Farewell, Scooter

When I moved to northern New Jersey in 1977, I took an instant dislike to the Yankees. I had spent most of my childhood years in Dearborn, Michigan, and was thus a Tigers fan, as were my father, grandparents, and everyone else in my family. In 1977, the Yankees were the defending AL champs, but they got spanked by the Reds (my second favorite team) in the World Series, and it was the first pennant they had won in my memory, so upon moving to Jersey I had no special animosity toward them. That would change.

Of course, they were a team of bluster, with the unlikeable (to me) players like Nettles, Munson, Rivers, Piniella, and then the newly arrived Reggie Jackson. But what really set my teeth on edge were the announcers, a trio that did both TV and radio in those days: Bill White, Frank Messer, and the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto. Having grown up with Ernie Harwell, who was the epitome of a professional broadcaster, these guys were clowns, and hopeless homers. It became my habit to root against the Yankees whenever I was watching just to get some weird sense of satisfaction. Rizzuto, of course, was the most clownish of all. He barely paid attention to the game, instead reading off birthday announcements, talking about his favorite Italian restaurants, and making a point of leaving early so he could beat the traffic over the George Washington Bridge.

But over the years, it became apparent that Rizzuto had an irresistible charm. I began to see what those who loved him saw. No, he wasn't a great announcer, by any stretch of the imagination. But he was a genuine character, a folksy, avuncular figure who watched the game as if he were sitting in your living room with you.

I'm old, but I'm not old enough to know him from his playing days, where he was a sparkplug shortstop for the great Yankee teams of the 40s and 50s. He was the MVP in 1950, and was a master bunter, base stealer, and defensive whiz. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1994 (after years of sturm and drang--truth be told, he probably would never have made the Hall if he hadn't become a legendary broadcaster) and was the Hall's oldest living member. When he was released mid-season by the Yankees in 1956, he made an immediate jump to the booth, where he remained for forty years.

To those growing up in the New York metropolitan area in the 70s and 80s he was omnipresent, even if you didn't watch baseball. He was a pitchman for The Money Store, a mortgage lender, and made dozens of commercials, his New York-accented voice honking the copy. At times his stories while broadcasting were surreal shaggy dog tales, and in the 80s a couple of writers for the Village Voice took transcripts of snippets of these broadcasts and put them in poetic form, which they called the Verse of P.F. Rizzuto. When the Yankees honored him with his very own day, they presented him with a cow (for his signature "Holy Cow!" calls) which promptly knocked him to the turf (the thunder that day was stolen by Tom Seaver, who won his 300th game for the visiting Chisox). And, of course, his play-by-play was featured in the Meat Loaf song, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, used for purposes the Scooter would become embarrassed by.

Rizzuto called it quits after an ugly incident in which he was asked to call a game in Boston and forced to miss Mickey Mantle's funeral. It was probably time for him to go, anyway, as cable networks got into the baseball business, with fancy graphics, pitch counts, speed guns, and strategy minutae. Rizzuto belonged to an earlier era of baseball. Though he was out of the public eye for the last few years, his presence will surely be missed.