September 28, 2024 • 26 mins
Maller & Danny G. have a great Saturday podcast for you! They talk: Straight A's, Storm Watch, Auburn/MLB Cancellations, & more!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Kabooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old Republic, a soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Right now in the air ywhere and a Happy Saturday?
Idiot is National Ask a Stupid Question Day? And it
is the Fifth Hour with Me Ben Maller and Danny
G Radio as we were back at it on a
(00:46):
college football kind of a Saturday. Hello, Danny G Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Where do babies come from?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I cannot answer that question. I cannot Why are we here?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Why is the sky blue? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
What is it the very top of the world? Why
can't we go there?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Danny?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
What is going on?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
My mom told me that when I was a toddler,
I would ask her questions like that and she is like,
stop asking me. Shit, I don't know the answer to.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Did we actually go to the moon?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Danny? Maybe?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Is the earth flat? Is it round? Is it hollow?
I need to know Danny, I need to know the
answers to these questions. On this podcast, we will have
straight A's stormwatch a Gangsters Paradise, much other random random
(01:44):
observations from the last few days, as we are known
to do on this podcast, but I thought we'd start
with this. Back on Thursday, Danny, they played the final
game ever in Oakland. There will never be another baseball
team likely in Oakland again. The Athletics played and there
(02:04):
was some vandalism, but it wasn't nearly like what we
thought was going to be. It was rather rather controlled.
Of course, the Oakland Police had like one hundred and
fifty officers or something like that out there. They had
six hundred security guards. I mean, it was over the top,
(02:26):
but I watched some of it. I was busy. I
couldn't watch the whole game, but I watched some of it.
And I'm not an A's fan. I talked about it
on the Overnight Show a little bit, but it just
bums me out when these teams relocate and it just
seems so unnecessary to me. I don't run the business
(02:47):
side of these things, but it just seems like they
really effed it up. And I had some stories some
I wanted to share here about my experience with the A's.
I was a radio stringer way back way back in
the day, many many years ago, when I was starting
out in radio, one of my first jobs. And so
(03:08):
back in those days before the Internet, in the Stone Age,
they would use a reporter to call in and you
have updates on the game and to get audio after
the game. So I did that for several years before
I became a talk show host full time, and in
that time I covered the Dodgers and the Angels and
all the teams in LA and I got a phone
(03:30):
call from some executive for the Oakland Athletics. It's probably
the late nineties, I forget exactly what year, but he's like, Hey,
we're looking for somebody in Anaheim to do this thing.
We were a sponsor and we want a live update
from the Big A when the A's are on the
(03:53):
West Coast. So I was like, yeah, I mean I'll
do it. It's a paying gig. Of course I'll do it.
And so I did that for a couple of years.
It was called the Coca Cola like Road Report or
something like that. It was like PEPSI was the sponsor
and It was a long time ago, but I got
(04:14):
a check every month from the Oakland Athletics and it
was it was you know when you get those checks, Danny,
you don't want to actually spend the money because it's
so cool to have the actual paper check. Well, it
wasn't a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Of money, it wasn't hard to save it.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Then well, they don't even have checks like this anymore.
It was it was just a check that had the
Oakland A's logo on it and it said from the
Oakland Baseball Club or whatever. And so I like, well, man,
I'm on the A's payroll. I mean, this is all
eighty nine cents. Yeah, I'm getting like, you know, fifty
bucks a game or something like that. But whatever it was,
(04:52):
and I don't even think it was that much. So
I did it and then became kind of friendly with
some of the guys worked on the broadcast. And so
then when the A's would come to Anaheim, I would
hang out in the A's broadcast booth. They would they
would welcome me in, and it was really just a
(05:12):
wonderful experience as a radio nerd to see how the
broadcasts were done. And I had heard as a kid
and I thought I was gonna be Ben Scully, but
I would listen to far away broadcasts of different different teams,
and I would get the Giants out of the Bay Area.
Every once in a while, I could scan the AM
(05:33):
dial and find a grainy, faraway feed of the Athletics,
but it wasn't normally from Oakland. It was like a
station in Fresno or something would come in where I live.
So I heard Bill King. I had heard him a
lot on NFL films from his work with the Raiders,
(05:54):
but he was a by play guy for the Athletics,
and I met him and hung out with him off
and on when I was at those games. And Ken Korak.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah there was also Ray Fosse. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Ray was doing TV at that time, so I was
in the radio booth. But it was It was great,
and I have one of my favorite stories, just absolutely crazy.
It was an August game in Anaheim, very hot. The
A's were not a playoff team, the Angels were not
(06:30):
a playoff team, so I'm The way it worked is
the broadcasters sat in the front row and I sat
in the second row, and I had the stats and
the scores out of town scoreboard before before the internet again,
So I was updating the scoreboard for the guy who
dubbed it. So I'm sitting there and it's like the
I know, it was the third inning. They were switching
(06:52):
broadcast role, so it was like the end of the
third inning, and then ken Korak was going to take over.
So Bill King gets up and he walks up a
couple of stairs behind me, and there's a lot of
room there and and ken Korak jokingly said, well, Bill's
(07:13):
going to get down to his underwear now, and I thought, well,
that's funny, you know, that's that's pretty funny. And hand
to God Bill King. And he was an old man
at that, I mean, he didn't live much longer than that.
I don't know when he passed away, but you know,
it was the ninety So he took off his pants.
I think he had shorts on. Actually, whatever he wanted,
(07:36):
he took it off. And he walked back down to
sit next to Ken and he was in his tidy whities,
and it was it was wild. Wow, he really did it.
That's that's nuts. But a very nice man lived on
a boat, I think in in northern California somewhere, so
that's my experience. But and I went to a few
(07:58):
as games, not many. And now you were I think, Nanny,
you were there much more than I was. I mean,
you were you spent time in the Bay right when
you were growing up.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
My mom went from Massachusetts to San Jose with her family,
as I've talked about before, met my dad in high
school there in San Jose, and then came down here
together in Thousand Oaks, California. And then they bought a
house in Simi Valley before moving to Woodland Hills, so
they would go to Dodger games. But then they found
out something about southern California. Ben, even back then you
(08:30):
could sell your house and make a lot of money
from it. Absolutely, my mom was telling my dad, I
want to go back up to the Bay. Ben, I'm
not kidding you. My mom and dad moved back and
forth from the Bay to LA I can't even count
on two hands. Got to go to my first Dodger
game listening to Vince Scully when I was in kindergarten,
(08:51):
really into baseball. When I was twelve, me and my
older brother would convince our older friend Dion Hawes. Probably
you two when you were kid, you had like that
one older friend who had a car. Yeah, we would
convince Dion to drive us to Oakland for A's baseball
because even though we were Dodger fans and that's what
(09:11):
we really knew as youngsters, that was the closest team.
We hated the San Francisco Giants, obviously being Dodgers fans,
but the Oakland A's were okay with us because, you know,
in our region we had the modesto as we got
to see Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco come through. I
have an old picture where I I'm posing with a
(09:34):
young Jose Conseco joja By. It was so fun to
see these guys blossom into major league players in Oakland.
So we would we would beg Dion, please take us
to an Oakland game, and once in a while he'd
be like, all right, you guys, pay for gas and
(09:54):
I'll take you.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, wasn't that expensive back then.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Not at all. And Dion was one of those cool
kids where he was just a few years older than us.
He had a nice pickup truck and he had a
booming system in it. Whenever he would pull up to
our house, he'd be bumping some Eric b and rock him.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Come on, Pippin, get your tims on.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
My older brother and I we were in kind of
a weird position being Dodgers fans. But you know, baseball
is very regional, and especially back then, as you know, Ben,
we couldn't unless we were surfing the am doll like
you late at night with an antenna trying to pick
up games and other cities. You weren't getting coverage of
(10:37):
other Major League Baseball teams the way you were your
local team.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, it was like a stone age. Like I told
younger people, I'm like, well, I to see, like the
Toronto Blue Jays. I had to watch this week in
baseball and maybe they would show a highlight of the
Toronto Blue Jays.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Maybe you know it.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It was on sat like Saturday morning, it would be
this week in baseball.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
That's exactly true. If you tried to explain that to
a kid right now, they wouldn't understand at all. So
it was a strange thing. It was like, Eh, we're
not exactly A's fans, but by family, we're kind of
related to the A's. And we get to the Oakland
Coliseum in nineteen eighty seven, one of the first A's
games that we attended very late in the year, and
(11:22):
in fact, it was Reggie Jackson's final home game playing
in Oakland.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh wow, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
It was very cool now think about it. Reggie Jackson
was literally on his last leg, but he was one
of those guys where, even though he was an old
player at the time, whenever he would come up to
the plate, it was very special because man, he could
hit a home run, still has power to hit it out.
(11:51):
That's exactly what happened on this night. My older brother,
i think, wanted to make this game count. We didn't
get to go to very many baseball games in general,
and so he looked around, elbows me and he starts
a Reggie chant in our section. Okay, And it starts out,
you know, just him, It's just my brother doing it,
(12:12):
and he won't shut up. He's one of those annoying
kids in the stands who's trying to get everybody else
in the stands to follow him.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
The little annoying kids where you're like, shut up.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And my older brother finally gets our section into it,
and our section now is chanting Reggie. Then the section
next to us picks up on it and they go
and it was kind of like the wave because the
next thing you know, the entire stadium is chanting Reggie's
name and Ben that at bat, Reggie knocks one out.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Unbelievable. Reggie was bigger than life and all at the
end of his career. At that time, he was like
one of the biggest stars in baseball. And now have
you seen those photos of like Reggie Jackson next to
the modern slugger, he looks like a backup infielder. But
when we were younger, I mean, he's amazing. Oh yeah,
(13:10):
Reggie Jackson.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah, And I mean at this point of his life,
he was like a balding, kind of had a little
bit of a bare belly. Yeah, he looked like a
former player already, even though he was still in a
major league uniform.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
But Ricky Henderson said about the A's leaving Oakland, he
was asked if he was sad about it, and he said,
this is such a classic quote by Ricky Henderson. He says,
I have too much money to be sad about the
A's leaving leaving Oakland. Isn't that not on brand? You're
an ass hat?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I'm sure other people saw what Jeff Passen wrote the
other day saying the Oakland A's were killed by greed.
Don't allow the people responsible for this to spin it
any other way. John Fisher did not have to move
the team. Major League Baseball and it's owners did not
need to be complicit in it. This was a choice,
(14:06):
a wrong one. History will sneer.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Well, what is He's going to make a lot of
money going to Vegas eventually, But I yeah, I agree
with the premise. The A's did not have to leave.
From what I read, Baseball was going to cut off
essentially all the welfare they were getting, right, That's why
they left. They had to announce they were leaving because
they weren't going to get the money from revenue sharing,
(14:29):
and so that's why they did this when they did it.
But yeah, why would Vegas is a great town. I
love Vegas. I go to Vegas a lot, But Oakland,
in the Bay Area, there's more people that live there.
It's a bigger media market by far than Las Vegas.
So from that standpoint in terms of television and all
(14:52):
those things, it is a downgrade. We'll see how it
plays out, But yeah, I agree, it didn't have to.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Happen, so didn't have to happen. The only one thing
I will say, and we've talked about this on our
podcast before, it is pretty pathetic how they have let
the city there in the flats of Oakland rot. And
we've seen over the past couple of weeks people mention
on their way to Oakland to go to one final
game how they were disgusted by what it looks like
(15:22):
surrounding the stadium there.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Well, I had a call from Lance, the bus driver
this week. Lance called up. His car was stolen from
San Francisco, he lives there. He tracked it to a
neighborhood in Oakland. So calls the cops. He says, I
know where my car is, and since it was parked
in a garage, they said, well, there's nothing we can do.
(15:46):
He said, well, I know where it is. I know
exactly where the car is. And they wouldn't help him
at all. And so Lance thinks they're going to use
his car in one of those neighborhood takeovers, you know
where they take over the intersection and they ride their
carton circles and burnouts and all that.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
And so, I mean, besides them losing their their sports
teams there.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
In and out Burger right, they've.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Lost, Oh, they've lost restaurants and businesses to crime. It's
kind of like the wild Wild West.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It's it's it's pretty bad now. The gangster's Paradise. I'll
make this quick. But last weekend, Danny a fortieth birthday
party for a friend of the wife. And when it's
a friend of the wife, it's a friend of you.
So I was dragged to Dave and Busters.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Have you you've.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Been to David Busters right over the years.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yeah, Oh yeah. We take the kids there sometimes for
their birthday celebrations. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
So they were having a big birthday party and they
wanted to go to one in a different part of LA,
but it was all booked up. So they said, all right,
let's let's go out to Ontario, in the Inland Empire
in southern California, the Ontario Mills Mall. I think it's fall,
so we we it's pretty far from what we are.
(17:10):
We drove out there and a little rough, Danny, a
little rough. It was, you know, it was a gangster's
paradise kind of set up. There were a lot of
shady looking people playing the games, and hey, the Eastern Own.
As long as they don't bother me whatever, I don't care.
So they had reserved a table, but we actually when
(17:31):
we got there, the table wasn't ready because there was
a party. They told us one of the people in
our party that the table that we were supposed to
get the party had been there for seven hours at
the table at a daven Busters seven hours.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
What do you do there for seven hours?
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I don't know. I have no idea. So we finally
got a table and we had a group. There were
probably about twelve of us all together, and we're eating,
we're enjoying. You know, the food was really not very good,
but we ate and pretended to like it and all
that stuff. It's terrible. So whatever I was invited, I said, right,
(18:21):
I'll go. And so then our waitress or a waiter
comes over and there was another party right across from us,
and she's she's in a bad mood, the waitress, and
I said, oh, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Shocker?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Apparently the group, and this was a group probably twelve
to fifteen people, grandma, mom, dads, kids, little kids. They
had eaten for about two hours and then left without
paying their bill. They just took off and they didn't.
(19:00):
They didn't pay their bill. We're not paying and they
didn't eve say any in these percent like they were
going to play games, and then they left. What are
you doing? And this was a this had to be
a ton of money, right. They were drinking alcohol, they
had everything.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So I got a bunch of losers.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I know, it's like wild and you were allowed to
do that in California. I think they don't really care,
but yeah, it was. It was interesting that I had
a good time playing the games. I didn't play too many,
but but I mentioned yesterday on the podcast that I
was watching the storm in the South through Florida and
Carolina's and Georgia and then on the way up. And
(19:40):
you've also been on storm Watch, right, Danny, this actually
affected you more than me.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, it's weird. I've never followed a hurricane or tracked
one before where it affected me because of where we live, obviously,
but in this case, we were set on the CNR
show to broadcast live from the graduate at Hotels and Burn, Alabama,
and it was supposed to be the pregame to the
pregame to the game day the day before their big
(20:07):
game was going to be you know, a lot of
b Auburn fans, a lot of OU fans there in attendance,
as well as you know, people in the region who
listened to the Coveno and Rich show. There had been
a lot of fans of the show that had RSVP'd,
and the hotel was really excited to have the broadcast there.
(20:27):
And then we start looking at the travel plans and
we were scheduled to fly into Atlanta. We would have
been landing in Atlanta right as the eye of the
hurricane was over Georgia. We were tracking that to see
if it was going to change. We get to Wednesday
and Rich is pacing the halls of FSR, telling me
(20:50):
in Coveno if we should fly into the eye of
the storm. And I'm like, it's all right, dude, will
be all right, and he's like, yeah, but even if
we wouldn't we land, we're going to be driving in
it because once we got to Atlanta, we were going
to get a rental car drive for ninety minutes to
get to Auburn in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Of course, I only ninety minutes out of Atlanta. I
thought it was further.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, yeah, no, not a long drive from Atlanta, but
it would have been an interesting drive through a hurricane. Finally,
what happens is Dan Beyer live on our show does
breaking news the Braves and Mets were canceled. Uh oh,
we better talk to our boss Scott. So we do
a group chat and we tell Scott, hey, you know us,
(21:37):
we're all in, but the games are being canceled. Now.
Not sure how many of our listeners are going to
be able to attend this live broadcast. Yeah, yeah, that
was one thing. We were all focused on our travel,
obviously trying to fly into that area. But then when
we really stopped and thought about it, we were like,
wait a second, if Georgia is declaring state of emergency
(22:01):
and we're trying to fly in, aren't the other people
trying to fly out or drive out? At that point,
our boss got a hold of the client and talked
to the people in charge to the Graduate hotels, and
they decided we better call this a.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Couple of other Auburn games that you can go to.
But yeah, that's you know, because the powers out from
when I was reading the Powers out all over you
certain parts of the South, So, yeah, who's going to
leave their house? Let me go to I want to
leave my I don't have power here, but I'm gonna
take off.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Come on, man, we got FEMA passes. Well you were got.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah that's true, you were gotting the street cred.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like I still, I
was down. I was like one of the ones pushing
forward still like No, what we could do is we
could fly into Dallas and then from Dallas straight into
Birmingham and rolled up like in the Ghostbuster Mobile.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
That'd be awesome.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yeah, the hotel win would have been boarded up, but
we're still walking in with our comrades and our live
broadcast equipment.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yes, we're here to save the day with a live
radio remote right here. Yes, that's awesome. I drove in
a tropical storm when I was back in Vermont, when
I was in Boston a couple months ago, and that
wasn't a hurricane, and that was pretty wild. The road
(23:25):
was flooding a little bit, it was dark, there were
no lights. I can only imagine what a hurricane would
be like with the power out on those old country
roads in the South where there's just nothing for miles
and miles and miles, And I mean that would be
like a horror film, wouldn't it, Danny, wouldn't you think?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Oh for sure, And we're hoping and praying that everybody
in that part of the country stays safe. At the
time we're taping this. I'm not sure what's going to
happen with the football games, but baseball was canceled.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Major League Baseball. If they'd been pro active, they could
have had the Braves play on Monday and yep, earlier
on Wednesday, and then they would have gotten the games in.
But they didn't do that. So now they're gonna play
a doubleheader on Monday most I guess that's going to
happen now, And whoever wins the playoff spot, it doesn't
really matter, Danny, because their pitching staff is going to
(24:18):
be shredded from having to play all those games.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
But they oh yeah, trust me. Rich Davis, who's a
big Mets fan, he had a take on the air
saying that this was actually an advantage for the Mets
because of how it affected the Braves pitching staff.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
That's one way to look at it.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's hopeful thinking by a Mets fan.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, wishful thinking by a Mets which is usually the opposite.
Usually the Mets fans were porked. You know, we were done,
we can't win and all that. All right, I have
some other stuff. I think I'll save it for tomorrow
the mailbag if I remember, and.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Now, and I'm glad we got to reminisce a little
bit about the Oakland A's because it is an emotional
thing for sports fans. You know. I saw one of
their broadcasters tearing up. You probably saw that video too. Yeah,
the post game guys and bit was in tears and
their dude next to them was choked up as he
was saying goodbye. And it's really weird. It's like a
(25:15):
piece of our childhood going to the wayside.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah, we're getting older. We've seen a lot of teams relocate.
Like I was saying about the other day, the Montreal
Expose gone, Seattle SuperSonics, Hartford Whalers and Hockey, all those
teams are gone. We've seen teams move multiple times. The
Raiders have moved from Oakland to La back to Oakland
(25:41):
to Vegas. The Chargers have moved. Oklahoma City was born
from the Sonics. I mean, there's been a lot of
name changes and relocations. The Charlotte Hornets became the Pelicans,
and Washington Bullets are no more, the Redskins, the Guardians
all that. But anyway, so college football for your your
(26:05):
you're home, so you'll be watching later today, Danny.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yes, yeah, exactly a lot of college football today.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I'll be watching as well. In baseball, most everything I
care about is decide, although we don't know the matchups yet,
and whether the Dodgers will end up with the number
one seed or the Phillies will have the number one seed,
all that kind of stuff. And then next week the
baseball playoffs. And we have a wonderful rest of your Saturday,
(26:34):
and we've got the mail bag tomorrow. We'll talk to
you next time later.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Skater by Fallacious
Kabooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old Republic, a soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Right now in the air ywhere and a Happy Saturday?
Idiot is National Ask a Stupid Question Day? And it
is the Fifth Hour with Me Ben Maller and Danny
G Radio as we were back at it on a
(00:46):
college football kind of a Saturday. Hello, Danny G Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Where do babies come from?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I cannot answer that question. I cannot Why are we here?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Why is the sky blue? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
What is it the very top of the world? Why
can't we go there?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Danny?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
What is going on?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
My mom told me that when I was a toddler,
I would ask her questions like that and she is like,
stop asking me. Shit, I don't know the answer to.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Did we actually go to the moon?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Danny? Maybe?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Is the earth flat? Is it round? Is it hollow?
I need to know Danny, I need to know the
answers to these questions. On this podcast, we will have
straight A's stormwatch a Gangsters Paradise, much other random random
(01:44):
observations from the last few days, as we are known
to do on this podcast, but I thought we'd start
with this. Back on Thursday, Danny, they played the final
game ever in Oakland. There will never be another baseball
team likely in Oakland again. The Athletics played and there
(02:04):
was some vandalism, but it wasn't nearly like what we
thought was going to be. It was rather rather controlled.
Of course, the Oakland Police had like one hundred and
fifty officers or something like that out there. They had
six hundred security guards. I mean, it was over the top,
(02:26):
but I watched some of it. I was busy. I
couldn't watch the whole game, but I watched some of it.
And I'm not an A's fan. I talked about it
on the Overnight Show a little bit, but it just
bums me out when these teams relocate and it just
seems so unnecessary to me. I don't run the business
(02:47):
side of these things, but it just seems like they
really effed it up. And I had some stories some
I wanted to share here about my experience with the A's.
I was a radio stringer way back way back in
the day, many many years ago, when I was starting
out in radio, one of my first jobs. And so
(03:08):
back in those days before the Internet, in the Stone Age,
they would use a reporter to call in and you
have updates on the game and to get audio after
the game. So I did that for several years before
I became a talk show host full time, and in
that time I covered the Dodgers and the Angels and
all the teams in LA and I got a phone
(03:30):
call from some executive for the Oakland Athletics. It's probably
the late nineties, I forget exactly what year, but he's like, Hey,
we're looking for somebody in Anaheim to do this thing.
We were a sponsor and we want a live update
from the Big A when the A's are on the
(03:53):
West Coast. So I was like, yeah, I mean I'll
do it. It's a paying gig. Of course I'll do it.
And so I did that for a couple of years.
It was called the Coca Cola like Road Report or
something like that. It was like PEPSI was the sponsor
and It was a long time ago, but I got
(04:14):
a check every month from the Oakland Athletics and it
was it was you know when you get those checks, Danny,
you don't want to actually spend the money because it's
so cool to have the actual paper check. Well, it
wasn't a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Of money, it wasn't hard to save it.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Then well, they don't even have checks like this anymore.
It was it was just a check that had the
Oakland A's logo on it and it said from the
Oakland Baseball Club or whatever. And so I like, well, man,
I'm on the A's payroll. I mean, this is all
eighty nine cents. Yeah, I'm getting like, you know, fifty
bucks a game or something like that. But whatever it was,
(04:52):
and I don't even think it was that much. So
I did it and then became kind of friendly with
some of the guys worked on the broadcast. And so
then when the A's would come to Anaheim, I would
hang out in the A's broadcast booth. They would they
would welcome me in, and it was really just a
(05:12):
wonderful experience as a radio nerd to see how the
broadcasts were done. And I had heard as a kid
and I thought I was gonna be Ben Scully, but
I would listen to far away broadcasts of different different teams,
and I would get the Giants out of the Bay Area.
Every once in a while, I could scan the AM
(05:33):
dial and find a grainy, faraway feed of the Athletics,
but it wasn't normally from Oakland. It was like a
station in Fresno or something would come in where I live.
So I heard Bill King. I had heard him a
lot on NFL films from his work with the Raiders,
(05:54):
but he was a by play guy for the Athletics,
and I met him and hung out with him off
and on when I was at those games. And Ken Korak.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah there was also Ray Fosse. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Ray was doing TV at that time, so I was
in the radio booth. But it was It was great,
and I have one of my favorite stories, just absolutely crazy.
It was an August game in Anaheim, very hot. The
A's were not a playoff team, the Angels were not
(06:30):
a playoff team, so I'm The way it worked is
the broadcasters sat in the front row and I sat
in the second row, and I had the stats and
the scores out of town scoreboard before before the internet again,
So I was updating the scoreboard for the guy who
dubbed it. So I'm sitting there and it's like the
I know, it was the third inning. They were switching
(06:52):
broadcast role, so it was like the end of the
third inning, and then ken Korak was going to take over.
So Bill King gets up and he walks up a
couple of stairs behind me, and there's a lot of
room there and and ken Korak jokingly said, well, Bill's
(07:13):
going to get down to his underwear now, and I thought, well,
that's funny, you know, that's that's pretty funny. And hand
to God Bill King. And he was an old man
at that, I mean, he didn't live much longer than that.
I don't know when he passed away, but you know,
it was the ninety So he took off his pants.
I think he had shorts on. Actually, whatever he wanted,
(07:36):
he took it off. And he walked back down to
sit next to Ken and he was in his tidy whities,
and it was it was wild. Wow, he really did it.
That's that's nuts. But a very nice man lived on
a boat, I think in in northern California somewhere, so
that's my experience. But and I went to a few
(07:58):
as games, not many. And now you were I think, Nanny,
you were there much more than I was. I mean,
you were you spent time in the Bay right when
you were growing up.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
My mom went from Massachusetts to San Jose with her family,
as I've talked about before, met my dad in high
school there in San Jose, and then came down here
together in Thousand Oaks, California. And then they bought a
house in Simi Valley before moving to Woodland Hills, so
they would go to Dodger games. But then they found
out something about southern California. Ben, even back then you
(08:30):
could sell your house and make a lot of money
from it. Absolutely, my mom was telling my dad, I
want to go back up to the Bay. Ben, I'm
not kidding you. My mom and dad moved back and
forth from the Bay to LA I can't even count
on two hands. Got to go to my first Dodger
game listening to Vince Scully when I was in kindergarten,
(08:51):
really into baseball. When I was twelve, me and my
older brother would convince our older friend Dion Hawes. Probably
you two when you were kid, you had like that
one older friend who had a car. Yeah, we would
convince Dion to drive us to Oakland for A's baseball
because even though we were Dodger fans and that's what
(09:11):
we really knew as youngsters, that was the closest team.
We hated the San Francisco Giants, obviously being Dodgers fans,
but the Oakland A's were okay with us because, you know,
in our region we had the modesto as we got
to see Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco come through. I
have an old picture where I I'm posing with a
(09:34):
young Jose Conseco joja By. It was so fun to
see these guys blossom into major league players in Oakland.
So we would we would beg Dion, please take us
to an Oakland game, and once in a while he'd
be like, all right, you guys, pay for gas and
(09:54):
I'll take you.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, wasn't that expensive back then.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Not at all. And Dion was one of those cool
kids where he was just a few years older than us.
He had a nice pickup truck and he had a
booming system in it. Whenever he would pull up to
our house, he'd be bumping some Eric b and rock him.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Come on, Pippin, get your tims on.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
My older brother and I we were in kind of
a weird position being Dodgers fans. But you know, baseball
is very regional, and especially back then, as you know, Ben,
we couldn't unless we were surfing the am doll like
you late at night with an antenna trying to pick
up games and other cities. You weren't getting coverage of
(10:37):
other Major League Baseball teams the way you were your
local team.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, it was like a stone age. Like I told
younger people, I'm like, well, I to see, like the
Toronto Blue Jays. I had to watch this week in
baseball and maybe they would show a highlight of the
Toronto Blue Jays.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Maybe you know it.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It was on sat like Saturday morning, it would be
this week in baseball.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
That's exactly true. If you tried to explain that to
a kid right now, they wouldn't understand at all. So
it was a strange thing. It was like, Eh, we're
not exactly A's fans, but by family, we're kind of
related to the A's. And we get to the Oakland
Coliseum in nineteen eighty seven, one of the first A's
games that we attended very late in the year, and
(11:22):
in fact, it was Reggie Jackson's final home game playing
in Oakland.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh wow, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
It was very cool now think about it. Reggie Jackson
was literally on his last leg, but he was one
of those guys where, even though he was an old
player at the time, whenever he would come up to
the plate, it was very special because man, he could
hit a home run, still has power to hit it out.
(11:51):
That's exactly what happened on this night. My older brother,
i think, wanted to make this game count. We didn't
get to go to very many baseball games in general,
and so he looked around, elbows me and he starts
a Reggie chant in our section. Okay, And it starts out,
you know, just him, It's just my brother doing it,
(12:12):
and he won't shut up. He's one of those annoying
kids in the stands who's trying to get everybody else
in the stands to follow him.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
The little annoying kids where you're like, shut up.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And my older brother finally gets our section into it,
and our section now is chanting Reggie. Then the section
next to us picks up on it and they go
and it was kind of like the wave because the
next thing you know, the entire stadium is chanting Reggie's
name and Ben that at bat, Reggie knocks one out.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Unbelievable. Reggie was bigger than life and all at the
end of his career. At that time, he was like
one of the biggest stars in baseball. And now have
you seen those photos of like Reggie Jackson next to
the modern slugger, he looks like a backup infielder. But
when we were younger, I mean, he's amazing. Oh yeah,
(13:10):
Reggie Jackson.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah, And I mean at this point of his life,
he was like a balding, kind of had a little
bit of a bare belly. Yeah, he looked like a
former player already, even though he was still in a
major league uniform.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
But Ricky Henderson said about the A's leaving Oakland, he
was asked if he was sad about it, and he said,
this is such a classic quote by Ricky Henderson. He says,
I have too much money to be sad about the
A's leaving leaving Oakland. Isn't that not on brand? You're
an ass hat?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I'm sure other people saw what Jeff Passen wrote the
other day saying the Oakland A's were killed by greed.
Don't allow the people responsible for this to spin it
any other way. John Fisher did not have to move
the team. Major League Baseball and it's owners did not
need to be complicit in it. This was a choice,
(14:06):
a wrong one. History will sneer.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Well, what is He's going to make a lot of
money going to Vegas eventually, But I yeah, I agree
with the premise. The A's did not have to leave.
From what I read, Baseball was going to cut off
essentially all the welfare they were getting, right, That's why
they left. They had to announce they were leaving because
they weren't going to get the money from revenue sharing,
(14:29):
and so that's why they did this when they did it.
But yeah, why would Vegas is a great town. I
love Vegas. I go to Vegas a lot, But Oakland,
in the Bay Area, there's more people that live there.
It's a bigger media market by far than Las Vegas.
So from that standpoint in terms of television and all
(14:52):
those things, it is a downgrade. We'll see how it
plays out, But yeah, I agree, it didn't have to.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Happen, so didn't have to happen. The only one thing
I will say, and we've talked about this on our
podcast before, it is pretty pathetic how they have let
the city there in the flats of Oakland rot. And
we've seen over the past couple of weeks people mention
on their way to Oakland to go to one final
game how they were disgusted by what it looks like
(15:22):
surrounding the stadium there.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Well, I had a call from Lance, the bus driver
this week. Lance called up. His car was stolen from
San Francisco, he lives there. He tracked it to a
neighborhood in Oakland. So calls the cops. He says, I
know where my car is, and since it was parked
in a garage, they said, well, there's nothing we can do.
(15:46):
He said, well, I know where it is. I know
exactly where the car is. And they wouldn't help him
at all. And so Lance thinks they're going to use
his car in one of those neighborhood takeovers, you know
where they take over the intersection and they ride their
carton circles and burnouts and all that.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
And so, I mean, besides them losing their their sports
teams there.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
In and out Burger right, they've.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Lost, Oh, they've lost restaurants and businesses to crime. It's
kind of like the wild Wild West.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It's it's it's pretty bad now. The gangster's Paradise. I'll
make this quick. But last weekend, Danny a fortieth birthday
party for a friend of the wife. And when it's
a friend of the wife, it's a friend of you.
So I was dragged to Dave and Busters.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Have you you've.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Been to David Busters right over the years.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yeah, Oh yeah. We take the kids there sometimes for
their birthday celebrations. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
So they were having a big birthday party and they
wanted to go to one in a different part of LA,
but it was all booked up. So they said, all right,
let's let's go out to Ontario, in the Inland Empire
in southern California, the Ontario Mills Mall. I think it's fall,
so we we it's pretty far from what we are.
(17:10):
We drove out there and a little rough, Danny, a
little rough. It was, you know, it was a gangster's
paradise kind of set up. There were a lot of
shady looking people playing the games, and hey, the Eastern Own.
As long as they don't bother me whatever, I don't care.
So they had reserved a table, but we actually when
(17:31):
we got there, the table wasn't ready because there was
a party. They told us one of the people in
our party that the table that we were supposed to
get the party had been there for seven hours at
the table at a daven Busters seven hours.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
What do you do there for seven hours?
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I don't know. I have no idea. So we finally
got a table and we had a group. There were
probably about twelve of us all together, and we're eating,
we're enjoying. You know, the food was really not very good,
but we ate and pretended to like it and all
that stuff. It's terrible. So whatever I was invited, I said, right,
(18:21):
I'll go. And so then our waitress or a waiter
comes over and there was another party right across from us,
and she's she's in a bad mood, the waitress, and
I said, oh, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Shocker?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Apparently the group, and this was a group probably twelve
to fifteen people, grandma, mom, dads, kids, little kids. They
had eaten for about two hours and then left without
paying their bill. They just took off and they didn't.
(19:00):
They didn't pay their bill. We're not paying and they
didn't eve say any in these percent like they were
going to play games, and then they left. What are
you doing? And this was a this had to be
a ton of money, right. They were drinking alcohol, they
had everything.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So I got a bunch of losers.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I know, it's like wild and you were allowed to
do that in California. I think they don't really care,
but yeah, it was. It was interesting that I had
a good time playing the games. I didn't play too many,
but but I mentioned yesterday on the podcast that I
was watching the storm in the South through Florida and
Carolina's and Georgia and then on the way up. And
(19:40):
you've also been on storm Watch, right, Danny, this actually
affected you more than me.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, it's weird. I've never followed a hurricane or tracked
one before where it affected me because of where we live, obviously,
but in this case, we were set on the CNR
show to broadcast live from the graduate at Hotels and Burn, Alabama,
and it was supposed to be the pregame to the
pregame to the game day the day before their big
(20:07):
game was going to be you know, a lot of
b Auburn fans, a lot of OU fans there in attendance,
as well as you know, people in the region who
listened to the Coveno and Rich show. There had been
a lot of fans of the show that had RSVP'd,
and the hotel was really excited to have the broadcast there.
(20:27):
And then we start looking at the travel plans and
we were scheduled to fly into Atlanta. We would have
been landing in Atlanta right as the eye of the
hurricane was over Georgia. We were tracking that to see
if it was going to change. We get to Wednesday
and Rich is pacing the halls of FSR, telling me
(20:50):
in Coveno if we should fly into the eye of
the storm. And I'm like, it's all right, dude, will
be all right, and he's like, yeah, but even if
we wouldn't we land, we're going to be driving in
it because once we got to Atlanta, we were going
to get a rental car drive for ninety minutes to
get to Auburn in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Of course, I only ninety minutes out of Atlanta. I
thought it was further.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, yeah, no, not a long drive from Atlanta, but
it would have been an interesting drive through a hurricane. Finally,
what happens is Dan Beyer live on our show does
breaking news the Braves and Mets were canceled. Uh oh,
we better talk to our boss Scott. So we do
a group chat and we tell Scott, hey, you know us,
(21:37):
we're all in, but the games are being canceled. Now.
Not sure how many of our listeners are going to
be able to attend this live broadcast. Yeah, yeah, that
was one thing. We were all focused on our travel,
obviously trying to fly into that area. But then when
we really stopped and thought about it, we were like,
wait a second, if Georgia is declaring state of emergency
(22:01):
and we're trying to fly in, aren't the other people
trying to fly out or drive out? At that point,
our boss got a hold of the client and talked
to the people in charge to the Graduate hotels, and
they decided we better call this a.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Couple of other Auburn games that you can go to.
But yeah, that's you know, because the powers out from
when I was reading the Powers out all over you
certain parts of the South, So, yeah, who's going to
leave their house? Let me go to I want to
leave my I don't have power here, but I'm gonna
take off.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Come on, man, we got FEMA passes. Well you were got.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah that's true, you were gotting the street cred.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like I still, I
was down. I was like one of the ones pushing
forward still like No, what we could do is we
could fly into Dallas and then from Dallas straight into
Birmingham and rolled up like in the Ghostbuster Mobile.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
That'd be awesome.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yeah, the hotel win would have been boarded up, but
we're still walking in with our comrades and our live
broadcast equipment.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yes, we're here to save the day with a live
radio remote right here. Yes, that's awesome. I drove in
a tropical storm when I was back in Vermont, when
I was in Boston a couple months ago, and that
wasn't a hurricane, and that was pretty wild. The road
(23:25):
was flooding a little bit, it was dark, there were
no lights. I can only imagine what a hurricane would
be like with the power out on those old country
roads in the South where there's just nothing for miles
and miles and miles, And I mean that would be
like a horror film, wouldn't it, Danny, wouldn't you think?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Oh for sure, And we're hoping and praying that everybody
in that part of the country stays safe. At the
time we're taping this. I'm not sure what's going to
happen with the football games, but baseball was canceled.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Major League Baseball. If they'd been pro active, they could
have had the Braves play on Monday and yep, earlier
on Wednesday, and then they would have gotten the games in.
But they didn't do that. So now they're gonna play
a doubleheader on Monday most I guess that's going to
happen now, And whoever wins the playoff spot, it doesn't
really matter, Danny, because their pitching staff is going to
(24:18):
be shredded from having to play all those games.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
But they oh yeah, trust me. Rich Davis, who's a
big Mets fan, he had a take on the air
saying that this was actually an advantage for the Mets
because of how it affected the Braves pitching staff.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
That's one way to look at it.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's hopeful thinking by a Mets fan.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, wishful thinking by a Mets which is usually the opposite.
Usually the Mets fans were porked. You know, we were done,
we can't win and all that. All right, I have
some other stuff. I think I'll save it for tomorrow
the mailbag if I remember, and.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Now, and I'm glad we got to reminisce a little
bit about the Oakland A's because it is an emotional
thing for sports fans. You know. I saw one of
their broadcasters tearing up. You probably saw that video too. Yeah,
the post game guys and bit was in tears and
their dude next to them was choked up as he
was saying goodbye. And it's really weird. It's like a
(25:15):
piece of our childhood going to the wayside.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah, we're getting older. We've seen a lot of teams relocate.
Like I was saying about the other day, the Montreal
Expose gone, Seattle SuperSonics, Hartford Whalers and Hockey, all those
teams are gone. We've seen teams move multiple times. The
Raiders have moved from Oakland to La back to Oakland
(25:41):
to Vegas. The Chargers have moved. Oklahoma City was born
from the Sonics. I mean, there's been a lot of
name changes and relocations. The Charlotte Hornets became the Pelicans,
and Washington Bullets are no more, the Redskins, the Guardians
all that. But anyway, so college football for your your
(26:05):
you're home, so you'll be watching later today, Danny.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yes, yeah, exactly a lot of college football today.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I'll be watching as well. In baseball, most everything I
care about is decide, although we don't know the matchups yet,
and whether the Dodgers will end up with the number
one seed or the Phillies will have the number one seed,
all that kind of stuff. And then next week the
baseball playoffs. And we have a wonderful rest of your Saturday,
(26:34):
and we've got the mail bag tomorrow. We'll talk to
you next time later.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Skater by Fallacious
Fox Sports Radio News
Host
Jonas Knox
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