Post by jumbo on Aug 14, 2007 18:21:42 GMT -5
August 14, 2007
Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop, Dies at 89
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who extended his Yankee life as a popular and even beloved broadcaster, punctuating his game-calling with birthday wishes to fans and exclamations of “Holy cow!”, died today. He was 89.The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Patricia said. Rizzuto, who had been in declining health for several years, died at a residential facility in West Orange, N.J. He had lived in Hillside, N.J., since 1945.
Rizzuto played for the Yankees from 1941 to 1956. His departure was abrupt. No longer willing to carry an aging, seldom-used infielder, the team cut him on Old-Timers’ Day. Soon after, he began calling Yankee games for WPIX-TV/Channel 11 and remained in that job until 1996.
Rizzuto played an integral role on the dynastic Yankees before and after World War II. He was a masterly bunter and defensive specialist for teams that steamrolled to 10 American League pennants and nine World Series championships. He was one of 12 Yankees on teams that swept to five consecutive World Series triumphs, from 1949 to 1953.
He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.
“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”
His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But he played in five All-Star games, and in his best season, 1950, he hit a career-high .324, drove in 66 runs and won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.
Rizzuto was frequently compared to other shortstops of his era, like Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.
“The little guy in front of me, he made my job easy,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”
A major league career was not foreordained. One of five children of Rose and Fiore Rizzuto, a construction foreman and trolley motorman, Philip Francis Rizzuto grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Glendale, Queens, when he was 12.
While attending Richmond Hill High School, he tried out for the Dodgers, but the manager, Casey Stengel, told him he was too small. The New York Giants told him to get lost. But Stengel’s rejection — “Go get a shoeshine box,” the manager told him — was the most vivid.
“When he became the Yankee manager in 1949, I reminded him of that, but he pretended he didn’t remember,” Rizzuto said of Stengel. “By ’49, I didn’t need a shoebox, anyway. The clubhouse boy at the Stadium shined my Yankee spikes every day.”
The Yankees signed him in 1937 and sent him to their Class D minor league team in Bassett, Va.
Stopping for a meal in Richmond, Rizzuto was served grits for the first time.
“I didn’t know what to do with them, so I put them in my pocket,” he said.
A mistreated left leg injury during his stint in Virginia — he had stepped in a gopher hole — nearly led to amputation. Or maybe it didn’t, depending on how Rizzuto told the tale. “They had to cut part of the muscle out of my leg because it was infested with gangrene,” he said, “and actually that was a break for me because I used to be so fast when I was a kid, I’d run by the ground balls, and this slowed me just enough so that I could make the ball.”
In 1941, his appearance at spring training with the Yankees made the pitcher Lefty Gomez wonder why the team had summoned a “Lilliputian,” but Rizzuto soon established himself, replacing ed the veteran Frank Crosetti and hit .307 in his rookie season.
Rizzuto became a bulwark of the Yankees’ infield, forming superior double-play combinations with second basemen Gerry Priddy, Joe Gordon and Jerry Coleman (who in the 1960s would join Rizzuto in the broadcast booth). He also developed into an eccentric — funny, superstitious, afraid of thunder and the target of pranks. When the tradition was for fielders to leave their gloves in the field when they came in to bat, Rizzuto would often return to the field to find a mouse, a snake or a rat wedged in the glove fingers.
Two plays in 1951 were emblems of Rizzuto’s career.
In the first, Rizzuto was at bat (he was righthanded) against Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, in the middle of a pennant chase. The score was tied at 1. DiMaggio was on third base. Rizzuto took Lemon’s first pitch, a called strike, and argued the call with the umpire. That gave him time to grab his bat from both ends, the sign to DiMaggio that a squeeze play was on for the next pitch. But DiMaggio broke early, surprising Rizzuto. Lemon, seeing what was happening, threw high, to avoid a bunt, aiming behind Rizzuto. But with Joltin’ Joe bearing down on him, Rizzuto got his bat up in time to lay down a bunt.
“If I didn’t bunt, the pitch would’ve hit me right in the head,” Rizzuto said. “I bunted it with both feet off the ground, but I got it off toward first base.”
DiMaggio scored the winning run. Stengel called it “the greatest play I ever saw.”
Later that year, Game 3 of the World Series against the New York Giants provided Rizzuto with an enemy he would fulminate about for the rest of his life.
With one out in the fifth inning, the Giants’ Eddie Stanky drew a walk against the Yankees’ pitcher Vic Raschi. The next batter was Alvin Dark, and the Yankees intercepted a hit-and-run sign to him. Berra, the catcher, signaled a pitchout, and his throw to Rizzuto at second base beat Stanky by 10 feet. But as Rizzuto waited with the ball in his glove, Stanky slid and kicked the ball into center field with his right foot. He ran to third. Rizzuto was charged with an error, and the Giants scored five unearned runs.
“I was nonchalanting it,” Rizzuto admitted sheepishly. “I was looking at the TV camera.”
Rizzuto was shocked when the Yankees released him in 1956 to sign the outfielder Enos Slaughter. But he soon accepted a job in the Yankee radio and TV booth with Mel Allen and Red Barber, two towering figures in sportscasting. “You’ll never last,” Howard Cosell, then a radio sportscaster, told him. “You look like George Burns and you sound like Groucho Marx.”
Three days into his new career, Rizzuto told his wife, Cora, that he wanted to quit — but he stayed, despite occasional threats to resign, until 1996. To those who heard him exclaim “Holy cow!” for a play (or a cannoli) that excited him, or chide a player as a “huckleberry” for committing an error, Rizzuto was an endearing, idiosyncratic voice despite his lack of professional credentials.
Rizzuto met Cora Ellenborg in 1942 after substituting for DiMaggio as a speaker at a communion breakfast in Newark. He had been invited to her home afterward for coffee and cake by her father, a Newark fire chief. “I fell in love so hard I didn’t go home,” Rizzuto recalled. He rented a nearby hotel room for a month to be near her.
Besides his daughter Patricia, his wife also survives him, as do their daughters Cynthia and Penny; a son, Philip Jr., and two grandchildren.
Over four decades in the Yankee announcing booth, Rizzuto transformed himself from a conventional announcer with a distinctly New York voice into an often comic presence. And he became well known beyond New York. The comedian Billy Crystal parodied him, and Meat Loaf used Rizzuto’s broadcast voice in his 1978 hit song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
As for his trademark expression, “Holy cow,” he said he had adopted it in high school, at his baseball coach’s suggestion, to replace profanity.When the Yankees celebrated Rizzuto with a day in his honor in 1985, retiring his uniform No. 10, the team presented him with a cow, which promptly stepped on his foot and knocked him over.
Rizzuto often diverged from actual game-calling, pausing to extend birthday, anniversary and confirmation congratulations. He never used the first names of his partners at WPIX-TV — they were “Coleman,” “Murcer,” “White,” “Messer,” “Seaver,” or “Cerone,” never Jerry, Bobby, Bill, Frank, Tom or Rick. Listeners heard about his wife (he called her “my bride”), an employment appeal for his son, Scooter Jr., reports about his golf game, or exultations about a new Italian dish.
Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors. But his fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of “W.W.,” for “Wasn’t Watching.”
Rizzuto often left a game at Yankee Stadium before its conclusion to beat the traffic over the George Washington Bridge. As one game headed into extra innings, he asked Messer, “Want a cup of coffee?” Messer nodded. But Rizzuto was gone, to his home in New Jersey. As he entered the broadcast booth the next day, Rizzuto tapped Messer on the shoulder and said, “Here’s your coffee.”
After many years of failing to be elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., he was voted in in 1994 by the Hall’s Veterans Committee, which reconsiders candidates rejected by sports writers. Friends like Yogi Berra, Bill White and Pee Wee Reese sat on the committee.
Rizzuto resigned from Channel 11 abruptly in August 1995, distraught that he had remained to broadcast a game at Fenway Park rather than join former teammates at Mickey Mantle’s funeral in Dallas. He watched the services on television from the booth. “I took it hard and knew I made a big mistake,” he said later. “I got more upset as the game went on and left in the fifth. They tried to drag me back, but I wouldn’t.”
But he returned in 1996 for a final season, persuaded by fans, Mantle’s sons and George M. Steinbrenner III, the principal owner of the Yankees. The pull of his cherished team was too strong. He was, after all, someone who practically saw the world filtered through Yankee pinstripes.
When the news came in 1978 that Pope Paul VI had died, Rizzuto said on the air, “Well, that kind of puts the damper on even a Yankee win.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop, Dies at 89
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who extended his Yankee life as a popular and even beloved broadcaster, punctuating his game-calling with birthday wishes to fans and exclamations of “Holy cow!”, died today. He was 89.The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Patricia said. Rizzuto, who had been in declining health for several years, died at a residential facility in West Orange, N.J. He had lived in Hillside, N.J., since 1945.
Rizzuto played for the Yankees from 1941 to 1956. His departure was abrupt. No longer willing to carry an aging, seldom-used infielder, the team cut him on Old-Timers’ Day. Soon after, he began calling Yankee games for WPIX-TV/Channel 11 and remained in that job until 1996.
Rizzuto played an integral role on the dynastic Yankees before and after World War II. He was a masterly bunter and defensive specialist for teams that steamrolled to 10 American League pennants and nine World Series championships. He was one of 12 Yankees on teams that swept to five consecutive World Series triumphs, from 1949 to 1953.
He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.
“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”
His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But he played in five All-Star games, and in his best season, 1950, he hit a career-high .324, drove in 66 runs and won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.
Rizzuto was frequently compared to other shortstops of his era, like Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.
“The little guy in front of me, he made my job easy,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”
A major league career was not foreordained. One of five children of Rose and Fiore Rizzuto, a construction foreman and trolley motorman, Philip Francis Rizzuto grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Glendale, Queens, when he was 12.
While attending Richmond Hill High School, he tried out for the Dodgers, but the manager, Casey Stengel, told him he was too small. The New York Giants told him to get lost. But Stengel’s rejection — “Go get a shoeshine box,” the manager told him — was the most vivid.
“When he became the Yankee manager in 1949, I reminded him of that, but he pretended he didn’t remember,” Rizzuto said of Stengel. “By ’49, I didn’t need a shoebox, anyway. The clubhouse boy at the Stadium shined my Yankee spikes every day.”
The Yankees signed him in 1937 and sent him to their Class D minor league team in Bassett, Va.
Stopping for a meal in Richmond, Rizzuto was served grits for the first time.
“I didn’t know what to do with them, so I put them in my pocket,” he said.
A mistreated left leg injury during his stint in Virginia — he had stepped in a gopher hole — nearly led to amputation. Or maybe it didn’t, depending on how Rizzuto told the tale. “They had to cut part of the muscle out of my leg because it was infested with gangrene,” he said, “and actually that was a break for me because I used to be so fast when I was a kid, I’d run by the ground balls, and this slowed me just enough so that I could make the ball.”
In 1941, his appearance at spring training with the Yankees made the pitcher Lefty Gomez wonder why the team had summoned a “Lilliputian,” but Rizzuto soon established himself, replacing ed the veteran Frank Crosetti and hit .307 in his rookie season.
Rizzuto became a bulwark of the Yankees’ infield, forming superior double-play combinations with second basemen Gerry Priddy, Joe Gordon and Jerry Coleman (who in the 1960s would join Rizzuto in the broadcast booth). He also developed into an eccentric — funny, superstitious, afraid of thunder and the target of pranks. When the tradition was for fielders to leave their gloves in the field when they came in to bat, Rizzuto would often return to the field to find a mouse, a snake or a rat wedged in the glove fingers.
Two plays in 1951 were emblems of Rizzuto’s career.
In the first, Rizzuto was at bat (he was righthanded) against Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, in the middle of a pennant chase. The score was tied at 1. DiMaggio was on third base. Rizzuto took Lemon’s first pitch, a called strike, and argued the call with the umpire. That gave him time to grab his bat from both ends, the sign to DiMaggio that a squeeze play was on for the next pitch. But DiMaggio broke early, surprising Rizzuto. Lemon, seeing what was happening, threw high, to avoid a bunt, aiming behind Rizzuto. But with Joltin’ Joe bearing down on him, Rizzuto got his bat up in time to lay down a bunt.
“If I didn’t bunt, the pitch would’ve hit me right in the head,” Rizzuto said. “I bunted it with both feet off the ground, but I got it off toward first base.”
DiMaggio scored the winning run. Stengel called it “the greatest play I ever saw.”
Later that year, Game 3 of the World Series against the New York Giants provided Rizzuto with an enemy he would fulminate about for the rest of his life.
With one out in the fifth inning, the Giants’ Eddie Stanky drew a walk against the Yankees’ pitcher Vic Raschi. The next batter was Alvin Dark, and the Yankees intercepted a hit-and-run sign to him. Berra, the catcher, signaled a pitchout, and his throw to Rizzuto at second base beat Stanky by 10 feet. But as Rizzuto waited with the ball in his glove, Stanky slid and kicked the ball into center field with his right foot. He ran to third. Rizzuto was charged with an error, and the Giants scored five unearned runs.
“I was nonchalanting it,” Rizzuto admitted sheepishly. “I was looking at the TV camera.”
Rizzuto was shocked when the Yankees released him in 1956 to sign the outfielder Enos Slaughter. But he soon accepted a job in the Yankee radio and TV booth with Mel Allen and Red Barber, two towering figures in sportscasting. “You’ll never last,” Howard Cosell, then a radio sportscaster, told him. “You look like George Burns and you sound like Groucho Marx.”
Three days into his new career, Rizzuto told his wife, Cora, that he wanted to quit — but he stayed, despite occasional threats to resign, until 1996. To those who heard him exclaim “Holy cow!” for a play (or a cannoli) that excited him, or chide a player as a “huckleberry” for committing an error, Rizzuto was an endearing, idiosyncratic voice despite his lack of professional credentials.
Rizzuto met Cora Ellenborg in 1942 after substituting for DiMaggio as a speaker at a communion breakfast in Newark. He had been invited to her home afterward for coffee and cake by her father, a Newark fire chief. “I fell in love so hard I didn’t go home,” Rizzuto recalled. He rented a nearby hotel room for a month to be near her.
Besides his daughter Patricia, his wife also survives him, as do their daughters Cynthia and Penny; a son, Philip Jr., and two grandchildren.
Over four decades in the Yankee announcing booth, Rizzuto transformed himself from a conventional announcer with a distinctly New York voice into an often comic presence. And he became well known beyond New York. The comedian Billy Crystal parodied him, and Meat Loaf used Rizzuto’s broadcast voice in his 1978 hit song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
As for his trademark expression, “Holy cow,” he said he had adopted it in high school, at his baseball coach’s suggestion, to replace profanity.When the Yankees celebrated Rizzuto with a day in his honor in 1985, retiring his uniform No. 10, the team presented him with a cow, which promptly stepped on his foot and knocked him over.
Rizzuto often diverged from actual game-calling, pausing to extend birthday, anniversary and confirmation congratulations. He never used the first names of his partners at WPIX-TV — they were “Coleman,” “Murcer,” “White,” “Messer,” “Seaver,” or “Cerone,” never Jerry, Bobby, Bill, Frank, Tom or Rick. Listeners heard about his wife (he called her “my bride”), an employment appeal for his son, Scooter Jr., reports about his golf game, or exultations about a new Italian dish.
Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors. But his fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of “W.W.,” for “Wasn’t Watching.”
Rizzuto often left a game at Yankee Stadium before its conclusion to beat the traffic over the George Washington Bridge. As one game headed into extra innings, he asked Messer, “Want a cup of coffee?” Messer nodded. But Rizzuto was gone, to his home in New Jersey. As he entered the broadcast booth the next day, Rizzuto tapped Messer on the shoulder and said, “Here’s your coffee.”
After many years of failing to be elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., he was voted in in 1994 by the Hall’s Veterans Committee, which reconsiders candidates rejected by sports writers. Friends like Yogi Berra, Bill White and Pee Wee Reese sat on the committee.
Rizzuto resigned from Channel 11 abruptly in August 1995, distraught that he had remained to broadcast a game at Fenway Park rather than join former teammates at Mickey Mantle’s funeral in Dallas. He watched the services on television from the booth. “I took it hard and knew I made a big mistake,” he said later. “I got more upset as the game went on and left in the fifth. They tried to drag me back, but I wouldn’t.”
But he returned in 1996 for a final season, persuaded by fans, Mantle’s sons and George M. Steinbrenner III, the principal owner of the Yankees. The pull of his cherished team was too strong. He was, after all, someone who practically saw the world filtered through Yankee pinstripes.
When the news came in 1978 that Pope Paul VI had died, Rizzuto said on the air, “Well, that kind of puts the damper on even a Yankee win.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
