Summer comfort
Bob Elliott’s human touch when covering the Blue Jays shines through in new book
On the last day of May, four years ago, I waited by Edwin Encarnacion’s locker in the Blue Jays clubhouse until no one else was around and then I approached.
“I have some news,” I told Encarnacion rather solemnly. “Today is Bob Elliott’s last day at the Toronto Sun.”
It was all I said. I didn’t elaborate at first. And then, after several seconds of silence — which is not unusual for Encarnacion — he spoke.
“Are you sure?” he asked and paused again before saying anything else.
And then I saw it. A single tear running down slowly from one of his eyes.
“Who am I going to talk to now?” he said with complete sadness.
He told me he talked to Bob every day. Usually, he said, it wasn’t about baseball. It was about life or the news of the day or the weather or family or some tournament somewhere or whatever it is that people talk about. One quiet man and one whispering man having connected personally and professionally, because that’s what Elliott did when he covered baseball for the Sun.
Just after the Encarnacion conversation, I made my way toward Jose Bautista, whom I never got along with very well. Before I said a word, he gave me one of those, ‘What do you want?’ stares. He could be intimidating that way.
I told him I had to talk to him. It was important and that he would want to be part of the conversation.
And then he let down his guard and opened up about his relationship with Elliott, the baseball writer.
He talked a lot about trust and relationship building. He talked about the way most Blue Jays players viewed Elliott and seemed more human and more sensitive in this conversation than any I’d had with him previously.
“I don’t how he established that back and forth, that trust,” said Bautista. “As players, we felt a sense of security when we spoke with him. That we could candidly say things on and off the record at times.
“I think he’s done a terrific job always balancing that. He made sure he got his two cents in and he’d give you his opinion, without mixing it up with a message from the athlete.”
Bautista could be cold, aloof, intense, overly sensitive and when he chose to be. But when talking about Elliott, he was decidedly warm and effusive.
I thought of these conversations when this book came in the mail on Tuesday. It’s part of the If These Walls Could Talk series that’s being run throughout professional sports. And this version — stories from the Toronto Blue Jays dugout, locker-room and press box — was written by the person most qualified and most connected to do it properly. It’s written by Elliott, starting with a foreword by Pat Gillick that gets you chuckling on the book’s opening pages.
When Elliott covered baseball, he took you places no one else could go. He didn’t work scrums. He didn’t follow the crowd. He asked his own questions, worked his own angles, and in today’s world of over-managed media, never went where the pack was going.
In the book, he writes about the night the Blue Jays won their first World Series in 1992. It was Game 6 in Atlanta and Wayne Gretzky wanted to be part of the Canadian history that was about to be made. He called and Jays president Paul Beeston didn’t just arrange a ticket for Gretzky. He got him a seat in his personal box that night.
With a one-run lead heading into the bottom of the ninth inning and Tom Henke pitching, Beeston and Gretzky headed for the elevator to make their way down to the clubhouse. “They entered Cito Gaston’s office, which was vacant except for Jays starter David Cone, dressed in his underwear. They opened a beer and waited.
“And they waited and waited.”
It took 24 more batters for the Blue Jays to win in extra innings. Gretzky watched the final outs on an office television. He didn’t see it live, but he celebrated it live.
Elliott’s book begins with the first World Series win, and works its way through Joe Carter’s home run a year later in vivid detail. And typical of Elliott, he uncovered the inside pieces that has made his work so spectacular. He writes about the great years and the not-so -great years, about Carlos Delgado and Roger Clemens and maybe the longest chapter in the book, about Bautista and then about the Hall of Famers, Roberto Alomar, Roy Halladay, Tom
Cheek and Gillick. The Hall of Famer he didn’t write about: Himself.
If you’ve lived the Blue Jays life the way so many of us have over the years, you don’t want this book, you need it. You don’t have to read it in any particular order. The chapters all stand on their own.
There is no baseball season right now. There may not be one. Already, this has become my baseball fix. I feel like I’m right there, in the conversations, in the clubhouse. These walls are indeed talking.