Editor’s Note: Joe Garagiola died Wednesday at the age of 90. A .257 career hitter, Garagiola was best known as Yogi Berra’s boyhood buddy from the Hill in St. Louis. I knew him best as a catcher on the awful Pittsburgh Pirates teams in the early 1950s. Joe, however, turned stories of those futile teams into a second career as a baseball comic and a third career as a baseball and news broadcaster.
Garagiola, though, was more than all of those. He was an exceptional human being, one of the finest I ever met, who worked for worthy causes no one else would touch. One of those causes was his effort to eliminate chewing tobacco from baseball. Every spring for years he visited training camps to show players the physical devastation caused by smokeless tobacco. He might have been too ill in his final days to learn that New York City banned smokeless tobacco from the city’s ball parks, including Yankee Stadium and Citi Field.
In this reminiscence, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, recalls another of Garagiola’s off-field efforts.
Murray Chass
The death of my friend Joe Garagiola floods my memory bank, and out of the many fond recollections I have of Joe there is one he agreed was special. When I became the baseball commissioner, I inherited a program that had been instituted by Peter Ueberroth when he was commissioner to provide financial assistance to needy old ballplayers and their spouses. The effort was named the “Baseball Assistance Team” and when I arrived in the commissioner’s office, the leadership of BAT was the duo of Joe and Ralph Branca, the former Dodger pitcher. Their efforts were notably successful and I quickly signed on to be a helpful as I could be.
The driving force behind the BAT program was the sad reality that the needs of many old time ballplayers were acute. While younger former ballplayers often were reasonably well off because of the MLB pension benefits, there were many others whose careers predated eligibility for the MLB pensions. In addition, there were many former Negro League veterans with sadly unfortunate stories of financial distress. Sometimes it was the widows of the old players who required assistance. As I became involved with BAT, I grew to admire the good works being done under the aegis of that program, and I made it a point to attend the annual BAT fundraising dinner.
The complete operating expenses of BAT were paid by the Commissioner’s Office and as a result the full time BAT staff executive, Frank Slocum, the son of Bill Slocum the New York baseball columnist, had an office near mine in New York. He had been on the staff of Ford Frick when Frick served as baseball commissioner and he was enormously helpful to me as a neophyte in baseball. In very short order I became a regular luncheon colleague joining Joe, Ralph and Frank so we could discuss BAT issues they believed required attention. Those luncheons contributed to my store of delightful baseball stories while drawing me into what became very close friendships with those superb baseball lifers.
At lunch one day, Joe pointed out what he believed was a need to celebrate the contribution of the Negro League players to the current success of major league baseball and to the opportunities of younger black players who were enjoying the benefits denied to these older men. The rest of us agreed some formal recognition of that contribution was long overdue, and we encouraged Joe to come up with some specific ideas. Joe soon proposed that we hold a three-day event at the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown at which Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame would celebrate the achievements of some 75 living alumni of the Negro leagues. That event took place in 1991 and was one of the many special achievements of Joe’s long and remarkable life.
Joe proposed to raise half the costs of the event and I agreed to raise the other half. The old ball players were invited as guests of baseball and it was our idea to have a dinner as the central event of the weekend when we of baseball could acknowledge the clear reality that these men had kept baseball alive during the long dark night when men of color were denied their opportunity to play in the white man’s major leagues. I thought it would give me a chance to express again a strong apology for the wrongs these fine men had been forced to endure.
As I met with Joe to plan the details of this event, we soon confronted the problem that arose due to the rural location of Cooperstown and the long distances to that small village from the nearest major airports. How would we transport the players and their families? I suggested we rent busses, and at that Joe demonstrated his reservoir of sensitivity to the special experiences shared by these old black players.
“Look Commissioner,” he explained slowly, “these fellows rode busses all their lives. They do not need to ride busses this weekend. I think we should get them some limos to meet them and they should be made to feel very special.”
Bingo. I knew immediately he was correct. He suggested I locate the money for half the limo costs and he would do the same. And so we met every one of these men with a limo and they and their wives or daughters or other guests rode to our event in style. And to this day, when I meet someone who was welcomed by the limos that Joe suggested, they warmly point to me – “You the man that sent that big limo for me.”
Over the many years since that event I have shared some good times with Joe and we agreed his rejection of busses in favor of limos for our party in Cooperstown was a vital part of what made that event so special. Few of the old time ballplayers are alive today but there was one aspect of the event that has also remained with me. At the dinner on that Saturday when we handed out to each former player a special medal to commemorate the occasion, I took the opportunity to speak to them of their significant place in baseball history. I made special mention of the pain they endured especially after some of them had served in the Armed Forces in World War Two and been part of the generation that preserved our nation as well as our modest little game.
Then in what I believed was a repetition I expressed to each of them my personal apology for the national and baseball policies that precluded them for playing in the major leagues and I also expressed the apologies of the entire Major League Baseball community. I was sure that apology was not an original.
At our event the New York Times was represented by Claire Smith, and she wrote about my apologies in an article that ran prominently the next morning on the front page of that paper. It turned out my simple speech was the first time such an apology had ever been made by a Commissioner of Baseball. I suspect Joe knew the apology was long overdue.
The death of Joe Garagiola takes from us a man of baseball who was also a deeply religious person devoted to the warm love of his neighbors. His special neighbors included the kids who attend the school Joe helped to support at a Pima Indian reservation in Arizona where a tiny group of Catholic nuns learned what a saint Joe really was. He loved those nuns fully as much as they loved him. He was one of the finest men I ever knew. My hope is he will keep open a seat near him at the great eternal ballpark so I can enjoy the games, hear him tell stories and laugh. What could be more heavenly?