model for the kind of personality I'd like in a baseball broadcaster.

 

BILL WHITE (3 cards in my collection)

This is the most recent acquisition among the ballplayer/broadcasters of my youth and the card that spurred this post. Bill White was the guy in the booth who served as Phil Rizzuto's sounding board. The banter between those guys amused me through many a Sunday Yankees broadcast when the score of the game (i.e. the Yankees winning) could have ruined my mood. I always got the feeling that White (the only name Rizzuto called him) thought Rizzuto was nuts.

 

PHIL RIZZUTO (6 cards in my collection)

Phil Rizzuto was the broadcaster who clued me into the fact that you could say whatever you wanted as a baseball broadcaster. You could talk about cannolis. You could actively root for the team you were announcing. You could leave the game three innings early. You could call a home run that wasn't. Phil did all of those things. All the time.

You would need to have known my grandmother to get this, but Phil Rizzuto was my grandmother if my grandmother knew baseball and was a former Yankees shortstop. 

 

FRAN HEALY (10 cards in my collection)

Fran Healy is totally associated with the Yankees, thanks to his broadcasting for them, even though he played for them only at the tail end of his career.

Before he joined the Yankees broadcast (I'm hazy on when, sometime in the early '80s, I remember him being on the radio a lot), I associated him with the Royals, particularly this card here, the first one of him I ever saw. It also reminds me of my friend Jeff, who was a Royals fan and many of the Royals cards I saw at the time came from his collection.

 

RALPH KINER (11 cards)

Kiner's Corner was genius when I was a kid. "You mean the baseball talk isn't over just because the game is over? We get to watch 15 minutes more????"

Ralph Kiner was part of a venerable trio that included Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy. They all looked old as the hills to me as a kid, but I'd probably be disturbed by how young they actually were if I looked it up (and then I'd add up their ages from that time and it wouldn't even add up to my age right now and I'd have to end this post to cry in the backyard).

Kiner's Kinerisms are now legendary but I had no idea he was flubbing stuff when I was watching. I just thought he liked to talk about the Mets. And baseball. And wear loud jackets.

 

TIM MCCARVER (23 cards)

Tim McCarver's broadcasting career was so long that I remember watching him broadcast when I was a kid and I remember him broadcasting when I was an old, critical adult whining about him on social media.

 

As I've said many times, McCarver was once one of the most enjoyable broadcasters this side of Garagiola. When he did Mets games on WWOR, I loved it. Lots of stories and joking around. Something definitely changed when CBS and Fox came around and McCarver went national. I also think we got a little too analytical about our baseball broadcasters.

 

DON DRYSDALE (90 cards -- probably more)

This is the first card I owned of Don Drysdale. I've done a lot better on obtaining his cards since. But I don't have them all tabulated on TCDB yet for a complete total.

Drysdale was a broadcaster for Monday Night Baseball in the late 1970s, so I first associated him with a bright yellow jacket and tolerating Cosell trampling all over what he was saying. In those days, Drysdale looked more like this:

And that's about it for former players who were broadcasting when I was a kid. There are a few others that I'm sure I saw, Bob Gibson, for example, who made brief appearances.

I discounted folks who were still playing when they broadcasted. Guys like Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver would work the postseason after their seasons were over.

When I was a kid, NBC was the king of baseball viewing with ABC doing what it could to keep up. CBS baseball didn't exist, but it had a long history with baseball back before my time when Dizzy Dean did the games.

Today, I don't think any of the national telecasts remind me of anything I watched then. The telecasts on Fox and especially ESPN are too pre-scripted, less conversational. And many of the team broadcasters are unbearable today as the many former players in the booth are too focused on what they were focused on as a ballplayer ("that's a good swing," "that's good pitch," stuff like that is almost all you get), rather than giving fans a real view of the experience of a major league game or being a pro ballplayer.

The best current TV team that resembles what I saw as a kid is the Mets team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling. I will watch them over virtually any other team's broadcast and I don't even like the Mets. It's too bad more of the teams, and whoever is broadcasting the World Series, can't be more down-to-earth like those three are.

 

Heck, I'd take Phil Rizzuto giving birthday greetings to Henrieta Lewandowski in Yonkers over what I hear now.