Avoiding drivers who seemed to be auditioning for Mad Max: New Jersey Turnpike Thunderdome, I needed a ball game to calm me down…Punching buttons…Ah, there it is, the Yankees. Prefer the Mets, of course, but they’re off…First inning, good. Don’t recognize the voice. Sounds too stiff. Gimme bozo John Sterling and his home run calls: “It is far! It is deep! It is…and Jeter drifts under it to make the catch just beyond shortstop. Two away.” Long pause. “The wind is blowing in today, Susan,” John tells his faithful sidekick, Suzyn Waldman, hoping she’ll cover his gaffe. “Not especially, John,” she replies. Miss you, Mr. Sterling. Now we got Mr. Stiff.

Mr. Stiff: There’s a fastball, strike two.

Suzyn: And the first fastball of the game is brought to you by the Vision Zero Initiative. Throw hard but don’t drive fast.

Mr. Stiff: Strike three!

Suzyn: The first strikeout of the game is brought to you by V C Clothes.

Mr. Stiff: And there it goes! Another homer for Aaron Judge!

Suzyn (Shouting Over the Fan Noise): The first homer of the game is brought to you by your KIA Dealer!

Hmmm…Call me crazy, but I noticed a trend. Here are just some of the additional info nuggets that were matched with a sponsor:

  • Someone in the on deck circle           
  • A line drive
  • Every additional homer                      
  • Call to the bullpen
  • The next day’s pitcher                        
  • The next game’s opponent
  • The start of the 8th inning                   
  • The defensive play of the game
  • A double play                                     
  • The paid attendance                         
  • The Audi drive of the game               
  • The Wendy’s turning point
  • The Dunkin run recap (enumerating the innings in which a run was scored)

By the end of the game, I expected Suzyn to announce: “And the next play called by Mr. Stiff will be brought to you by Play Dough.” Oh well, just part of a trend that seems to be gathering steam every year. For instance, ball parks used to be named after the club owner who built them, or somebody associated with the team, or the location. But now the name is just another money-making commidity. Shea Stadium becomes Citi Field. Three Rivers Stadium becomes Petco Park. Jacobs Field becomes Progressive Field and on and on. At least Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field retain names our forefathers would still recognize in our age where Greed Uber Alles rules. [THREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT CORPORATE GREED AND MONOPOLIES DELETED HERE BY WORDPRESS, THE BLOG HOSTING CORPORATION.]

As I drifted off that night, I started thinking of some of my favorite baseball announcers. Jim Kaat, Phil Rizzuto, Howie Rose, Ken Singleton, David Cone, Keith Hernandez, Bill White, Red Barber…and especially Ralph Kiner. Ralph would mispronounce words longer than a syllable, including everyday players’ names, and use the wrong adjectives to describe the action, so that every sentence was an adventure. “Jim Hickman draws a prodigious walk”…”Ron Hunt is stratified again by an insider pitch.” He had a postgame show for decades on WOR-TV called Kiner’s Korner but Ralph wasn’t much of a raconteur. He would throw a question out and hope his guest would run with it.

The most painful live interview I ever saw was in 1962 when Choo Choo Coleman made his one and only appearance on the show. Coleman was a back-up catcher for the Mets during their first two years, when they lost more games than any other professional team on any level in sports history to include other star systems (up until the upstart 2024 Chicago White Sox who sorely lacked the Mets legendary charisma ). Chooch, as he was called, didn’t talk much. After giving one word answers to a series of open-ended baseball questions that would normally get even camera-shy players to gab away, Ralph got desperate and decided to switch topics.

Ralph: So Choo Choo, are you married?     Chooch: Yes.

Ralph: What’s your wife’s name?                Chooch: Mrs. Coleman.

Ralph: What’s she like?                               Chooch: She likes me.

Choo Choo also had trouble remembering names, like his roommate during his rookie season, the Mets second baseman, Charlie Neal, who he couldn’t quite place when he saw him the next Spring.  Chooch’s short term memory was even worse. As he crouched behind the plate, signaling the pitcher with his fingers, he’d sometimes take a peak to recall the kind of pitch that would come flying his way. That’s why he had so many passed balls: in between calling the pitch and trying to catch it, he had forgotten what he had called, so he constantly crossed himself up. One opposing player in the on deck circle swore he heard Choo Choo muttering as he ran by, chasing yet another passed ball: “Man, I forgot I called a curve!” The great George Vecsy of the Times (back when the paper actually had a sports section) once wrote that Casey Stengel gushed: “I never seen a catcher move so quickly to get those passed balls!”

After his second season, Choo Choo bounced around the minor leagues. In 1969, he signed with the Tidewater Tides, the Mets Triple A farm team, and played with Art Shamsky and others who got called up to help the Amazin’s win the World Series that year. But not Chooch, who retired with a lifetime average of .197 and despite his speed, got thrown out trying to steal most of the time. As Casey used to say, you could look it up. And yet, everybody who ever met him would tell you that Choo Choo Coleman was a good and decent man. He fisrt played for the Indianapolis Clowns, the Negro American League version of the Harlem Globetrotters. And guess who also played for the Clowns? Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, who dethroned The Babe in 1974. So as my old pal Smokey Robinson used to say, don’t judge a book by its cover.

The Amagansett Star-Revue