{"id":237,"date":"2014-03-21T13:42:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=237"},"modified":"2016-08-29T01:11:52","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T05:11:52","slug":"scd-jimmy-piersall","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=237","title":{"rendered":"Sports Collectors Digest: Jimmy Piersall"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel<\/span><\/p>\n

Jimmy Piersall was in the news recently, with some memories stirred over a loony event from 1963 when he hit his 100th home run \u2013 and ran the bases backwards.<\/p>\n

He was playing for the Mets in their second season, and their final one in the Polo Grounds before moving to Shea Stadium in \u201964. He had told everyone that when he hit number 100, he would do just that, run backwards. And that is the way it was remembered by most. A wire service photo of the moment shows him heading for home with his back to home plate, number 34 on the rear of his Mets home uniform.<\/p>\n

What actually happened was that he ran the right way from home to third, then paused, turned, and went the final 90 feet backwards. And for some, it was a reminder that after wearing 37 for his whole career, he was now 34 because 37 resided on the uniform of his manager, Casey Stengel, who had once discharged a bird from under his cap while playing for the New York Giants.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t make characters quite like this anymore.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Piersall turns 80 on November 14, 2009. He may have been the most unforgettable baseball character of the 1950s, largely due to a best-selling book and a movie of the same name, \u201cFear Strikes Out.\u201d They dealt with his eccentric on-field behavior, later diagnosed as mental illness, which saw him institutionalized and the recipient of electric shock therapy.<\/p>\n

The first time I met Piersall he was working as a broadcaster for the Texas Rangers, and I was the Yankees PR director. He had always been intriguing to me, partly because of a couple of Yankee Stadium episodes, one in which he retreated to sit down with the monuments in center field and apparently have a conversation with them, and another in which he kicked a fan who had run onto the field in the rear end, getting as much elevation in his leg as a football placekicker.<\/p>\n

\u201cNice to meet you, Marty,\u201d he said. \u201cAre you sane?\u201d<\/p>\n

I smiled, and something like, \u201cI\u2019d like to think so!\u201d (I actually hadn\u2019t given it much thought).<\/p>\n

To which he replied, \u201cDo you have the papers to prove it?\u201d And with that he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a copy of his discharge paper from \u201cthe institution\u201d certifying that he was cured, and thus, \u201csane.\u201d I had no such proof. He had me.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t imagine I was the first one he did that to. Or the last.<\/p>\n

\u201cFear Strikes Out\u201d appeared as a book in 1955 after first appearing in short form in the Saturday Evening Post under the title, \u201cThey Called Me Crazy \u2013 and I Was!\u201d It was written by Boston sportswriter Al Hirshberg, then 46, and would spend a week on the New York Times bestseller list, the first baseball book to make it since Babe Ruth\u2019s autobiography seven years earlier.<\/p>\n

The year Ruth\u2019s book made the list \u2013 1948, was the year Piersall signed with the Red Sox at age 18. Two years later he made his major league debut, and by 1952 was a full-fledged big leaguer. As a native of Waterbury, CT (in \u201cRed Sox Nation\u201d), he was terrifically popular with Red Sox fans. But he had a quick temper, brawled frequently, (including one with Billy Martin), went overboard in arguing with umpires, drew suspensions, and was thought to be, in the chatter of the times, \u201ca little crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was sent to the minor leagues in June of \u201952, his behavior became more troubling, and he was finally \u201csent away\u201d where he received the electric shock treatments. \u201cCured,\u201d (check his papers!), he rejoined the Red Sox in \u201953 and largely on his defensive brilliance playing centerfield (replacing Dom DiMaggio), he finished ninth in MVP voting. In \u201954 he made the All-Star team.<\/p>\n

Hirshberg, a Boston native, had already written a book on the Red Sox (\u201cThe Bean and the Cod\u201d, 1947), and the Boston Braves (\u201cThe Pick and the Shovel, 1948), when he collaborated with Piersall on \u201cFear Strikes Out.\u201d The World War II veteran became an \u201cA list\u201d writer from this effort, especially when film rights were sold. He and Piersall enjoyed screen credits as writers of the original book for the Tony Perkins\/Karl Malden film, which was released in 1957 and famously showed Piersall climbing up the backstop in a mad fit. Piersall hated the movie, particularly disliking Malden\u2019s portrayal of a demanding father. And he wasn\u2019t thrilled when he later heard rumors of Perkins\u2019 sexual orientation. The film doesn\u2019t make too many \u201cbest baseball movie\u201d lists.<\/p>\n

Piersall went on to play for Cleveland, Washington, the Mets and the Angels (the later three, all expansion teams), and stretched his career out to 1967. Charlie Finley hired him to, sadly, run errands for him during the A\u2019s great seasons in the early \u201870s, showing him off to his guests, as Piersall would serve drinks and snacks to the Oakland owner. It was embarrassing to more seasoned baseball people.<\/p>\n

After his Rangers broadcasting job he teamed with Harry Caray for five years on White Sox broadcasts, finally getting sacked for criticizing management too often. That led to his second book, called \u201cThe Truth Hurts,\u201d (with Dick Whittingham), published in 1985.<\/p>\n

By \u201985, Al Hirshberg was long gone. He died in 1973 in Sarasota following a heart attack. His body of baseball work after \u201cFear\u201d was impressive \u2013 biographies of Eddie Mathews, Jackie Jensen, Red Schoendienst, Joe Cronin, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Frank Howard, and collaborations with broadcasters Russ Hodges, Curt Gowdy and Lindsey Nelson, and players Al Kaline, Carl Yastrzemski, and Hawk Harrelson. His book with Yaz followed Carl\u2019s triple crown season of 1967 and his book with Harrelson was published a week after his trade from Cleveland to Boston, good timing for both.<\/p>\n

He branched away from sports to do a pair of books on \u201cProject Concern,\u201d about medical outreach to third world nations, both in collaboration with a Dr. James Turpin, as well as a few other \u201cnon-sports\u201d titles. In some years, he had as many as four books published.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe liked people, he genuinely did,\u201d says Ray Robinson, who was frequently his magazine editor. \u201cHe\u2019d call everyone \u2018pally.\u2019 No one ever had a bad word for Al, and when he died, his agent threw a party in his memory in New York with a terrific turnout of the sports literary world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe called him \u2018The Old Master,\u2019 and never let a World Series pass without giving him an assignment\u201d, says Al Silverman, editor of Sports Magazine in the \u201860s. \u201cHe told me once he did more than 400 magazine articles in his career.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel Jimmy Piersall was in the news recently, with some memories stirred over a loony event from 1963 when he hit his 100th home run \u2013 and ran the bases backwards. He was playing for the Mets in… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2277,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-template-full.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-237","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4s5bl-3P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2884,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/237\/revisions\/2884"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}