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Paul White: For baseball lifer, game goes on

Paul White
USA TODAY Sports


The only retirement I ever cared about was Charlie Hough’s.

“I’ve considered myself lucky to get paid to be around a game that has no clock and no ties,” says Paul White, left, interviewing shortstop Jimmy Rollins in 2007.

That was 20 years ago and was meaningful to me because, for the first time in my life, I was older than every major league player.

And I got to write about what a strange rite of passage that was.

Now, I’ve been prodded to publicly reflect on another — my own retirement after all 33 years of USA TODAY’s existence, including a midseason detour to try something we first called Baseball Weekly.

The past 26 years have been nothing but baseball for me, including the day in 1990 when we debuted something we called the expanded box score. It’s pretty much the one you see every day now, but it was a drastic departure from tradition.

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That had been my winter’s focus, working with STATS, Inc. to more than double the information about a game you could get from the box score.

And there was Bryant Gumbel on Today the morning after opening day, waving the newspaper and asking for his old box scores back.

Baseball was changing as it always does. A year later, there was Baseball Weekly, another winter’s focus because the guys who ran our company were appalled that The Sporting News no longer would be printing box scores and said, “We can put together our own publication … can’t you?”

And plenty more has happened since in baseball — indelible memories as well as smudges we won’t be able to forget — which is the point.

The game moves on.

Hough was a blip, albeit a personal one.

To witness Joe Carter’s homer, Derek Jeter’s flip and Steve Bartman’s mistake is priceless, but no more so than moments in the stands as a fan — knowing I still have foul balls I snagged from Paul Schaal and Brian Downing (didn’t spill a drop making that grab in the upper deck at Tiger Stadium). Or that I happened to see a Ted Williams home run, Jim Palmer’s last pitch and a two-strike drag bunt by Wes Covington.

What’s that? Oh, Covington’s hit was the only one allowed by the Chicago Cubs’ Dick Ellsworth in a 1963 game at Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium, starting at an early age what has become a personal tradition/legacy/family joke of never having seen a no-hitter live.

***

Measuring memories

There was the day I stood on the field during batting practice in Arlington, Texas, and gaped at Mark McGwire in a sleeveless shirt, naively trying to figure out why his biceps didn’t flex during natural movements like other players’ did — then turning around to see an opposing coach looking at the same thing and shaking his head.

That, too, shall pass.

They’ve changed players and owners and managers and commissioners (Bud Selig really left, right?) several times over while I’ve watched.

They measure everything in words and inches in this business I’ve been in since my dad — a union printer in the days when they made newspapers with things like hot lead, linotype machines and rolling tables called turtles (Google it, kids) — got me a job as a high schooler taking scores over the phone for the newspaper where he worked.

I have my own measures of memories. I couldn’t begin to guess how many stories I’ve written, words I’ve transcribed via pen or tape recorder, players I’ve interviewed or clubhouse towels, socks and jocks I’ve dodged.

I do know I’ve seen major league games in 57 stadiums — as many as three in some cities and even four for one franchise: the Montreal/Washington progression of Parc Jarry to Stade Olympique to RFK Stadium to Nationals Park. The minor league count is 117, I’m pretty certain.

And that doesn’t count two trips to Japan, one in midsummer that included regular-season games as well as the historic Koshien high school tournament at the home of the Hanshin Tigers, the other a spring training visit that included a tiny ballpark in Kunigami Baseball Field in a town of 5,600 on the island of Okinawa.

Paul White visits a monument built in Japan.

“You have to go down there tomorrow and see us play our exhibition game,” said Trey Hillman, who was managing the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters at the time. “I promise it will be worth your while.”

The scene was remarkable, the stadium tucked in a park so close to the ocean you could see the waves crashing against the rugged piles of rocks.

That wasn’t what Hillman was touting, though.

Amid the pounding of the surf was suddenly a “pop-pop-pop” different from the thousands of such sounds I’d heard. When certain bats hit a ball or certain baseballs pop into a catcher’s mitt, you just have to go look.

It was my first glimpse of a teenage Yu Darvish, most notable because it was just one more surprise baseball had in store for me.

Everybody in baseball has a “pop-pop-pop” story about the guy they discovered, the game they saw or the moment locked or maybe even lost in time.

I’m sure some of the hundreds of tales I’ve heard from baseball lifers are embellished just a bit, an entertaining part of the precious hours I’ve gotten to spend listening to scouts and coaches and the folks around ballparks every day whom I wouldn’t even know existed had I not spent countless hours in tunnels and corridors under the stands.

Now, though, everything is documented and a side effect is the demise of some colorful folklore.

I can claim that, as a kid, I saw a veteran Roberto Clemente and a young Rusty Staub spend an afternoon at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field trying to outdo each other with ridiculous laser throws from the outfield. The details are muddy, I’ll admit, but try proving me wrong when I tell the full-on, dramatic version.

Now, if I want to argue with many of my peers that the twists and turns of the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks-New York Yankees World Series — from Byung-Hyun Kim meltdowns to Arizona’s broken-bats Game 7 rally against Mariano Rivera — made it more compelling than the ’91 Minnesota Twins-Atlanta Braves classic they love to tout, we just go to the video.

I’ve seen the video of Carter’s 1993 Series-winning homer dozens of times — if I take it frame by frame I can find myself watching the ball land about 15 feet from my spot in the outfield auxiliary press box.

Now, we even can watch Game 7 of the 1960 World Series — the Bill Mazeroski homer game — thanks to video that emerged from the late Bing Crosby’s wine cellar. My son was 10 when MLB Network showed it for the first time in 2011, and I made him watch the game some have called the greatest ever played, the one that had more to do than any other with baseball’s place in my life.

I was 10 when Maz homered. I was hurrying home from school with a transistor radio (Google, kids) in my ear when the ball cleared the left-field scoreboard at Forbes Field.

A postcard painting of that moment is one of only three things that have been on the wall next to my desk for years.

As my son watched the Pittsburgh Pirates and Yankees, he asked, “When you went to games back then, was everything black and white?”

Amazing what things in life we take for granted.

And amazing what perspective our kids can bring to a baseball game.

***

‘Oh, I have a list’

My daughter was the one who didn’t appreciate my excitement one afternoon in Pittsburgh when Vince Coleman of the St. Louis Cardinals reached first base, in position to break the major league record for consecutive successful stolen-base attempts.

“Watch this,” I said to a 7-year-old pretty much oblivious to the history about to occur, so much so that I needed to explain what a stolen base was.

“Oh, so he doesn’t actual steal the base,” she said.

Vince came through, of course. And the whole eavesdropping section around us began laughing as Coleman took second base out of the ground and my daughter bleated, “Daaaaaad, you said …”

That’s the same daughter who asked at a minor league game if umpires could be sent to the minors like players. I explained it was possible but seldom happened.

“I didn’t think so,” she said.

I had to ask why.

“No fat umpires in the minors.”

I don’t mean to pick on umpires. They’re like every other segment of the game. The vast majority are good people and competent folks, just like players, managers, front office people and even journalists.

Friends, though, always seem more interested in who the truly heinous, miserable people are. Maybe that’s a sobering sign of our times.

Oh, I have a list, just as I suspect anyone who has covered politics and corporate America could come up with. Power, money and the lust for both breed those folks.

I vowed long ago not to let them eclipse why I’ve considered myself fortunate to spend more than half my adult life around the game.

I prefer focusing on the days you looked forward to because of who you expected to see, to know you would get some time listening to, learning from and sharing thoughts with people you know are as thrilled as you are to be at the ballpark.

It was a good day when you get time on the bench with or in the office of managers such as Dusty Baker, Bobby Cox or the late Johnny Oates. The current game has plenty, from Joe Maddon and Bud Black to Fredi Gonzalez and John Gibbons and Buck Showalter.

Those good times are more fun to recall than are-you-kidding moments like former commissioner Selig calling during dinner one night, not pleased I had the audacity to write that supposed plans for contraction in MLB were disingenuous.

Eventually, realizing my opinion wasn’t going to change, Selig just said, “Well, you know, I can do anything I want.”

Hey, it comes with the job, and it certainly was an instructive moment.

I’ve considered myself lucky to get paid to be around a game that has no clock and no ties (trust me, I put as much value on avoiding ties in the wardrobe as on the scoreboard) because first and foremost I like baseball.

And that’s what I’d always remind myself while groggily boarding my sixth post-night game, predawn flight of the postseason. Somebody’s paying me to go to a ballgame.

So, now what?

You can find me at the ballpark, of course.

There’s still that no-hitter to see.

White was an original staffer at USA TODAY, which debuted in 1982, and a founding editor of USA TODAY Baseball Weekly, which debuted in 1991. Since then, his stories appeared regularly in this publication and across USA TODAY Sports’ print and digital platforms.

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