He said about Yankees fans that he doesn't mind it because he doesn't understand what they are saying with the language barrier. One way to block it out.
Classic! I watched it live and laughed my ass off. What made it so funny was he made it so matter of fact, like it happened at every game. Him and Orsillo talking about Jerry’s routine on game day or traveling or whatever was just hilarious. Local kid done good.
He was a delightful concert buddy at the last Rolling Stones show at Gillette. We were in the seats directly in front of him, and he couldn’t have been more stoked to have been there.
It was a cool May afternoon, and Somerset High School was playing
North Attleboro in the Eastern Massachusetts State Baseball Tournament
at a field in North Quincy. I was 15 months into my full-time newspaper
career with the Boston Globe, and while covering schoolboy and college
sports spent many hours on the office phone tracking down scores and
minor details; my colleague Bob Ryan and I loved the games, and the
people who played them. I don’t think either of us has ever forgotten
the New England baseball players of that time, men like Billy Travers
and Mark Bomback, Ace Adams and Bob Allietta.
Today, in my sadness for a friend, I’m trying to remember what it was
that so struck me. He was stood about 5-foot-9 and weighed 140 pounds,
so small the great Lenny Merullo of the Scouting Bureau worried that he
was too small. I remember that Scoots — which is what I called
him for 51 years — could hit a line drive over the shortstop’s head and
race around the bases like a battery-operated Lotus. He was a shy kid,
the son of working-class parents named Connie, a hairdresser, and Joe,
9-to-5 at a furniture store, who grew up loving the Red Sox;
one of the first times I ever talked to him he told me how he was there
on the final day of the Impossible Dream 1967 season and ran out on the
field to join in the mobbing of Jim Lonborg.
For several years, his Fenway locker was next to that of Carl
Yastrzemski, and he never lost his enormous respect for the man we used
to say was the toughest baseball player we ever met. There was a game in
Anaheim when Remy was on third with the Red Sox down two runs in the
eighth inning when a diminutive left-handed pitcher named Angel Moreno
threw a pitch behind Yaz’s head. The Angels
manager was Gene Mauch, who managed Yastrzemski in the 1959 Little
World Series between the Minneapolis Millers and Havana Sugar Kings and
revered his then-20-year-old outfielder, and always warned his pitchers
to never throw at him.
The scene was a Jerry Remy dream, because Scoots could imitate
anyone, anything, and laugh his way through it. The next morning, Remy
grabbed me in the lobby of the hotel to recreate the scene — Yaz backing
out of the batter’s box, grinding his hands around his bat, staring out
at Moreno. Remy did the imitation, then shouted, “Yaz doesn’t get mad,
he gets even.” Then he pretended to swing, and produced what Yastrzemski
produced — a game-tying, two-run, line-drive single through the box
that ticked Moreno’s ear, prompting him to fall on top of the pitching
rubber, blood rushing from the ear.
“You do Mauch,” he commanded, knowing Gene Mauch was a kind of
godfather to me in the baseball business. Remy lay down on the lobby
floor, moaning, and I stood over him, waving for a reliever to take his
place. I knew what Mauch said to Moreno as he straddled him lying on the
mound — “You dumb sonofabitch, I told you never to throw at him.”
Remy popped up, looked around at the people in the lobby who thought
we were insane, and announced, “We’re rehearsing for the movie about
Yaz’s life, called ‘Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.’”
It meant a great deal for Remy to play with Yastrzemski and to
understand that toughness, to locker next to him and see the unique
focus that got him through playing more games in the history of the game
than anyone but Pete Rose. We were sitting in front of the row of
lockers on May 13, 1979, before a scheduled day game against the Oakland Athletics.
In walked a rookie pitcher named Chuck Rainey, who passed by Yaz en
route to his locker in the back of the clubhouse. Understand, the Red
Sox had dumped Luis Tiant and Bill Lee after the 1978 season and were
strapped for replacements. Yastrzemski looked up, and asked, “Who is
that?” Remy poked me, a request to give him the answer. “It’s Chuck
Rainey, and today is his sixth start.” It was a scene for a later laugh,
knowing that at 10:30 a.m. before a 2:05 p.m. start Yaz’s entire focus
was preparing for what he knew the opposing pitcher would throw to him.
Remy’s career began with the California Angels, but he was traded to
the Red Sox in December 1977, and on a warm January afternoon we sat out
in his family’s back yard in Somerset talking about what it meant to be
traded home to his town team. He was always a master raconteur, which
from his Angels days meant his friendship with Nolan Ryan, stories from
the bus rides on a Dick Williams-managed team that had no one who could
hit a home run to how many times baserunners like Hal McRae and George
Brett took him out at second base and sent him flying towards the
outfield because a shortstop named Orlando Ramirez was usually slow
getting the double-play feed to him. He bounced a tennis ball against
the back steps, demonstrating a game he played as a kid, a game in which
Yaz usually hit .400.
When Remy was traded to the Red Sox, he was being likened to Johnny
Pesky, another diminutive infielder beloved in Boston despite hitting
only 17 home runs over 10 seasons. Scoots realized that to take
advantage of his speed he had to not hit as many balls in the air. So,
after hitting five home runs in his three years in Anaheim, he was
trying to not hit fly balls to the left fielder. When Rick Burleson
severely sprained his ankle on the last Sunday before the All-Star Game,
American League manager Billy Martin so liked the way Remy played that
he picked him to replace Burleson. Remy didn’t get into the game, but
one time when he was rehabbing his knee at a facility where we worked
out, he said, “How many kids from Somerset got to wear a Red Sox uniform
in an All-Star Game?”
Because of his change in hitting style, he would hit the last of his
seven career homers that August 20, in Oakland. It was a Sunday
afternoon. Boston had a 1-0 lead in the top of the fifth inning in a
matchup of two fellow All-Stars, Dennis Eckersley and Matt Keough, two
on, one out. Keough threw a nasty 1-2 spitter. Remy swung and missed.
Catcher Bruce Robinson dropped the ball, but Remy had already started
walking back to the Red Sox dugout. Umpire Durwood Merrill called it a
foul ball. As Remy turned around in disbelief, Keough charged Merrill,
resulting in a 10-minute recess.
Finally, order was restored, Keough took the mound and threw another
1-2 pitch. Remy hit it over the right-field fence, Keough got himself
thrown out of the game and Eckersley went on to a 4-2 victory.
One winter, working with rehabilitation specialist Peter Stone in
Brookline, Remy got up and reenacted that scene. “I have to practice my
pre-pre home run trot, ” he said to a woman who was also working out.
“You never know when I might hit another one.”
Remy could imitate any hitter, Mickey Rivers being a specialty. He
loved to break down the pressure level of different jobs, and decided
that the job with the least pressure he could imagine was the guy who
rode shotgun on the garbage or trash truck. He did not particularly like
surprises, so, like Yaz, he had his clothing lined up for every day of a
road trip before he’d drive to the airport. When he ran outside, it was
always the same distance; he’d always have the same exact amount of
beer. No one has ever done a better imitation of the famed late Yankees
announcer Bob Sheppard than Remy, who’d finish his “number two … number
two … number two (yes, the echoes)” by saying, “You’re not really in
the big leagues until your name has been announced by Bob Sheppard.”
Jerry Remy is the first kid from Somerset to be inducted into the Red
Sox Hall of Fame, and he died an icon an entire generation grew to know
as RemDawg for more than 30 years in the television booth. Yet in many
ways, I have always felt that there is an underappreciated understanding
of the kid I first saw in North Quincy. He was re-sculpting his game
that first year in Boston, and was on that All-Star team. He was hurt
late in the season, and because Frank Duffy was forced over to second
base and Jim Rice was playing right because Dwight Evans had been beaned
and suffered a concussion, a Lou Piniella pop fly ended up falling and
blowing up a scoreless Ron Guidry-Eckersley matchup, leading to the
third of four straight “Boston Massacre” losses to the surging Yankees.
If he had been in the field, and had made that play, would there have
been a need for that ill-fated Game 163? We’ll never know. But when it
did arrive, that Yankee-Red Sox “playoff,” Remy could have been a
playing icon. In that game, he made a spectacular diving defensive play.
He bunted perfectly to get Rick Burleson to third and make it 2-0 in
the bottom of the sixth. He doubled off Rich Gossage leading off the
eighth when the Yankees led 5-2. And in the ninth, following a Burleson
one-out walk, he hit a line single to right that Piniella only saw at
the last moment and stabbed at; otherwise, it likely would have been an
inside-the-park two-run homer; if Reggie Jackson, as Reggie thought he
should be, had been playing right, the ball would have bounced on his
barehand side, not glove-side, and gone to the bullpen.
The next season, he hurt his knee catching his spike on Jerry
Narron’s shinpads, necessitating Rice carrying him off the field. In
1980, manager Don Zimmer had to put him in right field for an inning on
soaked grass in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, and he re-injured the
knee. The surgeries continued, 1980, 1981, 1983 … yet, every winter,
working out diligently with Peter Stone, he kept coming back, every
off-season working on his bunting. He’d go to the Tufts University cage,
take flips, and work on bunting like Hall of Famer Rod Carew, dropping
balls towards first and third, past the pitcher in front of the second
baseman and shortstop. One day after feeding him flips for a good half
hour, he said, “I’m right at the point where I’m going to get an extra
step or two because the second baseman and shortstop have to move in.”
Unfortunately, the knee never gave him the opportunity.
He had his Jerry Remy Baseball Camp, which a Red Sox fan from
Cheshire, Conn. named Brad Ausmus attended. He always thought about
managing, but never got the opportunity. So in 1988 he began at NESN,
and with the help of remarkable tutors like Ned Martin and Sean
McDonough, began a broadcasting career that was perfect for someone with
his sense of humor and natural abilities.
He fought through round after round of cancer, but when he was at
Fenway, he would always be seated at the clubhouse table studying the
media notes and taking in the comings and goings of the players. He
never forgot one of the first rules of covering baseball, that it’s
important to be seen and available no matter whether your reporting was
positive, or critical. “People who knew me when know me now,” he’d often
say, and when players from this 2021 Red Sox team wore shoes honoring
him and donned “Jerry Remy Fight Club” T-shirts, it pierced the hearts
and souls of those who did know him long before he was The RemDawg.
He knew he was my niece Debby’s favorite player and always wore the
number 2, so, in spring training in Winter Haven, Fla. took her out to
dinner. I think that night he threw out the first pitch before the
Yankee game, anecdotes about Carlton Fisk and The Rooster, about
Burleson, and, of course, Fred Lynn, Evans and Rice and Yaz were
whirling around in his head.
I admit I am not unbiased. In 1990, his name appeared on the Hall of
Fame ballot, which in itself is a remarkable accomplishment, because any
player who meets the requirement of lasting 10 years in the big leagues
has to be an exceptional player. I voted for Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan
on that ballot. They were inducted that year. I voted for Gaylord Perry,
Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Bunning and Ron Santo. I did not think that at
that time any of the other players on the ballot had a chance to make
it.
So I voted for Jerry Remy. It was his lone vote before permanently
falling off the ballot. Months after the vote went public, he figured
out who did it, and said, “I can always tell my grandchildren I got a
vote for the Hall of Fame.”
For 31 years, I have been conflicted about doing it, even though I did not think it denied someone else an election opportunity.
Today, October 31, 2021, I am not conflicted. I’m thinking about that
field in North Quincy and the back step of his family’s house in
Somerset, and hearing him say, “Yaz doesn’t get mad, he gets even,” then
remembering for posterity how tough Scoots was to fight through all
those knee surgeries and chemotherapy treatments and become a kid from
Somerset whose name will always be remembered, Bob Sheppard’s voice
incanting, “Number Two, Jerry Remy.”
(Photo of Remy at a 2017 ceremony in his honor: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
The post you post when your team blows a 4 nothing lead and ends the game with a double play and you looking over your shoulder wondering if it’s only about the Ws.
Good freaking lord, I’m too old for this shit and it’s too early in the season for a heart attack, which is supposed to happen in the winter when I shovel the driveway.
Comments
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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RIP "Rem Dawg"
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Cancer can go fuck itself.
Gammons: To me, Jerry Remy was ‘Scoots,’ and his humor, toughness and friendship will always resonate
I remember the first time I saw Jerry Remy.
It was a cool May afternoon, and Somerset High School was playing North Attleboro in the Eastern Massachusetts State Baseball Tournament at a field in North Quincy. I was 15 months into my full-time newspaper career with the Boston Globe, and while covering schoolboy and college sports spent many hours on the office phone tracking down scores and minor details; my colleague Bob Ryan and I loved the games, and the people who played them. I don’t think either of us has ever forgotten the New England baseball players of that time, men like Billy Travers and Mark Bomback, Ace Adams and Bob Allietta.
Today, in my sadness for a friend, I’m trying to remember what it was that so struck me. He was stood about 5-foot-9 and weighed 140 pounds, so small the great Lenny Merullo of the Scouting Bureau worried that he was too small. I remember that Scoots — which is what I called him for 51 years — could hit a line drive over the shortstop’s head and race around the bases like a battery-operated Lotus. He was a shy kid, the son of working-class parents named Connie, a hairdresser, and Joe, 9-to-5 at a furniture store, who grew up loving the Red Sox; one of the first times I ever talked to him he told me how he was there on the final day of the Impossible Dream 1967 season and ran out on the field to join in the mobbing of Jim Lonborg.
For several years, his Fenway locker was next to that of Carl Yastrzemski, and he never lost his enormous respect for the man we used to say was the toughest baseball player we ever met. There was a game in Anaheim when Remy was on third with the Red Sox down two runs in the eighth inning when a diminutive left-handed pitcher named Angel Moreno threw a pitch behind Yaz’s head. The Angels manager was Gene Mauch, who managed Yastrzemski in the 1959 Little World Series between the Minneapolis Millers and Havana Sugar Kings and revered his then-20-year-old outfielder, and always warned his pitchers to never throw at him.
The scene was a Jerry Remy dream, because Scoots could imitate anyone, anything, and laugh his way through it. The next morning, Remy grabbed me in the lobby of the hotel to recreate the scene — Yaz backing out of the batter’s box, grinding his hands around his bat, staring out at Moreno. Remy did the imitation, then shouted, “Yaz doesn’t get mad, he gets even.” Then he pretended to swing, and produced what Yastrzemski produced — a game-tying, two-run, line-drive single through the box that ticked Moreno’s ear, prompting him to fall on top of the pitching rubber, blood rushing from the ear.
“You do Mauch,” he commanded, knowing Gene Mauch was a kind of godfather to me in the baseball business. Remy lay down on the lobby floor, moaning, and I stood over him, waving for a reliever to take his place. I knew what Mauch said to Moreno as he straddled him lying on the mound — “You dumb sonofabitch, I told you never to throw at him.”
Remy popped up, looked around at the people in the lobby who thought we were insane, and announced, “We’re rehearsing for the movie about Yaz’s life, called ‘Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.’”
It meant a great deal for Remy to play with Yastrzemski and to understand that toughness, to locker next to him and see the unique focus that got him through playing more games in the history of the game than anyone but Pete Rose. We were sitting in front of the row of lockers on May 13, 1979, before a scheduled day game against the Oakland Athletics. In walked a rookie pitcher named Chuck Rainey, who passed by Yaz en route to his locker in the back of the clubhouse. Understand, the Red Sox had dumped Luis Tiant and Bill Lee after the 1978 season and were strapped for replacements. Yastrzemski looked up, and asked, “Who is that?” Remy poked me, a request to give him the answer. “It’s Chuck Rainey, and today is his sixth start.” It was a scene for a later laugh, knowing that at 10:30 a.m. before a 2:05 p.m. start Yaz’s entire focus was preparing for what he knew the opposing pitcher would throw to him.
Remy’s career began with the California Angels, but he was traded to the Red Sox in December 1977, and on a warm January afternoon we sat out in his family’s back yard in Somerset talking about what it meant to be traded home to his town team. He was always a master raconteur, which from his Angels days meant his friendship with Nolan Ryan, stories from the bus rides on a Dick Williams-managed team that had no one who could hit a home run to how many times baserunners like Hal McRae and George Brett took him out at second base and sent him flying towards the outfield because a shortstop named Orlando Ramirez was usually slow getting the double-play feed to him. He bounced a tennis ball against the back steps, demonstrating a game he played as a kid, a game in which Yaz usually hit .400.
When Remy was traded to the Red Sox, he was being likened to Johnny Pesky, another diminutive infielder beloved in Boston despite hitting only 17 home runs over 10 seasons. Scoots realized that to take advantage of his speed he had to not hit as many balls in the air. So, after hitting five home runs in his three years in Anaheim, he was trying to not hit fly balls to the left fielder. When Rick Burleson severely sprained his ankle on the last Sunday before the All-Star Game, American League manager Billy Martin so liked the way Remy played that he picked him to replace Burleson. Remy didn’t get into the game, but one time when he was rehabbing his knee at a facility where we worked out, he said, “How many kids from Somerset got to wear a Red Sox uniform in an All-Star Game?”
Because of his change in hitting style, he would hit the last of his seven career homers that August 20, in Oakland. It was a Sunday afternoon. Boston had a 1-0 lead in the top of the fifth inning in a matchup of two fellow All-Stars, Dennis Eckersley and Matt Keough, two on, one out. Keough threw a nasty 1-2 spitter. Remy swung and missed. Catcher Bruce Robinson dropped the ball, but Remy had already started walking back to the Red Sox dugout. Umpire Durwood Merrill called it a foul ball. As Remy turned around in disbelief, Keough charged Merrill, resulting in a 10-minute recess.
Finally, order was restored, Keough took the mound and threw another 1-2 pitch. Remy hit it over the right-field fence, Keough got himself thrown out of the game and Eckersley went on to a 4-2 victory.
One winter, working with rehabilitation specialist Peter Stone in Brookline, Remy got up and reenacted that scene. “I have to practice my pre-pre home run trot, ” he said to a woman who was also working out. “You never know when I might hit another one.”
Remy could imitate any hitter, Mickey Rivers being a specialty. He loved to break down the pressure level of different jobs, and decided that the job with the least pressure he could imagine was the guy who rode shotgun on the garbage or trash truck. He did not particularly like surprises, so, like Yaz, he had his clothing lined up for every day of a road trip before he’d drive to the airport. When he ran outside, it was always the same distance; he’d always have the same exact amount of beer. No one has ever done a better imitation of the famed late Yankees announcer Bob Sheppard than Remy, who’d finish his “number two … number two … number two (yes, the echoes)” by saying, “You’re not really in the big leagues until your name has been announced by Bob Sheppard.”
Jerry Remy is the first kid from Somerset to be inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame, and he died an icon an entire generation grew to know as RemDawg for more than 30 years in the television booth. Yet in many ways, I have always felt that there is an underappreciated understanding of the kid I first saw in North Quincy. He was re-sculpting his game that first year in Boston, and was on that All-Star team. He was hurt late in the season, and because Frank Duffy was forced over to second base and Jim Rice was playing right because Dwight Evans had been beaned and suffered a concussion, a Lou Piniella pop fly ended up falling and blowing up a scoreless Ron Guidry-Eckersley matchup, leading to the third of four straight “Boston Massacre” losses to the surging Yankees.
If he had been in the field, and had made that play, would there have been a need for that ill-fated Game 163? We’ll never know. But when it did arrive, that Yankee-Red Sox “playoff,” Remy could have been a playing icon. In that game, he made a spectacular diving defensive play. He bunted perfectly to get Rick Burleson to third and make it 2-0 in the bottom of the sixth. He doubled off Rich Gossage leading off the eighth when the Yankees led 5-2. And in the ninth, following a Burleson one-out walk, he hit a line single to right that Piniella only saw at the last moment and stabbed at; otherwise, it likely would have been an inside-the-park two-run homer; if Reggie Jackson, as Reggie thought he should be, had been playing right, the ball would have bounced on his barehand side, not glove-side, and gone to the bullpen.
The next season, he hurt his knee catching his spike on Jerry Narron’s shinpads, necessitating Rice carrying him off the field. In 1980, manager Don Zimmer had to put him in right field for an inning on soaked grass in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, and he re-injured the knee. The surgeries continued, 1980, 1981, 1983 … yet, every winter, working out diligently with Peter Stone, he kept coming back, every off-season working on his bunting. He’d go to the Tufts University cage, take flips, and work on bunting like Hall of Famer Rod Carew, dropping balls towards first and third, past the pitcher in front of the second baseman and shortstop. One day after feeding him flips for a good half hour, he said, “I’m right at the point where I’m going to get an extra step or two because the second baseman and shortstop have to move in.”
Unfortunately, the knee never gave him the opportunity.
He had his Jerry Remy Baseball Camp, which a Red Sox fan from Cheshire, Conn. named Brad Ausmus attended. He always thought about managing, but never got the opportunity. So in 1988 he began at NESN, and with the help of remarkable tutors like Ned Martin and Sean McDonough, began a broadcasting career that was perfect for someone with his sense of humor and natural abilities.
He fought through round after round of cancer, but when he was at Fenway, he would always be seated at the clubhouse table studying the media notes and taking in the comings and goings of the players. He never forgot one of the first rules of covering baseball, that it’s important to be seen and available no matter whether your reporting was positive, or critical. “People who knew me when know me now,” he’d often say, and when players from this 2021 Red Sox team wore shoes honoring him and donned “Jerry Remy Fight Club” T-shirts, it pierced the hearts and souls of those who did know him long before he was The RemDawg.
He knew he was my niece Debby’s favorite player and always wore the number 2, so, in spring training in Winter Haven, Fla. took her out to dinner. I think that night he threw out the first pitch before the Yankee game, anecdotes about Carlton Fisk and The Rooster, about Burleson, and, of course, Fred Lynn, Evans and Rice and Yaz were whirling around in his head.
I admit I am not unbiased. In 1990, his name appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, which in itself is a remarkable accomplishment, because any player who meets the requirement of lasting 10 years in the big leagues has to be an exceptional player. I voted for Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan on that ballot. They were inducted that year. I voted for Gaylord Perry, Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Bunning and Ron Santo. I did not think that at that time any of the other players on the ballot had a chance to make it.
So I voted for Jerry Remy. It was his lone vote before permanently falling off the ballot. Months after the vote went public, he figured out who did it, and said, “I can always tell my grandchildren I got a vote for the Hall of Fame.”
For 31 years, I have been conflicted about doing it, even though I did not think it denied someone else an election opportunity.
Today, October 31, 2021, I am not conflicted. I’m thinking about that field in North Quincy and the back step of his family’s house in Somerset, and hearing him say, “Yaz doesn’t get mad, he gets even,” then remembering for posterity how tough Scoots was to fight through all those knee surgeries and chemotherapy treatments and become a kid from Somerset whose name will always be remembered, Bob Sheppard’s voice incanting, “Number Two, Jerry Remy.”
(Photo of Remy at a 2017 ceremony in his honor: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
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games back
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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