Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Phil Rizzuto
1917-2007
Played before my time. Decades listening to Phil calling Yankee games. Sometimes infuriating when he lost track of the count as he wished happy birthday to all the nuns on his list for that day. But who's to say his anecdotal style, discursive & casually hyperbolic, didn't seep into mine, or that of any number of Nuyawk area writers? Ball two. Leave the zeppoles, take the cannolis. There'll be Rizzuto memories everywhere for the next week. Start with The Contrarian's dad, & this from the New York Times obit:
From the Daily News, Phil & Cora visit Pier 94 after 9/11.
Played before my time. Decades listening to Phil calling Yankee games. Sometimes infuriating when he lost track of the count as he wished happy birthday to all the nuns on his list for that day. But who's to say his anecdotal style, discursive & casually hyperbolic, didn't seep into mine, or that of any number of Nuyawk area writers? Ball two. Leave the zeppoles, take the cannolis. There'll be Rizzuto memories everywhere for the next week. Start with The Contrarian's dad, & this from the New York Times obit:
Rizzuto met Cora Ellenborg in 1942, after substituting for DiMaggio as a speaker at a communion breakfast in Newark. He had been invited to her home afterward for coffee and cake by her father, a Newark fire chief. “I fell in love so hard I didn’t go home,” Rizzuto recalled. He rented a hotel room nearby for a month to be near her.Phil Rizzuto Park is three blocks from here, done with a baseball theme, but there's a soccer field, not a diamond. Huckleberries.
From the Daily News, Phil & Cora visit Pier 94 after 9/11.
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Worth reading is Star-Ledger TV Critic Alan Sepinwall's column on Scooter, "The end of the innocents:"
But the beauty of the Scooter was how conventional standards didn't apply to him. Rizzuto's flaws as a broadcaster only made us love him more, whether we remembered him from his playing days or only knew him as the colorful old uncle who shared the booth with the likes of "Seaver," "Murcer" and, of course, "White."
So what if he missed the occasional play or 12? What Rizzuto understood, certainly better than blowhard technicians such as Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan, is that baseball is supposed to be fun, darn it. And Scooter was nothing if not fun.
But the beauty of the Scooter was how conventional standards didn't apply to him. Rizzuto's flaws as a broadcaster only made us love him more, whether we remembered him from his playing days or only knew him as the colorful old uncle who shared the booth with the likes of "Seaver," "Murcer" and, of course, "White."
So what if he missed the occasional play or 12? What Rizzuto understood, certainly better than blowhard technicians such as Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan, is that baseball is supposed to be fun, darn it. And Scooter was nothing if not fun.
Bruce Longstreet writes:
I once drove from my parents house in Roselle to a little past the Union Toll Plaza on the GSP listening to Phil call a game on the radio, and in that time could not discern...1. Which team was at bat. 2. The score 3. WHO was at bat. 4. What team were we playing? 5. Who was pitching 6. What was the count because Phil was on a tear about vitamin E, which he had just heard about but the whole rest of the world had known about for two or three years by then. I can hear ball game noises. Foul balls being hit. Pitches being thrown and caught. And he's just going on about Vitamin E. At one point you can hear a sharp crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd. Phil pauses, mutters, "ohhhh... there's a double in the corner" and then goes back into his vitamin e rap. I literally did not know even which teams were playing each other and in what town for about 12 minutes. Classic Scooter. I loved it.
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I once drove from my parents house in Roselle to a little past the Union Toll Plaza on the GSP listening to Phil call a game on the radio, and in that time could not discern...1. Which team was at bat. 2. The score 3. WHO was at bat. 4. What team were we playing? 5. Who was pitching 6. What was the count because Phil was on a tear about vitamin E, which he had just heard about but the whole rest of the world had known about for two or three years by then. I can hear ball game noises. Foul balls being hit. Pitches being thrown and caught. And he's just going on about Vitamin E. At one point you can hear a sharp crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd. Phil pauses, mutters, "ohhhh... there's a double in the corner" and then goes back into his vitamin e rap. I literally did not know even which teams were playing each other and in what town for about 12 minutes. Classic Scooter. I loved it.
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