To this day George Brett has no idea what he would have done had he been able to get at Tim McClelland.
“I had no clue,” Brett said of that day 25 years ago Thursday (July 24) when McClelland, the home plate umpire in a Yankee Stadium game between the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals, nullified a stunning ninth-inning Brett home run against Goose Gossage that gave the Royals a 5-4 lead.
“The first time I saw it on tape I said you have to be kidding me,” Brett said. “I was baffled. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just reacted. That couldn’t have happened. I couldn’t believe it; I really couldn’t.”
The scene has been played and replayed and will be played many more times in the next few days because of the anniversary of the bizarre pine tar game. One of the most infamous games in history, it gained instant celebrity when McClelland called Brett out for having pine tar too far up on his bat.
Enraged, Brett bolted from the third base dugout and ran at McClelland, looking as if he wanted to kill him. Brett, the Royals 30-year-old third baseman, had watched quizzically from the dugout as McClelland laid the bat across home plate to measure how far up the bat the pine tar reached.
“When McClelland put the bat on the ground,” Brett recalled today, “I said why’s he doing that? Frank White said ‘I think it’s the pine tar.’ I said ‘if they call me out, I’ll kill one of those guys.’”
Then McClelland picked up the bat, pointed at Brett and gave the out sign.
“I was mad enough to do something stupid,” Brett said, “but I wasn’t going to hit him. It wouldn’t be as big if not for my reaction.”
McClelland, a rookie umpire that season, said when Brett raced toward him “I really wasn’t thinking anything. I knew he wasn’t going to hit me. At least I hoped he wouldn’t.”
The umpire said he was amazed that the incident has lived in peoples’ minds for so long. But, he added, “It’s hard to believe that it’s 25 years. It seems like it was just yesterday.”
Despite Brett’s anger, he has not held a grudge against McClelland.
“McClelland and I are great friends,” Brett said. “We were in Detroit the next week, and he was at the plate. He started laughing and said, ‘You want to check your bat for pine tar?’ I said, ‘Timmy, let’s just let it go.’”
Brett also recalled a subsequent conversation, saying the umpire said to him, “What were you going to do to me? I’m 6-foot-6, 250 pounds, and I was wearing a mask, a chest protector and shin guards. What were you going to do?”
As angry as he appeared to be in charging McClelland, Brett said the scene looked worse when another umpire put his arms around Brett’s neck and tried to pull him back.
“Joe Brinkman tried to get me away, and I threw him off,” he said.
With or without the approach of the 25th anniversary, the pine tar game is never far from Brett. “That seems to be the topic of conversation,” he said.
Brett was in New York for the All-Star game as one if the Hall of Famers who were honored. One of the highlights of the visit was a parade along the Avenue of the Americas on the day of the game.
“At the parade,” the former third baseman related, “ if I heard it once I heard it 5,000 times: ‘Do you have any pine tar? Where’s your pine tar?’ Everybody’s remembered for something – Ralph Branca, Bill Mazeroski, Bill Buckner, all great players. And I’m remembered for something – pine tar.”
Brett’s pine-tar home run was not his first big home run against Gossage, the celebrated reliever, who will join Brett in the Hall of Fame Sunday. In Game 3 of the 1980 American League Championship Series Brett crushed a two-out, three-run homer against Gossage in the seventh inning that catapulted the Royals to a 4-2 victory and a three-game sweep of the Yankees.
“I’ve seen Goose on numerous occasions,” Brett said. “I played with Goose in All-Star games and never said a word to him. Back in that era that’s the way it was. You didn’t talk to opposing pitchers. I finally met Goose in spring training when he was with the Yankees and I was with the Royals.
“Goose was getting ready to open a restaurant in Colorado Springs, and he asked the clubhouse guy to ask me for a bat for the restaurant. I told Chuck I’d like to meet him so I went out before the game and talked to him during batting practice. I gave him the bat, and he said ‘This is great. It’s going to be unbelievable.’”
The Brett bat was especially unbelievable because Brett lathered it with pine tar. “It took me the whole game,” Brett said. “I put more pine tar on the bat than I ever did. I hit it against the wall and against my shoes to make it look like it was used in a game.”
When Gossage was elected to the Hall of Fame last January, Brett called to congratulate him. In true Gossage fashion, Goose responded, “I should have hit you in the bleeping neck.”
As for the pine tar game, Lee MacPhail, the American League president, overruled McClelland’s decision, reinstated the home run and ordered the teams to complete the game. George Steinbrenner’s reaction to that ruling was to say that MacPhail should go house hunting in Kansas City, a suggestion that was seen as a thinly veiled threat for Yankees fans to do something to MacPhail. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, in turn, fined Steinbrenner $250,000 for his remarks..
The teams finished the game a few weeks later. For the last out in the Kansas City ninth, Billy Martin, the Yankees manager, showing his disdain for MacPhail’s ruling, put Don Mattingly at second base and Ron Guidry in center field. Neither out-of-position player made a play because George Frazier struck out Hal McRae.
Dan Quisenberry set down the Yankees in order in their half of the inning, and the Royals won, 5-4.
The final act of the incident was produced by Ken Nigro, the Yankees’ public relations director, who had T-shirts made up for the writers who covered the game, saying “I covered the pine tar game.” He also gave each writer – what else? — a can of pine tar.