Ralph Kiner lived a good, long
life. He came, seemingly out of nowhere, to become one of the great
sluggers of his era. He had to be shut
down after ten years in baseball due to a bad back. Today, they would probably build
him his own mobile whirlpool to drive back and forth to the stadium. There
would be special trainers and a masseuse and even a towel boy (same uniform as
a bat boy) whose one job would be to run over with a towel as Kiner got out of
his “whirlpool on wheels” to make sure that he was relatively dry by the time
he stepped to the plate. Heck, any team today would very likely buy a separate
private plane for someone who could consistently hit home runs with a ratio of
7.1 home runs per 100 at bats. In that ten-year span, Kiner averaged over 100
RBIs per season, while leading he National league in slugging parentage in
three of his ten years in baseball.
When a lot of hitters’ careers are over,
that’s it. (Had their also been a DH back then, perhaps Kiner would have hung
on for a few more years and might have hit over 500, or even 600 home runs.)
They had their time in baseball. It was fun, they met some pretty girls, had
some great poker games on the road, then retired to some sleepy town to open a
bar and tell the same stories over and over again. Then there was Ralph Kiner.
Instead of opting for the easy life of local celebrity, Ralph Kiner decided
that he would rather tell old war stories on the new medium of television, and
so instead of opening “Kiner’s Korner,” the finest suds place in Alhambra,
California (where he was raised), Kiner joined the New York Mets.
The Mets were a colorful team cast of
cast-offs, has-beens and players well past their expiration date, and if you really want to experience the ‘62
Mets in retrospect, go and read Jimmy Breslin’s Can’t Anyone Here Play this Game?,
which
nicely evokes the fans overall sense of bemusement at the new team’s futility. Maybe
it was because of manager Casey Stengel’s indefatigable chuckle in the
face of yet another game ending strikeout, or even the overall goofiness of
some of the early players sheer inability to even come close to playing actual
baseball, but deep down, I think that many Mets fans, and many baseball fans in
general, give credit where credit is due. The Mets have consistently had the best
announcers in baseball, from the original trio of Kiner, Lindsey Nelson and
Bob Murphy, up to today’s troika of goofiness, Keith and Ron
and Gary. Mets announcers have been light years ahead of most other teams. And for all of that time,
up until last season, for over fifty years, Ralph Kiner was a part of it. Even when Bell’s Palsy made
him slur his words and made his announcing sound as
tanked as (supposedly) he and fellow
announcers Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy got after every
game, Kiner never gave up and just
before he died, the one thing he had discussed with his
family, was the possibility of doing
even more games the next season.
Enough has been written about Kiner’s malapropos,
once even calling himself “Ralph Korner” during a game, and you can read the standard
obituaries for that, but I’d like to mention one thing that most people left
out of their fond remembrances of Kiner. Don’t get me wrong, those of us of a
certain age loved Kiner’s Korner almost as much as the actual ballgame.
What other team would allow the other teams stars to be interviewed after a
Mets game? While that was certainly one of his legacies, to me, it was how much
I associated him with baseball and with the Mets. That for over five decades
and to millions of people, he was the face and voice of the Mets. Nelson
left the Mets in 1978 to announce for the Giants for the next three years Murphy
moved over to be exclusively on radio in 1982 and that left Kiner as the last
of the three on television. He was paired with a who’s who of announcers
afterwards, including Tim McCarver, before he started to ease up his workload
and let the kids take over, first Keith in 2002 and then Gary and Ron 2006.
Kiner never “retired” per se. He was
just phased out gradually. I’m not sure if it is my general paranoia about the bone-headed moves of various
Mets owners and tone deaf inconsistency that makes me think that Ralph was a
little “old fashioned” for a new game where Sabermetrics demanded that every
time a new hitter approached the batter’s box, an array of statistics must be thrown
at the audience (“Brooks is batting .327 against left handed hitters during
Thursday games in April!”) as if manna to the fans, wandering starving in a
desert of meaningless statistics. My theory is that the Mets management knew
that Ralph would lovingly mangle those statistics just as he would mangle the
players’ names. They thought they would graciously slide him into retirement,
bringing him back a few times a year for old time’s sake. Maybe it was Kiner’s
frustration with his speech problem that made him cut back. Either way, it wasn’t
as jarring as it could have been. We loved Gary and Keith and Ron, but when
Ralph was there, the booth had an entirely new dimension, it sounded both
livelier, and more focused. I think, even towards the end, the three younger
announcers were always a bit in awe of Kiner. Even Keith was usually on his
best behavior when Kiner turned up to announce a game.
And now, Ralph Kiner has passed away.
There are still players alive from the 1962 team, but as far as I can tell, (there may be an elderly
groundskeeper I’m missing) this severs the last line to the 1962 team. It also severs
a link to baseball in the 1940s, to players who served in World War II and
accepted less money when the team wasn’t doing well. The passing of Ralph Kiner
will be commemorated by the Mets. There will be a Kiner’s Korner in the
stadium, as well as a patch for the players to wear this year. But Ralph is
gone and with Ralph, one of the last links to a time when baseball really was
the national game. I’m not naive enough to think that no one cared about salary
in the old days. But hearing Kiner reminisce, even well into his eighties and
nineties, the way he talked about baseball, the game itself, the hopelessly bloated
monstrosity of today’s baseball game, just seemed like so much fun. If
you are reading Zisk, you are probably a baseball junkie, hopelessly hooked
on a team (you have yours, I have the Mets) who’s owners seem hell bent on
squeezing every little bit of fun and spontaneity out of a wonderful game. When
I heard Ralph Kiner’s voice, I knew that no matter how the Mets did, I was
going to enjoy the broadcast. I obviously never heard Ralph when I was at the
stadium, cursing the Mets and wondering if I had enough spare change to somehow
get nine dollars together for a beer, or maybe a pretzel and a half in a
stadium seemingly designed by someone who had never set foot in a major league
stadium before. And then I could say to myself, if you were watching this at home,
you would be having fun not because it was cheaper, but because Ralph is
calling the game. And sitting there, in the cheap seats, at least I knew that
Ralph was there, in the booth that I couldn’t see from my cheap seats, probably
mispronouncing a player’s name, and then I realized, it’s enough to know that
Ralph was present.
Here’s a real fact about baseball fans,
the teams don’t make the sport fun, we as fans, make things fun
ourselves. The teams don’t own the team, we do. If that’s the fiction I needed
to get me through the game again, then Ralph provided that for a long time. We
will still have fun at a game, but when I look over at Kiner’s Korner, I’ll
realize that a huge part of what made the game fun for me is gone.
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