(PHOTO: Robert Rodriguez/AP Photo)
On July 24, 1983, with two outs and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium in New York, Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run off future Hall of Famer Goose Gossage to give his team a 5-4 lead over the Yankees. Or so it looked. After examining the bat, home-plate umpire Tim McLelland ruled that Brett used excessive pine tar and called him out, overturning the home run and ending the game.
Or so it looked. The Royals appealed the play, and American League President Larry MacPhail ruled that the home run should count. The game was restarted nearly a month later, on Aug. 18, with the Royals leading 5-4. Closer Dan Quisenberry retired the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth to save the game for Kansas City.
With the 30th anniversary of the game approaching and Brett again visiting New York — this time as the Royals’ interim hitting coach — the Hall of Famer discussed the infamous incident with reporters before the Royals played the Yankees on Tuesday. In the candid, occasionally explicit 20-minute news conference, Brett revealed a host of facts most fans likely did not know about the Pine Tar Game.
Brett watched the final four outs from Newark, N.J.:
“I got kicked out of the game for some reason,” Brett said, laughing. “I don’t know why I was kicked out, but I was kicked out. And we flew in on an off day. Larry Ameche, Don Ameche’s son, was our chief TWA flight rep at the time. So he knew of a good little restaurant down in New Jersey near the airport, and we sat at the bar and had some Italian food and watched four outs being made on TV. It was some little place in Newark, right by the airport.”
George Brett before the Yankees-Royals game on Tuesday. (PHOTO: Kathy Willens/AP Photo)
It was historic for at least one other reason:
Yankees manager Billy Martin, angry that the game was replayed, waged a silent protest by finishing the contest with pitcher Ron Guidry in center field and first baseman Don Mattingly at second base. The starting second baseman in the game, Bert Campaneris, was injured, and the center fielder at the time of the game’s suspension, Jerry Mumphrey, had been traded to the Astros. Neither Guidry nor Mattingly was a factor defensively in the one-third inning they played out of position, but Mattingly’s short stint at the keystone marks the last-time a left-handed-throwing player has played the middle infield.
Before he was the “pine tar guy,” Brett was something way worse:
In the 1980 World Series, Brett left a game because of hemorrhoid pain.
“After the World Series in 1980, every city I went to, I was ‘The Hemorrhoids Guy,’ ” he said. “And you get these people sitting near the on-deck circle, and they have their pops. The first two or three at-bats, they don’t say anything. And then they get a few pops in them and they start making hemorrhoids jokes.
“Well, I heard every hemorrhoid joke in the world –- my best response is, ‘My troubles are all behind me.’ … From October of 1980 to July 24, 1983, that’s what I heard. And from that July 24 to 2013, now I’m the pine tar guy. So it’s really the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Thank you, Billy Martin. I went from having an embarrassing thing that people remembered me for to something positive.
(PHOTO: AP Photo)
“Pretty much every time I play golf, they always want to check my clubs for pine tar. If I’m playing with strangers or in a pro-am or some type of celebrity tournament, the gallery at every hole brings it up. It’s kind of funny the first couple of holes, but after a while it gets old. And of course, that’s what I’m known for. It could be worse.”
Brett calls the bat in question “the best bat I ever had:”
“The guy who made the bat was named Tiny, and Tiny would always put little red stars on the bat where the knots are, where the hard parts are,” he said. “And that bat, I think, was a seven-grainer. It was a really good piece of lumber. You look at a lot of these grains now, a good bat might be 10, 11, 12, a normal bat would be 13, 14, 15 grains going through it. This bat had seven grains, which meant it was really really hard.”
In addition to Brett and Gossage, a third Hall of Famer factored in the incident:
“Gaylord (Perry) was kind of a memorabilia guy,” Brett said. “So he thought it would really cool to steal the bat from the umpires, so he wrestled it away from them. And I don’t know who he threw it to … but you could see at the end of the video that all of a sudden the security guys on the field are running through the dugout. … The bat boy was running the bat up to the dugout tunnel and the security guys are chasing him on their walkie-talkies saying, ‘OK, the bat is now in the dugout. It’s running up the tunnel, somebody lock the front door of the locker room. Don’t let him in the locker room!’ And sure enough they confiscated the bat right there.”
