My highly imprecise gauge for determining whether you’re growing old is this: You are if your childhood baseball heroes are being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I’m embarrassed to admit I qualify. George Brett, the Kansas City Royals star I idolized in my pre-teen years, was recently inducted. I’m even more embarrassed to admit that watching television replays of his teary acceptance speech got me a little misty, as it made my childhood days of Brett-worship seem so distant.
The most important thing you need to know about Brett is not that he was an extraordinary hitter — you should already know that — but that he frequently looked disheveled, as if he had just come from a barroom brawl. One of his cheeks was always bulging with tobacco, and from what I recall of his baseball-card mug shots — a key reference point in one’s childhood — he looked just angry enough to be intimidating. Tom Boswell of the Washington Post memorably described Brett as someone “who couldn’t wait for somebody to come into him spikes high at third base so they could roll in the dirt and see who’d get punched in the mouth more often.”
Indeed, unlike many hitters with great batting averages, Brett wasn’t content to tap out singles and then lollygag on first base. He hit for power, and if his teammates didn’t help him get around the bases, he’d try to steal (my favorite set of Brett statistics is that he’s the only player ever to have accumulated more than 3,000 hits, 300 home runs, 600 doubles, 100 triples, and 200 stolen bases). His single greatest hit of all may have come in the 1980 playoffs, when he cracked a Goose Gossage fast-ball so hard that I recall it still rising when it ricocheted off the upper deck of Yankee stadium.
That home run was the culmination of an extraordinary season. Brett hovered around 400 as late as September 19 (he finished with a not too shabby .390). I recall spending countless mornings that summer hunched over Royals’ box scores before bicycling off to swim practice. And while my hometown of Lafayette, California, didn’t contain many Brett fans, my good friend Matt Steinhaus was enough of a baseball enthusiast to know a close-to-.400 hitter couldn’t be ignored. Thus our routine poolside greeting each morning was a quick recital of Brett’s latest statistics, with roars of approval on those (frequent) occasions when he’d succeeded in boosting his average.
Though Brett would never again give serious chase to .400, he did not stray far from the headlines. He capped the 1980 season, for instance, by becoming the only player to sit out a World Series game because of hemorrhoids. Three years later, he provided one of the indelible sports images of all time: When an umpire disallowed his game-winning homerun on the spurious grounds that pine tar extended too far up his bat, he jumped about in such a rage that it looked as if fire-works were exploding in his pants. In 1985, Brett led the Royals to victory in the World Series, though Cardinals fans still bellyache that a horrendous call by umpire Don Denkinger cost them game six.
That ’85 series was the last time I paid close attention to Brett or the Royals. His athletic feats ceased to be a part of my daily life, and soon enough, I was watching more CNN than ESPN. I only recently learned he won a batting title in 1990 (Brett partisans like noting he’s the only player to have led the league in hitting during three different decades). And I deeply regret having no memory of September 30, 1992 — the day he banged out four hits in a game to reach 3,000.
Perhaps that explains why I got so sentimental about Brett’s Hall of Fame induction. Granted, I wasn’t alone. News accounts indicated that after Brett broke into tears talking about his three older brothers and his late father, there weren’t many dry eyes among his thousands of fans who had made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown from Kansas City and beyond. Many of them were, of course, outfitted in Royals jerseys with “BRETT” and his “5” on their backs. Had I been there, I would have been tempted to dress the same way.
The speech will surely become a fixture in Brett lore, though there’s another statement of his that I think better reflects what his rough-and-tumble baseball-playing days were all about: “You walk into the clubhouse. There’s a rack filled with bubble gum, candy bars, and chewing tobacco. There’s free beer in the refrigerator. And food after the game. What else could anyone want?” Amen.
MATTHEW REES
