Lost Ballparks
Lost Ballparks with Mike Koser is a podcast that transports you back to the golden age of baseball—through the voices of those who lived it. Hear firsthand stories from players, broadcasters, batboys, clubhouse managers, groundskeepers, umpires, and fans who vividly recall what it was like to spend a summer afternoon at Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field, Yankee Stadium, Comiskey Park, Crosley Field, and many more beloved ballparks now lost to time.
Lost Ballparks
Best of Lost Ballparks: Bob Costas (HOF 2018)
(This episode was recorded in 2022).
We’re curating the most downloaded episodes for new listeners discovering Lost Ballparks. If you’re a longtime listener, thank you for being part of this incredible community!
Bob Costas has hosted 12 Olympics, 7 Super Bowls, 7 World Series, 10 NBA Finals, has won 29 Emmys (more than any other sportscaster in history) and a Baseball Hall of Fame Ford C. Frick winner. What a thrill it was to talk old ballparks with him!
For context, this interview was recorded before the passing events goalie.
SPEAKER_12:Um park in the city of the pulling.
SPEAKER_10:So we have an action.
SPEAKER_13:Sunny day here at Tiger State. The wind blowing straight in from right field. Well, friends, here we are back to the pomegranate in New York City.
SPEAKER_09:Come on, pull up on a comfortable chair. We want to take your shoes up, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, I'm Mike Cozer, and welcome to the season three premiere of the Lost Ball Parks Podcast with my special guest, Bob Costas. One-on-one pitch.
SPEAKER_02:Look out! Do you believe it? It's gone.
SPEAKER_01:Bob Costas is without question one of the greatest sports casters of all time. He's hosted 12 Olympic Games, seven Super Bowls, seven World Series, 10 NBA finals, has won 29 Emmys, more than any sportscaster in history, has been named National Sportscaster of the Year eight times, also a record. He was given the prestigious Ford C. Frick Award by the Baseball Hall of Fame, and he is my first guest on season three of the Lost Ballparks Podcast. When I come across a photograph of Ebbett's Field or the polo grounds that I've never seen before, there's some transport of quality about those old ballparks that takes me to another place, another time. And some of those photographs, honestly, I could look at for 30, 40 minutes, just imagining Vince Goley up above running down the Dodger lineup for the day.
SPEAKER_06:In the outfield, Harry Anderson in left, Don Landrum in center, and Richie Ashburn around and right.
SPEAKER_01:And I'll tell you, from the time that I started doing this podcast, Bob, I've wanted to ask you specifically this question. What is it about ballparks, places like Old Yankee Stadium and Chive Park, Forbes Field Sportsman's Park? What is it about those places that's so captivating and that all these years later we continue to talk about?
SPEAKER_07:Mike, I think ballparks historically, and even many, not all, at present, are really distinctive locations. George Carlin has a famous bit.
SPEAKER_14:I'd like to talk a little bit about baseball and football.
SPEAKER_07:Very insightful about the differences between baseball and football. And one of the differences is that football is played in a stadium, often War Memorial Stadium. Whereas baseball is played in a park. It's a ballpark. Sometimes it's called Yankee Stadium, but it's still a ballpark. And through the years, they have often been very distinctive, quirky. They, in some cases, especially with the ones built in the early part of the 20th century, they fit the contours of the urban space that was allotted to them. That accounts for the odd and enduringly appealing uh layout of Fenway Park, for example, and other ballparks. That I think is a big part of it. The other thing is that baseball, and people who get it, get it, and others scoff at it. Baseball has always been something where, yes, there's excitement, yes, there's interest, but you seldom hear the word fondness attached to other sports. But many of us feel a fondness about baseball, about its history, about the personal connections in our lives that were built around baseball, which doesn't mean that that couldn't happen around football or basketball or other sports, of course, but I just think it's to a greater extent about baseball. Maybe it's because of the fact that it's played every day. So each game doesn't feel as if it's a big spectacular event. It's just another chapter in a series of chapters that play out over a year or over many years, if you're aware of the history of the game. And then the kind of leisurely pace allows for conversation and interaction in a way that other sports don't. So all of those things I think play into it. And maybe the proof of the point we're making, you know, we can try and figure out how to express it. But in concrete terms, no pun intended, in the 70s, when all those multi-purpose stadiums came in and they were indistinguishable from one another, you didn't know if you were at Veteran Stadium in Philadelphia, Bush Stadium in St. Louis, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Three River Stadium in Pittsburgh. They're all the same, right? With the boring identical dimensions and layout with artificial turf. And in the early 1980s, when I started doing games on NBC on the Saturday game of the week, I said something that I guess hit home with a lot of people. I said, they build colonial style homes with microwave ovens in them. Why can't they build old-style retro ballparks that feel like ballparks, but still have the features that modern economics and people's desire for modern conveniences and amenities calls for? Well, I can't take credit for the idea, but eventually along came Camden Yards.
SPEAKER_08:Oreo Park at Camden Yards, baseball's newest tribute to the game and its traditional old-fashioned values, and all of the other retro ballparks, which are tremendously appealing.
SPEAKER_07:Uh, and when you think about the ballpark, I forget what it's called now, but the ballpark in Chicago where the White Sox play. Guaranteed rate field. That was built in the early 90s, and it was the last one built before it dawned on everybody that we got to go back to the future here. That baseball has a unique kind of appeal, a unique kind of connection to its fans, and ballparks, the venues, are part of that connection. And so when you think about that ballpark in Chicago, it doesn't have artificial turf, but in many ways it has more in common with the ballparks we decried from the 70s and 80s than it does with the wave of ballparks that immediately followed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%. And it's hard to believe, honestly, that we traded Kamiski Park for uh what's there now. Bob, do you remember your first major league baseball game where you attended your first game?
SPEAKER_07:My dad took me to a game as it happened. I don't know if he was this prescient to know that they would be gone after the season, but when I was five years old, he took me to one game at the Polar Grounds and one game at Ebbettes Field. And I don't remember any of the particulars except for one, which I'll get to in a minute. Uh, but I remember the atmospherics of it. I remember being struck, everybody from my generation has told this story about the colors. It's like when the Wizard of Oz goes from black and white to technicolor, because the only baseball, I'm five years old, the only baseball I've seen is on a black and white TV from a high home camera.
SPEAKER_12:Good evening, everybody. Here we are, Evans Fields, Chicago Cubs are in here, and this is the knot hole game.
SPEAKER_07:And now you walk into this ballpark and you're struck by this array of colors and sights and sounds. So I remember that. I remember sitting on my father's shoulders. Uh, each of those ballparks had the pillars. So you had to kind of look beneath an overhang, but I had to be up on my dad's shoulders to see over the head of the people ahead of us, uh, and then here underneath. So I remember what the ballpark looked like. I remember kind of the swirling cigar smoke and the hot dogs, peanuts, score cards here, but I don't remember any particulars, except that the Dodgers had uh what Vin Scully later described as that uh wedding cake white uniforms and the and the blue lettering and the and the blue caps with the B on it. And my dad bought me one of those caps, uh a B Dodger cap, uh, as a souvenir. But I don't remember who they were playing, and I don't remember any details of the game. Same at the polo grounds, except for this. I do remember that my dad said, look at that guy out there. No, no, no, Bobby, not that one. The one in the middle, that's Willie Mays. Like he was saying to his son, son, that's the Grand Canyon, that's the Washington Monument, that's Willie Mays. And again, he was pretty damn pressured because I remember it to this day. And I've shared shared that story with Willie.
SPEAKER_01:And of course, the John T. Brush Stairway that led you down from Coogan's Bluff into the Polo grounds, still exists. In fact, several years ago, it was renovated. Have you been back?
SPEAKER_07:I regret to say I have not, except when I was still a kid, because the Mets played at the Polo Grounds in 62 and 63 before Shea Stadium. And the dear young Mets made the old polo grounds their home. So I saw Met games, comically feudal as they were, at the polo grounds, and I remember that. I remember them being struck because we were sitting in a different part of the park. We were sitting just up the first baseline between home play and first base. So I had a better view of the field itself and how weird it was, how close the right field line was, like 255, 260 feet. Yeah. A pop fly could be a home run, but a vicious line drive that ricocheted off the wall was a single. But all the way out to center field, where the steps leading to the clubhouse were on the field behind a giant Chesterfield cigarette sign, which famously emitted puffs of smoke.
SPEAKER_12:Chesterfield, they satisfy.
SPEAKER_07:21 grain tobaccos make 20 wonderful smokes. Think of Willie Mays making that over-the-shoulder catch in 1954. What made that so great was that even then there was more expanse in center field at the polo grounds than almost anywhere else. So he had to run as far as he had to run to pull that ball in. So I remember being struck by that when I went to a couple of Mets games in 1962 and three.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and one of my favorite pieces of polo grounds history has to be from Maddie Schwab, who was the head groundskeeper for the New York Giants. He and his family lived in an apartment underneath the left field stands. And I remember reading an account from his kids who years later said that growing up, they would have sleepovers with their friends from school, and they would put these tents out in left field, center field, right field, and they'd camp out for the night. What an incredible memory as a kid to have lived in the polo grounds.
SPEAKER_07:I was fascinated by those ballparks even when I was a kid. And I was lucky in this respect. Well, baseball still, during the generations of my youth, was still primarily a radio sport. In New York, a disproportionate number of games were televised. So I had an idea in my mind of what Crosley Field in Cincinnati looked like and other ballparks and something else about the polygons. The bullpens were on the field. So guys are warming up in deep left center field, the benches out there with a little kind of awning covering it, because a ball would be hit out there so infrequently. But when it was, then it was almost like kids. You're playing stickball on the street, and the ball goes under a car or ricochets off some lady's window, and now she's yelling at you. It almost had that kind of wait a minute, is this big league baseball or is this a game in the sandline field? And all those little quirks, uh, the fact that at Crosley Field there was an embankment and there was a laundry out behind the fence in left field, and a tape measure home run would clear everything and then land in the laundry.
SPEAKER_14:Look at that drive. You talk about a tape measure shot.
SPEAKER_07:And I often used to think to myself, 10, 11 years old, is there a Mrs. Wagner? Because Mrs. Wagner in our neighborhood, if we hit a baseball too far and it went in her yard, she'd steal it and wouldn't give it back. Was there a Mrs. Wagner or the equivalent at the laundry? Hey, you kids over there, hey Frank Robinson, hey Vader Princeton, stay off my lawn.
SPEAKER_01:Or Ted Klazewski, yeah. So in 1959, you got your first taste of Yankee Stadium.
SPEAKER_10:It's Yankee baseball time again from Yankee Stadium, brought to you by P. Valentine and Sons Brewers the famous three-ring Valentine beer, the crisp refresher.
SPEAKER_07:What was that like? Well, it was the second to last day of the regular season. It was one of the few years in the 40s, 50s, and to the mid-60s that the Yankees didn't win the pennant. And they were playing the Baltimore Orioles. They were out of the pennant race. I was heartbroken that Mickey Mantle did not play that day. The Orioles won the game 7-2. Brooks Robinson hit a home run for them. Johnny Blanchard hit a home run for the Yankees. We were sitting in the lower left field stands behind the 402 sign and straight away left at the old Yankee Stadium. And I remember Hector Lopez patrolling left field for the Yankees, and we're behind him, thinking, me and my cousin, my dad took me and my older cousin to the game. We got our gloves, thinking somehow a home run ball is going to come right to us. Or maybe Hector Lopez, instead of tossing the ball around between innings, maybe he'll turn around and toss it to him, to us rather. We beseeched him. Hector, Hector, I don't know if you can hear us or not, but he never threw a ball our way. And the more lasting memory is at the end of the game, back then, the Yankees would let fans walk around the field. You could leave the ballpark by way of the field. You walked around, you couldn't go on the grass, but you walked around the warning tracks. Um, you could circle the field and then go out. They'd open up the bullpen gates at the back of the bullpen's in right center and left center. And that led you out into the street to where the subways were. And so eventually we get in front of the monuments. And now there's many monuments, but then there were only three: Miller Huggins, the manager, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrick. Uh, and the flagpole was behind the monuments because it was 460 some feet from home play to center field. So again, there weren't many baseballs kids out there. So we get to the monuments, and I'm already, you know, pretty emotional that I'm at this cathedral of baseball. You know, it's so awe-inspiring, the triple decks and the facade above, and everything about it is like this is this this is to me a religious experience already. And now I'm at these monuments. And what would you think when you were seven years old? I thought they were buried there. I thought this was the sacred Yankee burial ground. And soon enough, maybe not too soon, but Joe DiMaggio would eventually be buried there. And worse yet, from my standpoint as a seven-year-old in 1959, Mickey Mantle would be buried there. So I started to cry. And my father's trying to reassure me that yes, these three men are dead, but they're buried someplace else. They're not underneath the warning track here. But I thought he was lying to me just to try to make me feel better. Uh, and I was close to inconsolable. But you know, when you're a kid, a few minutes seems like an eternity. And I remember then he picked me up and he he put me on his shoulders and kind of jiggling me around to make me laugh. And that's how we went bobbing out of Yankee Stadium on that day. So the the memory is more about me and my dad because the game was more or less unremarkable.
SPEAKER_01:I can remember Bob as a young kid being drawn to the radio. I would listen to Herb score and uh Joe Tate call games for Cleveland.
unknown:Coma takes the turn at first and he hits the second.
SPEAKER_01:On a clear night, I could pick up Ernie Harwell in Detroit calling Tigers games.
SPEAKER_04:Two for the price of one for the Tigers.
SPEAKER_01:A great play by Trooby. For young kid, it was, and I think you talk about this too, it was theater of the mind. And I would listen to them paint the picture of what it was like at Tiger Stadium that night or municipal stadium in Cleveland. Your first taste, I think, of Major League Baseball Radio, was it Mel Allen and uh Red Barber, Lindsey Nelson, those fellas?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, Lindsay came a little later. I was 10 when the Mets came into existence, and their original broadcast team stayed together for a long time, Lindsay Nelson, Ralph Kiner, and Bob Murphy. But I guess it would have been Mel and Red.
SPEAKER_02:There's a drive in left center, Mattel digging hard, still going, still going, big the Dodgers had already gone west.
SPEAKER_07:I wouldn't hear Vin Scully until a few years later. Red and Mel, who were the first two broadcasters uh inducted into the broadcast wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and deservedly so. They were the two dominant baseball voices when I was very little. What made Mel Allen so beloved? Well, first of all, he was the voice of the most successful team. So they were always in the World Series, always in contention. They had this great history, all of these heroic exploits. So he had good games to describe.
SPEAKER_03:On a hard shot by Barrow, Nelson grabbed the ball, stepped on first, and Mannell was quick thinking, stopped in his tracks, slid underneath the tag, got back to first, as McDougall scurred the time run. How about that?
SPEAKER_07:He also had a very pleasing voice. A disproportionate number of early sports broadcasters, in all sports, but especially in baseball, had southern backgrounds. It almost sounded like their voices were coated with honey. Ernie Harwell.
SPEAKER_04:Easy pitch on the way. He swings and fouls it off. It'll reach the seat over back of the Tiger Dug. And the man from Walla Walla will take that one home. Red Barber.
SPEAKER_10:Ball game in this series, just as tight as a brand new pair of shoes on a rainy day.
SPEAKER_07:Lindsay Nelson.
SPEAKER_11:Big crowd of 50,125 on Farmer's Night to see the Mets and the Reds. Standing room only.
SPEAKER_07:Mel Allen. Hello there, everybody. This is Mel Allen. So how listenable you are matters, especially in baseball. There are periods of time when not much is happening and it's conversational, so the broadcaster has to be a companion. So Mel had all those qualities going for him. And he also had a very distinctive home run call.
SPEAKER_03:There's one, it is going, it is going, it is going.
SPEAKER_07:You know, everything that's great, almost everything that's great, seems obvious when somebody thinks of it first. What's so great about going on? What's so great about it? It's perfect. It fits. You know, Harry Carey had it might be, it could be, it is. Later, Dick Enberg came up with Touch Em All.
SPEAKER_12:Hit well the right failed in a celebration time. Touch them all.
SPEAKER_07:But some people have said to me, why don't you have a signature call? Because I've never been able to think of an original one that's that good. Plus, I also think it works better on a local broadcast, where you know that the audience by and large is rooting for the team that you're the voice of, as opposed to a national broadcast. So I just say whatever occurs to me in a big moment like that. Mel also had, like Dick Emberg had, oh my, oh my! Mel had, how about that?
SPEAKER_14:Here comes Billy Martin digging hard and he makes the catch at the last second. How about that?
SPEAKER_07:But it isn't just you see the three words, how about that? Okay, fine. But it was the way he said it, the lilt in his voice, the inflections. So whenever something remarkable happened, if he punctuated it with how about that, then you knew that it was either remarkable or it was a note of some interest. So he had a lot of stuff going for him that endeared him to his audience for a very long time.
SPEAKER_01:What really captured my imagination as a kid was the syndicated radio program that you hosted for 10 years from 1986 to 1996 called Costas Coast to Coast. Knowing that there would always be a good story was one of the reasons I tuned into that show, and then later to your show later on NBC. In fact, this morning I was watching your interview with Hank Aaron, I think it was April of 1991. The games leading up to when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record should have been joyous. But as he recounted in that interview to you, it was one of the most difficult periods of his entire life.
SPEAKER_00:I had a daughter in college. Of course, she she wasn't able to enjoy college life as well as some of the other girls were, because uh we had gotten some letters that said that she was going to be kidnapped and things like this. Overall, Bob, it was uh it was not a a happy moment for me, and it was a moment that um I think should have been probably one of the greatest moments, you know, in my life because I because of what I was going through. If I'd have been happy, I think everything would have been nice.
SPEAKER_07:Hank is one of the most important figures in the history of American sports. There will never be another Jackie Robinson for obvious reasons of the man and the circumstances in which he found himself. But if anyone could be said to honestly, in baseball, to honestly have taken the baton from Jackie Robinson, it was Hank Aaron. Hank was such a humble and decent person. He really didn't have the personality of a crusader, but he understood what had been thrust upon him, especially as he began to approach Babe Ruth's record. And he was not someone who sought personal glory, and I really believe that he became determined to break the record, not so much to glorify himself, but to defeat and deny all the racists who had opposed him. And obviously, in the end, he triumphed, not just statistically, but he has all the honor now. Even at the Hall of Fame, where everyone is an all-time great, he kind of stood apart. The applause for him, and even the way he was treated by his Hall of Fame peers, put him in a slightly different category. It wasn't just respect, it was reverence. And he had earned every bit of that.
SPEAKER_01:Hank Aaron was a hero to so many of his kids. I can still remember the first time I got a Hank Aaron baseball card. Growing up on Long Island, yours was Mickey Mantle. I mean, here you are as a kid at Yankee Stadium watching Mickey Mantle play, being in awe of him, to then later being able to sit down and have a face-to-face interview with him. And of course, in 1995, when Mantle passed away, you were asked to give his eulogy. I mean, that's a pretty remarkable turn of events.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, yeah. And I couldn't help but think of all the kids I went to junior high and high school with, you know, and we'd be arguing. It was an ongoing New York argument, Mantle and Mays and all that kind of stuff. And here I am. Happenstance and good fortune put me in place in so many big sports events over a long career. But baseball has always been the one that meant the most to me. So later to be asked, because of my St. Louis connections, to do Stan Musial's eulogy, to be among Hank Aaron's eulogists and Joe Morgan and Bob Gibson. Um who could possibly think it? And if I was effective at all in those moments, it's because my connection to the game and especially to that era was genuine. Is genuine. Beyond those that I mentioned, I mean, who would think that I would become friends with Joe DiMaggio or with Ted Williams and so many others? There's just a difference. I know some people scoff at it, and I'm not diminishing any other sport and its glories and its history. But baseball is just different.
SPEAKER_01:Bob, I know for a time you carried Mickey Mantle's 1958 tops card in your wallet.
SPEAKER_07:I don't have it on me now. I I could I could go in the other room and fetch it, but I never leave the house without it. If I got a suit or a sport jacket on, it's always in the breast pocket. Or even if I'm just, you know, in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and run out to get a cup of coffee, I have to have it with me because there's always at least a slim chance that someone will say, Hey, Bob, do you really have that mantle card? And I don't want to disappoint them. So pull that right up. I almost always have it.
SPEAKER_01:All right, October 15th, 1988, game one of the World Series, Azen Dodgers at Dodgers Stadium, and what would prove to be one of the great World Series moments in baseball history. You've got the lead-in on the NBC broadcast, Bob, and I think you said something to the effect that Kirk Gibson won't even be introduced tonight and will not be available to even pinch hit. I mean, you gotta remember what happened to Gibson during the NLCS. Uh he injured his left hamstring while um trying to steal second in game five, and then his right knee while sliding into second base in game seven. So Gibson's a mess. I mean, he can't even he can't even walk at this point. Both legs are bad. So in the seventh or eighth inning, you're in the Dodger dugout and you take a second to take a peek down the tunnel, and you make your way into the training room where you see Gibson on the trainer's table. The TV was on, and at that moment, Vin Scully on the TV broadcasts reiterates on the air that we don't see Kirk Gibson.
SPEAKER_05:We mentioned Gibson. If you were in the ballpark with binoculars, your first thought would be late in the game, is Gibson in the Dodger dugout? And the answer would appear to be no.
SPEAKER_01:At that moment, you saw Gibby's reaction to what was being said on TV.
SPEAKER_07:Scully, being as great as he was, it wasn't just the way he called plays, it was the way he framed and created a narrative of a game or a moment. And so during the game, he asked Harry Coyle, the great director, to pan the dugout occasionally. No Gibson.
SPEAKER_05:As you look, you see Fernando Valenzuela, and you're looking for Kurt Gibson. And there is Noel Gibson, the man who was the spearhead of the Dodger offense throughout the year, who saved them in the league championship series. Will not see any action tonight for sure.
SPEAKER_07:He is not even in the dugout. And even had he never appeared, that would have been part of the story of the game. Because certainly you would have pinch hit him had he been available in that ninth inning against Eckersley. And even had he struck out when he did come up, we had framed what that moment was. 90% of it was Vin. I had very little to do with it, but we had framed it so that no matter what the payoff was, it was part of the narrative. Now we couldn't have possibly dreamt that it would play out the way it did, which was like a movie. So Gibson is on the training table and he hears Scully say for the third or fourth time, no Kirk Gibson. And Kirk was such a fiery competitor, he said something like, bleep that, got off the table, pulled on his uniform, and then the Dodgers had a batting cage between the clubhouse and the dugout. And he had a bat boy putting balls on a T and he was taking a few swings. And I'm standing in that tunnel and I can hear thwack, usually punctuated by uh thwack, uh. So I what's going on? So I walk down and see what's happening, and then I get on the telex to Mike Weisman, who is the executive producer. I say, Mike, Gibson's taking swings. I guess he could pinch hit. And that was my contribution. He passed that along to Vin and Joe, but they had already made Gibson part of the story. So now they were just more aware that there was a possibility. And then he shows up, and one of the great moments in baseball history plays out. But you can tell he's in pain. Definitely. And you know, you could tell during the at-bat, and part of the reason it plays out and is remembered the way it is, he didn't hit the first or second pitch.
SPEAKER_05:Gibson shaking his left leg, making it quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.
SPEAKER_07:The count went to three and two.
SPEAKER_05:The time run is at second base with two out.
SPEAKER_07:He stepped out of the box two or three times. So the drama and the anticipation played out, which also allowed Vin Scully to say all those great Vin Scully things, all those grace notes to set the thing up.
SPEAKER_05:Gibson was so banged up, he was not introduced. He did not come out onto the field before the game.
SPEAKER_07:And Gibson himself has told me that the way he remembers this signature moment in his career is not just the way it's in his mind's eye from looking at Dennis Eckersley or having done it or watching the ball leave the park, but he remembers it in large part from watching the replays of the way NBC covered it, which shows me that if we, and I include myself here only tangentially, because it's really the guys in the truck and then Joe in the booth, but if we on whatever the event is do a really good job, think of Al Michaels, the miracle on ice in 1980. It would have been a great event no matter what. But if he doesn't punctuate it with, do you believe in miracles, then it doesn't echo down the corridors of time the way it still does. So we don't want to get in the way, but if we do our job correctly, we can enhance the moment and have an effect on how people remember it. And that was one of those moments.
SPEAKER_01:And here Gibson is in this important moment, barely able to even walk to the plate, let alone take a swing with the bat. I mean, if he puts the ball in play, there's a real concern that how's he going to get to first base? And yet, with the full count, he does this.
SPEAKER_02:High fly ball in the right field. She is gone.
SPEAKER_01:In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened. So when you're watching that home run sail into the left field seats, are you thinking, I'm watching one of the great moments in World Series in baseball history. Does it occur to you at that moment?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, it does. It was absolutely goosebump raising. And you didn't have to have a rooting interest. You know, a lot of times people think network announcers have a rooting interest because they have a rooting interest. So they see it through that prism. Even Vin Scully, who has to feel attached to the Dodgers, he was so professional. He did a game differently on network television than he would on a Dodger broadcast. But even if you didn't have a specific rooting interest, it was just such high drama. There was something truly theatrical about it. And the buzz in the ballpark was different than 99% of the climactic moments that I've experienced. You know, LA crowds are notorious for arriving late and leaving early. Well, the fans in the ballpark were still there, many of them. There were 10,000 people, at least, maybe more, still there a half hour after the game ended because they didn't want to relinquish the moment. And my little contribution after that, I jumped on the field and interviewed Gibson, but there was nothing special about my questions. They were all obvious questions, and he answered them. And what mattered was uh the exhilaration of the moment. That's all that mattered. So now we're walking out of the park, and I said to David Neal, who was the pregame producer, you know, that reminded me of Robert Redford's Last At-Bat as Roy Hobbes in the Natural. And David took it from there and he went back to NBC and Burbank and he took the film of the natural. And it was much harder then to edit than it is now, where you could do everything very quickly digitally. So he stays up all night and he intercuts Redford's Last At-Bat with Gibson's. And it was eerie the way they mirrored each other. I mean, Gibson wasn't bleeding through his uniform like Redford, but he was definitely hobbling around. He was definitely wounded. Even the way La Sorda jumped up in excitement when the home run was hit, Wilford Brimley is the manager of the New York Knights, jumps up and they almost looked the same, same kind of body type, barely got an inch or two off the ground. And so with Randy Newman's score from the natural playing beneath it, the way we came on the air, and again, my contribution was minimal. All I said was, Echoes of a miracle. Echoes of a miracle. And then the thing played out with all that great Randy Newman music as the bed. And as we had a slow motion shot of Gibson approaching home plate, being embraced by his teammates who were waiting for them, it just said in graphic form, in script, welcome to the World Series, game two, next. Now I get response just saying that now. Yeah. All these years later. And people, it doesn't happen nearly as often now. It used to happen a lot, but it could still happen a few times a year, where you get in a cab or somebody goes up to you in a restaurant, and they mention that very thing. So, and and Gibson, Gibson has seen it many times, the way that the pregame show celebrated what he had done the night before. And it's meaningful to him. So, you know, to have been a small part of something that's a part of baseball history is is a cool thing, and it's it's my good luck to have been there.
SPEAKER_01:Magical. Now, Bob, I'm a I'm a lifelong Cleveland fan, and I'll get you out of here on this. I uh born and raised, and there's I think only been one time in my life when I actually cried watching a baseball game. Or at least I know what it is.
SPEAKER_07:I know what it is.
SPEAKER_01:One that I can remember, October 26th, 1997, game seven of the nineteen ninety-seven World Series, the Marlins and the team then known as the Cleveland Indians. I will tell you, Bob, I was 100% certain that a World Series, a World Championship was coming to Cleveland for the first time since 1948. You had the call when in the bottom of the 11th, the Marlins Edgar Rintoria steps up to the plate with two out, and the game tied at two. The open pitch.
SPEAKER_07:I understand it. And you know, that team was not a one-season fluke. The Indians of the 90s were a tremendous team that John Hart and Company had built. In 94, had the season been played to completion, they might well have made the postseason. In 95, they were the best team in baseball, but then they ran into the Braves pitching and lost the World Series. In 97, they beat the Yankees, who were the reigning world champions in the early rounds of the playoffs, and they came this close to winning the World Series. Then the next year, people forget this. In 98, the Yankees have an historic team. They win 114 regular season games. They sweeped the Rangers three straight in the division series. They subsequently sweeped the Padres four straight in the World Series. The only team that gave them a hard time was Cleveland. They took them to six, but Cleveland was up two games to one in Cleveland for game four. El Duque on the mound, bottom of the first, and Tomy hits a ball. I'm calling the game with Joe Morgan. Tomy hits a ball that everybody in the ballpark, and me and Joe in the booth, thinks is out of there. Would have been a three-run homer, and the Yankees would have been really on edge. Their masterpiece season would have been in definite jeopardy. And the ball somehow died on the warning track. The Yankees went on to win that game. And then David Wells pitched a beauty in game five. And despite a Tomey grand slam, the Yankees won game six and escaped. And I underline escaped. So that was a stretch of time where the Indians were so good. The ballpark was new. They had, I I forget what it was, like maybe 300 plus consecutive sellouts. There was such a buzz around Cleveland about that team. And if only once it could have paid off with the world championship that they're still waiting for since 1948, would have been a great thing. And I'll tell you this, Mike. You try, as a matter of professionalism, to play it as down the middle as you can. And Jim Leland was a great story. But the Marlins had almost no history. They'd been in existence for five years, five seasons. They've still never won a division title. They've won two World Series, but both as a wild card in 97 and then 2003. Whereas Cleveland had all this history and all this longing. They were a traditional baseball team and franchise, the kind that I related to. And you may remember this, you're a kid, but you may remember this. As the ninth inning began, I said, if they can lock this down, or words of this effect, it won't just be for this team and for all the rabid fans that fill Jacobs Field, as it was then called, night after night. It'll also be for all those diehard fans who showed up, 5,000 or so of them, at municipal stadium in all in all those fallow years, to watch sudden Sam McDowell and Daddy Wags Wagner and Max Alvis. It'll be for them too. So part of me was, you know, if I had to choose, the Marlins can wait. This is the Indians' time. But it didn't happen that way. And it's your job to celebrate or at least appreciate and document what happens in front of you. And the Marlins had some good stories too, including Craig Counsel, the rookie then out of Notre Dame, who delivered the game-tying sacrifice fly in the ninth and scored the World Series winning run in the 11th. So there's always something that can be highlighted on either side. But I I understand that the anguish in Cleveland probably exceeded the jubilation in South Florida that night.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's uh there's no question. I mean, it's hard to imagine that you feel a game so much, but that one still, all these years later, still has not lost its sting. Well, Bob, you have called Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Finals, Olympics, the Kentucky Derby, golf, boxing, hockey won 29 Emmys. What a privilege and honor to spend a little bit of time with you today, uh, looking back at uh some great baseball history.
SPEAKER_07:Mike, thank you. I can tell that you're an old soul, and I mean that in uh as a compliment. You're a young guy with an old soul. And when I was your age, I was the same, or even younger than you are now. I was the same. I remember saying to my parents when I was like nine years old, I'm only nine and I'm nostalgic. I I understood what nostalgia was when I was when I was nine years old. And and I see you with your monarchs and Buck O'Neill t-shirt on. You know, we're we're kind of on the same page in that sensibility. So it's a pleasure to talk with you.
SPEAKER_01:Looking forward to catching up with you down the road.
SPEAKER_07:I look forward to it. Thank you, Mike.
SPEAKER_01:Listen, I can tell you that as a kid, I spent hours listening to my radio for Bob Costas on that program Coast to Coast. He is one of the all-time great sportscasters. And uh man, it was just fun being able to talk to him for a little bit. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, the season three premiere of the Lost Ball Parks Podcast. If you're new to the podcast, take a minute to subscribe on whatever platform you're on. It's free. And if you could also leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, believe it or not, those things help a lot. So we appreciate your support in any way possible. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week, and tune in next Wednesday for another episode of the Lost Fall Parks Podcast.
