By Marty Appel
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\tOn a recent trip to his boyhood haunts in the Queens, New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, a sprightly Tom Villante paused and said, \u201cC\u2019m here; I want to show you something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tThrough the portals of a century old apartment building named after President Grant, Villante turned right and pointed to his old mailbox, still intact almost 75 years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\t\u201cThis is where I got my letter from the Yankees clubhouse man, informing me that I\u2019d been hired as batboy for the 1944 season,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was from Pop Logan. Beautiful handwriting. Everything I\u2019ve accomplished to this day started with that letter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Logan, who went back to the days of Cap Anson, ran the clubhouses in the Polo Grounds, Hilltop Park (home of the Highlanders, forerunners of the Yankees) and Yankee Stadium. He had seen Tom\u2019s diligent approach under the pressure of a World Series, where Tom filled in for a friend in the visiting dugout of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1943. He sent him to Yankees manager Joe McCarthy to interview for the home batboy job in 1944. Now, Logan was writing to tell him he was hired, and where to report on opening day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tommy, now 90 years old, was \u201cCommie\u201d back then, a nickname for Carmelo. The nickname fell out of fashion for obvious reasons in the 1950s, but in the \u201840s, everyone called him Commie, and he hung out in the \u2018hood with his pals Shifty Willie, Harry the Hawk, Ernie the Milkman, Fuzzy Barone, Gimpy Moscowitz and Joe Zoot. And a funny kid from a few blocks north named Don Rickels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Serving as Yankee batboy during the war years, Tom did not get to work with a star-studded roster, (his teams finished third and fourth), although the Yankees would always be the Yankees, the glamour team. McCarthy was a 7-time world champion and a towering figure in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat a privilege to work under his watchful eye,\u201d recalled Tom. \u201cHe didn\u2019t miss a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there was the veteran shortstop Frankie Crosetti, pressed back into regular duty with Phil Rizzuto off in the Navy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCro was my mentor,\u201d says Tom. \u201cI\u2019d play the middle infield spots during batting practice and he was at my side, tutoring me. I was good enough that McCarthy thought of me as a future second baseman. The Yankees, in fact, arranged for me to go to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania on full scholarship, and when I\u2019d come home in the summers, I\u2019d still go and work out with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On one visit to the Yankee clubhouse during a college break, Tom noticed a group of players gathered around a rookie. They were all laughing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI asked Joe DiMaggio what was going on,\u201d recalls Tom. \u201cHe said, \u2018This rookie just came up; the guys love to hear the funny way he talks, especially about movies. A real character\u2026.name is Larry Berra, but his nickname is Yogi.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn my freshman year, I had a 5-for-5 game against Muhlenberg, and the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a headline, YANKEE BAT BOY GETS 5 HITS. I visited the Yankees at Shibe Park in Philly the next day, and Cro had that story hanging in his locker. He was like a proud father. I felt six feet tall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alas, he was only 5\u20197\u201d, smaller even that the incumbent second baseman Snuffy Stirnweiss, (5\u20198\u201d), and by the time Tom had graduated, Casey Stengel was managing and Billy Martin was scheduled to play second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He might have been the first sparkplug infielder to major in electrical engineering, which sounds appropriate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Undeterred, Tom took a job at BBDO Advertising after college, the firm loosely portrayed on TV\u2019s \u201cMad Men.\u201d The characters, including Jon Hamm\u2019s \u201cDon Draper,\u201d could well have been based on the personable and quick-witted Villante, who was soon working on the Schaefer Beer account. Schaefer was the principal sponsor of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and to oversee the account, Tom was designated as the radio-TV producer, right there in the press box with Red Barber and a young Vin Scully. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
From those days came lifelong friendships with many of the \u201cBoys of Summer,\u201d and even the formation of an investment fund with Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Erskine and Gil Hodges. They lost their money investing in a Pay-TV scheme – Skiatron – which they thought was a sure thing when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, but the friendships remained. Their money had come out of their winning checks from the 1955 World Series. It was Tom who accompanied owner Walter O\u2019Malley into the Dodgers clubhouse after Reese threw out Elston Howard for the final out of the \u201955 Fall Classic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJohnny Podres, {the winning pitcher}, told me, \u2018Pee Wee has waited his entire life for that ground ball,\u2019\u201d said Villante.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His sports coat, spoiled by having Snider pour champagne on it, was covered on Tom\u2019s BBDO expense report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tom had school smarts, baseball smarts, business smarts and street smarts. Baseball people gravitated to him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t sell Schaefer in California, but it still had the broadcast rights, so we \u2018sublet\u2019 the sponsorship and I moved west and was still producing the games. It was the start of a new broadcasting phenomenon – fans at the game, holding transistor radios to their ears, to hear Vin Scully describe what they were seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1959 he returned to New York in an even more senior capacity with BBDO. Schaefer became \u201cthe one beer to have, when you\u2019re having more than one.\u201d A marketing survey showed that 20% of beer drinkers consumed 80% of the beer. Tom was getting more and more adept at research and modern marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wedding to the beautiful Marilyn Orzechowski included Jackie Robinson and Ralph Branca as guests as he bid goodbye to a happy bachelorhood traveling with a Major League baseball team. They had two children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His own Marilyn wasn\u2019t the only Marilyn on baseball minds. One day over lunch, Tom asked DiMaggio if he had read the book review of a new Marilyn Monroe book by Norman Mailer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI never read about her,\u201d said Joe. \u201cI try to keep my memories to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1968, he became the executive director of the Major League Baseball account, won by BBDO, which was originally intended to launch the MLB Promotion Corporation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBaseball marketing was in its infancy, even after a century,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThere was little coming out of the Commissioner\u2019s Office. There were still people in the game who thought television was giving the games away for free.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1969 the BBDO team coordinated events surrounding the Centennial of Professional Baseball, which culminated in the selection of the all-time greatest (and greatest living) players, a book (This Great Game), a postage stamp, a record album narrated by James Stewart and Curt Gowdy, a poster (he still has the original art), a White House visit, and the centennial banquet in Washington D.C. in conjunction with the All-Star Game. His team created the now-iconic MLB logo, still used today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tSoon after Jackie Robinson\u2019s death in the fall of 1972, Rachel Robinson decided to create a Foundation in her late husband\u2019s name to encourage and enable minority children to go to college. By chance, Tom encountered her outside his BBDO office on Madison Avenue and brought her upstairs to get things rolling with design and marketing services. The Jackie Robinson Foundation was rolling; Tom joined the Board of Directors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tIn 1976, he created \u201cBaseball\u2019s Most Memorable Moments\u201d (Bobby Thomson\u2019s \u201cShot Heard \u2018round the World\u201d was the winner), but the promotion was also run locally by teams and created a terrific marketing opportunity for the game during the nation\u2019s bicentennial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tBy this time Ballantine Beer had gone out of business and Tom was back at Yankee Stadium with Schaefer as the Yankees new beer sponsor. He had by then created something called the \u201cSchaefer Circle of Sports,\u201d an umbrella for all New York sporting events sponsored by his brand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tHe could happily have stayed at BBDO, amassing stock options and enjoying life, but Commissioner Bowie Kuhn came calling, offering him the position of Executive Director of Marketing and Broadcasting, beginning in 1979. Now the one-time Yankee batboy became the top marketing executive in baseball, just as MLB\u2019s broadcast rights and the budding cable universe were unfolding and converging. He advised clubs on how to negotiate local broadcast rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tAmong his notable contributions was the creation of MLB\u2019s first advertising slogan – a simple, yet potent message: \u201cBaseball Fever: Catch It.\u201d For years, it was the tag line for all things baseball. It was a step into the modern world of marketing. (The last slogan anyone could remember before was \u201cIt\u2019s Fun to be a Fan,\u201d generally used at the minor league level). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tIt was even featured as a \u201cJeopardy\u201d answer and was a Trivial Pursuit question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tHis two cars would bear the license plates \u201cBB FEVER\u201d and \u201cCATCH IT\u201d. They still do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tHe remained a welcome presence at Dodgertown, the Dodgers\u2019 spring training site in Vero Beach (where he maintained a winter home), and had the luxury of his own golf cart to drive around the complex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tHe honed his executive broadcast skills and was the first to tell George Steinbrenner, \u201cYou know, one day you might want to think about owning your own regional network.\u201d (That would come to be in 2002 when the YES Network debuted and the Yankees became the first team to take ownership of their own network, with every cable household in the area putting money in the Yankee treasury whether they watched baseball or not).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tVillante even consulted with WPIX in the late 1980s about carving out an agreement to bring both the Yankees and the Mets schedules to that one station, an idea that crystalized years later, in 2015, when both teams found a way to put select games on one over-the-air broadcast station. (WGN had of course done this in Chicago with the Cubs and the White Sox).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tVillante left MLB in 1984 and returned to BBDO headquarters to run Tom Villante Sports Marketing, consulting with a number of teams, and at the same time, creating \u201cYogi at the Movies,\u201d in which Berra offered movie reviews as part of television commercial breaks, and \u201cLasorda At Large\u201d featuring the colorful Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda spinning stories from his long career in a long-running syndicated radio feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\t\u201cIn the TV pilot, a review of \u2018Fatal Attraction,\u2019 Yogi kept calling Glenn Close, Glen Cove, a town on Long Island. We left it in for our first Yogi-ism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tIn 2010 he began writing an autobiographical internet blog called \u201cMe and Alphonse\u201d, featuring his best friend and foil from his BBDO days, art director Alphonse Normandia, and using the vehicle to tell tales for a select e-mail audience. The list started with 50 names, mostly retired BBDO people; it grew to the thousands. If the tales involved dinners with Yogi, Lasorda, or DiMaggio, Sandy Koufax, Don Zimmer, or Joe Torre – all the better, because they were all true, and all got better with the cleverly written and punchy prose, famous for never having a typo or a grammatical error. By 2018, the number of stories approached 1,500. Alphonse, who died in 2014 and knew nothing about baseball, was sometimes on the receiving end of a story he had nothing to do with – but he was a character in most of the tales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tThe day of Tom\u2019s visit to Jackson Heights was the day after the 2018 All-Star Game. Tom had plenty of comments about the pre-game ceremonies, the telecast (\u201cWasn\u2019t that terrific, having those players miked?\u201d) and the emerging stars on the field. He stayed up until the end, despite having played 18 holes of golf earlier in the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\t\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have missed Alex Bregman\u2019s game winning homer for anything,\u201d he said. \u201cThat will be one of those All-Star memorable moments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tThere was one more stop to be made in Queens. \u201cLet\u2019s go to the Lemon Ice King of Corona,\u201d he said. \u201cThe best ices.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\tFor a behind-the-scenes life well lived around baseball, you would be hard pressed to top Tom Villante\u2019s run, from Yankee batboy to the game\u2019s marketing Czar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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By Marty Appel On a recent trip to his boyhood haunts in the Queens, New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, a sprightly Tom Villante paused and said, \u201cC\u2019m here; I want to show you something.\u201d Through the portals of a… Continue Reading