REMEMBERING RUSTY
FAN FAVE & N.Y. ICON DEAD AT 73 /
W HETHER you connected to Rusty Staub best as a player, as a broadcaster or as a humanitarian — or if you were fortunate enough to know him firsthand — he stood out, right? The red hair. The batting stance. The erudite nature. The relentless commitment to helping others.
“What a unique personality he was,” Ron Darling said Thursday morning at Citi Field. “I’ve never met anyone like him. I think that that’s unusual. Where everyone ends up being just about like everyone else, he was not that guy.”
Staub sadly entered the “was” phase of his existence on Thursday morning, as he passed away in a West Palm Beach, Fla., hospital after a long illness. Even on Wednesday, a friend of his had expressed optimism about the former slugger’s prognosis, but that proved to be false hope. As a choked-up Keith Hernandez said Thursday, however, Rusty had been in a great deal of pain. His suffering ends now.
That he died just three days short of his 74th birthday was not lost on Darling, who noted the connection between Staub passing at 73 and 1973 being such a big year for him and the Mets. As beloved as Staub remained among Mets fans by virtue of his two stints (1972-75 and 1981-85), he arguably kept a similarly sustained level of popularity up in Montreal (1969-71 and 1979), where fans knighted him as “Le Grand Orange.”
Tie-ins everywhere you look, right? With free agency over 40 years old, Staub stands as the only player to tally 500-plus hits with four different clubs (Astros, Mets, Tigers and Expos). Only Staub, Ty Cobb, Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield homered in their teens and in their 40s. The man could play — and, to be more specific, hit.
Yet his on-field accomplishments feel secondary, even though they created the platform for him to be something far greater than your ordinary ballplayer.
“He was a Renaissance kind of man,” Darling said. “Ballplayers tend to like to fish and hunt, whatever they do. There are a few guys that do everything. And Rusty was good at everything.”
He was a restaurateur. If you’re of a certain age, you either went to Rusty’s rib place on the Upper East Side or, at the least, you had heard of it. He worked Mets games for local TV in the first decade following his retirement, and if his work didn’t match what Darling and Hernandez do now on SNY, you liked having him in the booth because of his joy and his meaning to the franchise.
And goodness, was Rusty a man of charity. His New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund did remarkable work. He operated on the front lines in the weeks and months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“His time after baseball was almost fully devoted to the citizens of New York in some way,” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said.
A native of New Orleans, Rusty looked out for New York even during his playing days. Independently, Hernandez and Darling discussed Staub’s role in getting them to live in Manhattan; Rusty convinced Hernandez to do so, while he confronted Mets general manager Frank Cashen when the Mets’ brass tried to keep Darling out of the city.
Hernandez, who just visited Staub on Saturday before the Mets broke camp, could barely contain his emotions as he said a few words about his good friend. Darling told a great story about Staub, sitting at the end of the Mets’ dugout, using his giant bat to whack a very young Darling in the shins the day after a good start and ordering him to never again throw that slow curveball to right-handers.
Darling loosened up Hernandez, though, when he mentioned Staub’s database — his “little red book” — on pitchers and their tells for certain pitches. And how, if Staub saw Darling tipping his pitches, he never would have informed him, “because he would wait for me to be traded and he’d have to face me.”
“He let me look through it,” said Hernandez, completing the 1-3 play from Darling. “It went back to Bob Friend and Joey Jay. It went back from the ’ 60s and the ’ 70s into the present. I said, ‘Let me have this book.’ He goes, ‘No.’ I said, ‘ Why?’ He said, ‘You didn’t earn it.’ ”
Hernandez recalled a game against the Padres’ Ed Whitson — research on Baseball-Reference.com indicates it was Aug. 31, 1984 — when he used Rusty’s info to get two singles off the future Yankee Whitson’s changeup, which Whitson tipped by fanning his glove.
“I got on first base and I was going, ‘Rusty! Rusty!’ ” Hernandez said. “And he about had a heart attack, because I was giving away secrets.”
The day Staub retired, Hernandez said, “He gave me the book. I still have it.”
Everyone who wants to has a Rusty memento, or a story, or a memory. He was that kind of guy. The Mets have all season now to honor him, and even that will barely cover this Renaissance man’s impact.