The young television producer was hesitant. He stood on the top step of the dugout. He looked down to where Jimmy Piersall was sitting.
"Jimmy, could you spare a couple of minutes?" the producer asked. "We'd like to get your thoughts on the Strawberry incident?" Although the Chicago Cubs were about to open their exhibition season, the big story of the moment had come from the New York Mets' camp.
Over in Florida, right fielder Darryl Strawberry and first baseman Keith Hernandez had gotten into a fight as they lined up for the annual team photograph.
The battle had been captured by television cameras. The fight had been running over and over on cable television for two days.
There were two things the television producer didn't understand about Piersall.
First of all, he'll answer any question without the slightest artifice. Second, after a decade of television and radio experience in which he did his own shows, Piersall has absolutely no fear of the microphone. He's a professional.
I couldn't hear the producer's question because the blustering wind blew his voice away.
But I could hear Piersall. He always speaks up loud and clear.
"One time, when I was playing for the Cleveland Indians, a big guy named Walter Bond took my job," Piersall said. He clearly relished the memory.
"Bond was something like six feet nine, and he was supposed to have great power, but he went 0 for 31. That wasn't enough for me. I was hoping he'd fall down and break a leg.
"Bond accused me to my face of telling the opposition how to pitch to him." Piersall grinned.
"I told him I wish I'd thought of that, because I certainly would have." Piersall hesitated in an obvious attempt to build tension. Then he followed with the kicker.
"A ballplayer who worries about the other guy is crazy. You've got your own problems. When you're in a big league clubhouse, nobody else really cares about you. They really only care about themselves." The television producer thanked Piersall profusely.
"Fine," Piersall said, "anytime." Piersall led the way back to the dugout. We sat down again.
"Where were we?" he asked.
Piersall answered his own question.
"Oh, I remember. Listen, of course there's tension in big league life. You have to produce every day. I never drank or smoked, but the tension was something waiting for you when you got up every morning."
As a player, Piersall suffered a nervous breakdown. He wrote a book about his experiences titled Fear Strikes Out. After nearly 35 years, it's still one of the best looks inside baseball ever written.
Piersall was played in the 1957 movie version of his biography by Anthony Perkins, and Piersall's father was played by Karl Malden.
"I don't know why they ever picked Perkins to play me," Piersall says. "I mean, he threw a baseball like a girl, and he couldn't catch one with a bushel basket. He danced around the outfield like a ballerina, and he was supposed to be depicting me, a major league baseball player. I hated the movie." Tension has never left Piersall. He still takes lithium every day. Despite keeping himself in playing condition into his late fifties, he has undergone two serious heart operations because of blocked arteries.
The first one occurred in 1976 when Piersall was working for the Texas Rangers. The second surgery was in December 1987.
"I wound up this last time with two solidly blocked arteries," Piersall said, "and two smaller ones they didn't think they'd be able to attach properly. The operation took eight hours, but now I feel twenty years younger." Piersall, 59, spends hours each morning running and stretching as he coaches the Cubs' outfielders in spring training. "Do the kids know what you did as a player?" I asked.
"Nah! Sometimes, they hear about me from their grandfathers or even their fathers.
"But I know how to get their attention. `Listen,' I tell 'em, `I lasted nineteen years in the big leagues, and I had a total fielding average of .997, so I must have been doing something right.'" Piersall was the most exciting American League player of his time. He turned base hits into outs with his glove.
Playing alongside Ted Williams at Fenway Park in Boston, Piersall somehow seemed to catch all the balls hit to both center and left fields. He also had some remarkable years in Cleveland where he played the shortest center field in memory and repeatedly sprinted back to catch long balls over his shoulder.
And always, Piersall had a sure sense of zany theatre that rivaled the Marx Brothers.
Even when he played for Casey Stengel and the original (and hapless) New York Mets, Piersall had an almost Chaplinesque sense of the absurd. He always knew baseball is at its best when it's fun.
"They brought Duke Snider back to play for us," Piersall remembered. "It was the end of his great career.
"Stengel was already about 75 years old. He used to fall asleep on the bench. One day, he sent Duke up to pinch hit. Duke responded by hitting his 400th career home run.
"The next day there were these little boxes in the paper saying that Duke had hit his 400th, I was astonished. There should have been headlines.
"I decided that when I got my 100th, there would be some attention paid.
"Late in the season, we were playing the Phillies.I had a sense I was gonna hit a home run. So I alerted the photographers on the field to keep their eyes on me.
"I promised them that if I hit the ball out, there would be a show.
"Dallas Green, now the Yankee manager, was the Phils' pitcher. I hit a ball down that 247-foot right-field line in the old Polo Grounds. It traveled just far enough to get into the stands.
"So I ran around the bases backward. And I ran fast because I had been practicing for this. When I got to third base, I shook hands with Cookie Lavagetto, who was our third base coach and then went on into the dugout.
"Stengel never said a word. When I passed him in the dugout, he didn't even smile.
"There were seven or eight newspapers in New York then, and next day I bought them all. I was big in every one of them.
"One paper even did a sequence of me running the bases backward. It wasn't on the sports pages. It was on the front page of the paper!
"A couple of days later, the Mets released me. I should have remembered one thing that Stengel had always insisted upon: `If there's gonna be a clown on the ball club, I'm it,' he always said. Casey Stengel didn't want anybody upstaging him." Piersall leaned forward farther, pressing on to his next point.
"Baseball has become a very boring game," he said. "Unless something's happening, it can be very dull.
"A lot of the problem today is the umpires. They put themselves on a pedestal. They won't let anybody argue with them anymore without getting tossed out of the game.
"Billy Martin and I couldn't play today. Leo Durocher couldn't manage, and I don't think Stengel could, either. There's too much of a demand for decorum.
"I have something else against umpires besides their inflated opinion of themselves. A lot of them are too fat. They should take more pride in themselves. Some of these guys could lose fifty pounds and still be fat. They're like baby hippos out there. They simply can't cover their position." Chicago fans still remember Piersall's hilarious days as a color commentator for the White Sox alongside Harry Caray. Piersall drove Bill Veeck, an owner with a sense of humor, to distraction. He was impossible for White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn to abide.
Piersall pointed out the errors players made on the field. He also pointed out which players hustled for their money and which were loafing.
One day, he called Bill Veeck's wife a "boring woman." This resulted in Veeck's son Mike invading the radio booth and attempting to strangle Piersall. Another time, he went on a television show with Mike Royko and made his famous pronouncement about baseball wives: "They're just horny broads who wanted to get married, and they wanted a little money, a little security and they wanted a big, strong ballplayer." In addition to working in the booth with Caray, Piersall later did a very highly rated sports talk show on radio that lasted four years.
"I don't think my doctor would let me do one again," Piersall said. "There's too much tension.
"Besides, I think sports talk shows are el stinko. I did it for the money. But they're boring. It's the same old fans calling in with the same old nonsense. I got in trouble because I was telling them the truth.
"Did you ever try to talk to a football coach or a basketball coach? They're the most boring creatures on Earth. They keep saying the same things over and over." Piersall has already been to see the widow maker twice in his life. He knows what it's like to be flat on his back, being rolled into an operating room and not knowing whether he is really coming back out again.
Baseball and his incredibly intense lifestyle have taken a heavy toll.
"Right now, I feel great," Piersall says. "I swim. I fish. I walk my dog for 45 minutes a day. I play tennis. I'm in great shape and enjoying life. I love my wife."
Suddenly, for the first time, he turns serious.
"I could go just like that," Piersall says. "But I wouldn't change a thing. I'd do it all over again. Just the same way.
