San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Remembering Blue’s helpful hand
It’s 1978, early in spring training in Arizona, and the rookie baseball writer needs a story to feed the beast of deadline. Outlook: bleak.
The Cubs are about to play the Giants. How about Bill Buckner? He’s emerging as a first baseman for the Cubs. He nicknamed his glove Wilson Pickett, because “he can pick it” is a popular tribute to slick fielders.
Nah, rude rebuff from Billy Buck.
Next, trying to chat up Chicago manager Herman Franks around the batting cage, all the scribe gets from genial Herm is surly grunts and tobacco splatters on his sneaks.
Rookie scribes who don’t produce stories do not become veteran scribes. The daily deadline clock is ticking.
Hey, there’s Vida Blue, who has just been traded from the Oakland Athletics to the San Francisco Giants. It’s a long shot. The writer is quickly learning that the best players are often less approachable than regular humans, and Blue
is coming off a rough season that has the vultures circling his career.
The writer and the pitcher are about the same age, but one is a nervous rookie, the other a fading superstar who surely has had his fill of interviews. The reporter approaches Blue in the visitors’ cramped clubhouse. Hey, Vida, got a minute?
“Step into my office,” Blue says, calling the writer by name and pulling up a chair from a nearby stall.
Blue is holding a gallon jug of orange juice. He gives it a hard slap to start the mixing process and the plastic jug explodes, showering Blue. He roars with laughter, actually more like hearty giggles. He towels himself off, and the two
men proceed with the interview, amiable and unhurried, and sticky.
The rookie ballscribe is learning that baseball has a distinctive culture of curmudgeonry, so you have to be on your toes. Getting cursed out by a manager is like your morning coffee. There are a few stars who reject that surly elitism, like Nolan Ryan and Dusty Baker, but the writer never again would run across anyone quite like Vida.
Whenever they crossed paths over the years, Blue would greet the writer by name and interact warmly. The writer would wonder to himself, “How did we become best buddies?”
Through a TV show connection, and mutual friends, the two talked often over the past decade, and Blue was inevitably the same old orange juice Vida. Not just friendly and good-natured, but genuinely warm and engaging. He couldn’t help himself. Vida liked people.
When he died, a wave of sorrow mixed with fond memories swept through baseball and washed over thousands of people in and out of the game. A longtime scribe flashed back to a giggling pitcher soaked with orange juice and smiled sadly.
Deep thoughts & cheap shots
• This corner salutes and endorses the campaign of Golden State Warriors head Steve Kerr to stamp out flopping, but Kerr’s suggestion that the NBA adopt a soccer-like rule to punish floppers is unnecessary. The NBA already has a rule that allows refs to slap a technical foul on a flopper. The rule includes a postgame video-review process, with floppers, even if they weren’t T’d up during the game, subject to fines and suspension. Commissioner Adam Silver could end flopping instantly with a brief memo: “Dust off the flopping rule. Enforce it.”
• Chronicle sports philosopher Bruce Jenkins hates the NBA’s proposed midseason tournament, and this corner seconds that emotion. It’s hard to think of a more naked money grab. Fans will embrace rooting for LeBron James and Stephen Curry to make more money? Hard to think of a worse idea, except for maybe making the All-Star Game best-of-seven.
• WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said that when her league expands, it will take 18-24 months for a new team(s) to hire coaches and build an organization. If Oakland’s African American Sports & Entertainment Group lands an expansion team, it will take those folks about two weeks to be ready to rock ’n’ roll. A Joe Lacob team in San Francisco also might be a quick build, but AASEG already has a strong president in Alana Beard, an arena with a wide-open schedule, and a legion of Oakland sports fans hungry to root for a team that isn’t abusing and exploiting their loyalty.
• The audio of West Virginia head basketball coach Bob Huggins throwing around the anti-gay slur on a radio interview is disgusting. But what makes the sound bite truly chilling is the reaction of the two radio-show hosts, who laugh like hyenas and shout, “He’s the best! He’s the best ever!” God or somebody help us.