September 19, 2025 • 59 mins
Denny Matthews concludes his 57th year as the voice of the Royals with Sunday's final home game, a perfect opportunity to enjoy the Profile chat we did a few years back. The sound of summer for Kansas City baseball fans and Baseball Hall of Famer tells his own story with his usual dry wit and amiable detail.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Danny Clinkscale, Reasonably irreverent podcast, insightful and
witty commentary, probing interviews and detours from the beaten Path.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Welcome to Kansas City Profiles, presented by Easton Roofing. The
word iconic is probably wildly overused, and maybe it's been
rather overused as far as this particular podcast is concerned,
but there's no question that Denny Matthews is the iconic
baseball announcer for the Kansas City Royals. A Baseball Hall
of Famer, a member of multiple Halls of Fame, Denny
(00:37):
Matthews has been one of the Royals announcers and the
lead announcer for most of the Kansas City Royal since
their very inception. He got a baseball job just a
couple of years after college, after never having called a
baseball game before technically a real baseball game on the radio.
Certainly his resume was called at a Major League baseball park,
(00:57):
and we'll get into that. But he has seen the
Royals go through rather quickly good times than a lengthy
period of bad times, and then the good times once
again and then got it back to the bad. He
has seen it all and called it all in his
own inimitable style. He is playing and straightforward. He is
somebody who knows the game so well, having played it.
He played college football with never having played high school football.
(01:19):
He's done a string of remarkable things in his career,
all the while keeping himself as a rather private person
here in Kansas City. For somebody who is so important
and such an integral part of the sports scene of
Kansas City. He tells great stories, he is amiable, he's funny,
and it's an absolute pleasure to have Denny Matthews as
my guest on Kansas City Profiles, presented by Easton Roofing.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
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You were born in Jacksonville, Florida, but moved early on
(04:31):
to Bloomington, Illinois. What are your very first memories of
being little? Denny Matthews.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
I don't remember anything about Florida because I was taken
away by my parents who grew up in Illinois. So
I was there six weeks, so very few memories of Jacksonville,
I would think, not.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
So what are your first memories of Bloomington.
Speaker 6 (04:55):
Well, my dad was in the service, he was in
the Navy, and he came back after about a year,
and of course I had no idea who he was,
why he was there, but lived with my mom, my grandparents,
her mom and dad, and I remember those flashes of
memory from oh, probably three years old, maybe two and
(05:18):
a half, three, three and a half. My grandfather worked
on the railroad and he was an engineer in the
yards in Bloomington, and every once in a while, my
grandmother would take me down to the train yard and
he was a switch engineer, and he would come across
the tracks, pick me up, take me back to the engine.
He'd hand me up to the fireman in the cab
(05:39):
of the diesel and I'd ride around with him for
an hour. And of course, when you're four or five
six years old, that's the.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Big leagues, absolutely the case. When did you start to
get your interest in sports?
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Well, when my dad came back from the service, and
again I'm four four and a half. He was a
basketball and baseball player excuse me, at Illinois State University.
In fact, he was the first All American baseball player
at Illinois State University and had a chance to sign
(06:16):
with either the White Sox or the Cincinnati Reds. But
then something called World War Two came along and that
kind of took care of that.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
And obviously he was a very good athlete, so he
passed some of that along to him. Was so you're
was it a natural thing for you? Did you like it?
Did he I'm not saying force you, but did he
encourage you?
Speaker 6 (06:41):
Yeah, very much. Baseball, basketball, everything in season and three
younger brothers, and he taught really all four of us
how to play the game, especially a Baseball and basketball
were his two specialties, So all four of us grew
up in a sports atmosphere, so to speak, and he
(07:02):
was very supportive. He was as you say, and I
wish I could have seen him play that It was impossible,
but a good athlete to play at a college of
that stature in both baseball and basketball and really be
praised for his baseball acumen and ability.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Both of your parents worked worked for State Farm Insurance.
How would you describe their relationship.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Well, they met. My dad grew up in Danville, Illinois,
came to Bloomington Normal for college at Illinois State. At
the time it was Illinois State and Normal University. Bloomington
Normal or Twin City is separated by only a street
and much like state line here in our area. But
they met when he was in college. My mom was
(07:50):
I think three years younger and married and I was
the first of four to come along, all boys. But
they had a great relationship. My mom was always very
blunt and to the point my dad was scaring enough,
but very supportive. They both were supportive, obviously of all
of our endeavors and it was really a very enjoyable childhood.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I would say, obviously it's a college town that's pretty
big school probably obviously not quite as big then. But
what was what was it like growing up in the
forties in Bloomington.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
Well, Elinois State was in normal Elini Westland, where I
ended up, was in Bloomington and again separated only by
a boulevard and a city division street of all things.
Someone very cleverly named the division Street to separate the
two little towns, and it's pretty creative, right, Yeah, But
(08:53):
Elini west and Ilinois State had a great rivalry in
all sports. Then subsequently in the sixth these, when I
was involved a year after my final year of football
at Illinois Westland, where they didn't play football anymore, Illinois
State was about twenty six twenty seven thousand in only
Westland was still about thirteen hundred students. Here was quite
(09:17):
a difference. So they still played basketball and very competitively,
and to this day still compete in baseball.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
You did something pretty darn unusual, is you played college
football and you didn't even play high school football. Is
that correct?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
That is correct? I was. I played baseball and basketball
in high school, but I just felt like I was
too small to play football. And as I got into college,
I became very good friends with Vic Armstrong, who was
a quarterback at Illinois Westland. And by that time I
had kind of grown out of my childhood in a sense,
(09:55):
and I was well I ten one seventy. I used
to watch college and pro football and TV, and I
always like to watch the wide receivers. Elleno Westland never
had a wide receiver offense until Vick had a great
arm was the quarterback, and he and I worked together
(10:17):
at State Farm Employees Park in the summer. We had
our summer job, three month job, and we'd talk and
play catch with a football, and he told me one day,
we're going to go to a wide receiver offense, and
when we play catch, you catch everything, and why don't
you come out? And in the back of my mind,
(10:38):
oddly enough, before he had even said that, I had
thought that that it might be fun, it might work.
Who knows, like you said, I never played high school football,
so there was no basis of comparison. I had no
idea what it would be like. But I did went
out and Dick and I had a great relationship. He
(10:59):
finished at eleventh in passing. I was eighth in past
receiving small college, and it was a good tandement worked out.
It was great fun and I still could play baseball,
and I started to broadcast some sports on the local
(11:19):
radio station in between football and baseball seasons during my
sophomore year in school. In college, how would.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You describe yourself as a baseball player?
Speaker 6 (11:34):
Well, pretty good. I was left handed. Infield or second
base was my position. I worked out after my first
year in college with the San Francisco Giants farm team
in Decatur, Illinois. Geene Thompson was the area scout for
the Giants at the time, and he scouted our games
(11:57):
in the central part of Illinois, and he invited me
to come down to a Decatur in August of the
summer and work out, which I drove down about an
hour drive and worked out. And there was another player
there working out who went to school Indicator Saint Teresa
(12:17):
High School of Decatur, who later became a Big leaguer.
His name was del Uncer, who was a good outfielder
played in the Big League for a number of years,
and they worked both of us out, and Dell subsequently
signed a professional contract I went home and Geenet invited
me to come back and work out. This was in
(12:40):
mid August of the summer, and I had decided to
play football. That was my sophomore year. I was going
to go out and play football or try for the
first time. And my dad said, well, he said, look
at it this way. You're all jazz stuff about playing football,
so it'd be silly to sign there at the end
of their minor league season anyway, And if you play
(13:01):
baseball at Illinois Westley and you're good enough in three
years from now, if you're still you know, a decent
player and they think you are, why, you might have
that chance. So that was fun. That was an interesting
There were two guys that I worked out with who
were playing for the Giant's farm team that year. Was
He was an outfielder pitcher, great big guy named Ollie
(13:23):
Brown who was a good big leaguer. And then Tito Flintis,
who was a longtime big league infielder and I worked
out together at second base. We had no idea obviously
that he was going to be in the big leagues eventually.
But the one thing that stood out for me working
out with Tito was he had about one hundred and
(13:43):
twelve pounds of chains around his neck, and when we
were fielding ground balls, I was saying for jangling and
rattling Rod, I'm thinking, how can you feel ground balls
with all that jewelry around you and all those noises?
And he turned out to be pretty good and I
never did get any next change.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Your college sort of mate in the middle infield was
Doug Rader, right, is that correct?
Speaker 6 (14:08):
Yeah? After two years, Doug played short, I played second,
and he signed with the Houston Astros after his sophomore year.
And yeah, he was a terrific college player. Obviously, big
tall guy. He was kind of skinny at Westland, but
he sure grew into that body. He was about six three,
(14:29):
could run well, great arm, and a good hitter. I know.
We played Overton Notre Dame one Saturday afternoon. He got
hit on the wrist and it broke his wrist, So
that was kind of a blow. But yeah, they were
all over him, all the scouts from different teams. I
knew all about him, and it was just taken for
(14:50):
granted that after that second year at Westland he was
going to sign with the Astros.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
So you mentioned that between playing football and football and
baseb ball, you spent some of those short months doing
some broadcasting. How did that develop for you?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I know, you know in reading a lot of stuff
about you that you just loved listening to the radio
and being in the Midwest you could hear all kinds
of different broadcasts, particularly at night. And was that something
that was there ever an inkling that that was something
you wanted to do? With that develop in college?
Speaker 6 (15:21):
Yeah? That came in college, because I think when you're
in high school, I'm even into college, you're more concerned
with playing than you are with broadcasting. I mean, that
was well down on the list probably. But the athletic
director ATLI westl And Jack Hornberger, was very good friends
with the sports and news director at WJBC, the very
(15:42):
good local radio station in Bloomington, and Jack told Don
Neuburg that he thought that I might be interested in broadcasting.
And there were four high schools and the two colleges
in the Twin Cities at the time, and they did
a lot of basketball high school and of course the
two college and they didn't have a large staff, and
(16:02):
they were always looking for two or three people to
kind of fill in on the on the basketball broadcast.
They might even have as many as three games in
one night. They do one live and then type record
the other two play those after the live broadcast and
U So Don Neuberg came out to west Land and
(16:23):
we sat down and he said, Jack Cortereer told me
that you might be interested in broadcasting, and I said, well, yeah, yeah,
it'd be fun. I guess nothing about it, but you're right.
I used to listen to all the all the baseball games,
and I'd flip around during the nighttime hours, and in
that locale in central Illinois, we could get a lot
(16:45):
of the broadcast. But WJBC, the hometown radio station, was
a Cardinal affiliate, had been for a while and to
this day they still are. And so it was Jack
Buckerry Carey, Joe graigi Olda for a couple of years,
and hot summer night I'd play by the radio there
in the living room and just listen to the games,
(17:07):
and really no thought of broadcasting. But later on I
realized that I was getting a pretty good education sublimberly,
I guess you could say, just listening to those guys
describe baseball. And so it was almost like having a
college course, I think laying there and listening to the
(17:29):
games I have to do any homework, that was one
good thing about it. But I think I was learning
some pretty good lessons from some pretty darn good broadcasters.
Now we could get the Chicago guys too, so yeah,
it was good and we were in a good location
for that.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
When you finished college, you still did have an opportunity
to play professionally, But at this point you had to
make a sort of a life decision, I guess. And
it's a funny story. Eventually that Buddy Blattner told you
that you actually had a better chance to play professional
baseball than be a major league announcer because of the
amount of jobs. But how did you decide to make
the decision at that point in time and maybe not
(18:05):
pursue professional baseball at least for a little while.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Well, by that time, I was pretty enamored with broadcasting,
and I figured, you know, that might be a kind
of a cool job if you could podcast for a
major league baseball team. I had no idea. I was
so naive that there were, you know, hundreds of guys
trying to do the same thing, I guess, But as well,
I could have it by the Royals were born in
sixty nine, and I went back to work at State
(18:34):
Farm after I got out of college for a few months,
and then had a chance to go over to WMBD
Radio NTV in Peoria, which was a bigger market and
only about forty minutes from Bloomington, and then from Peoria.
After I spent a few months there, I went down
to Saint Louis and did some TV on the weekends
at Camox TV, And while I was there, I got
(18:58):
the job with the Royals. So that was kind of
the quick transition from college to State Farm. For a
few months to I was still doing part time at WJBC,
but then I went full time in Peoria full time,
well not totally full time. I did weekends at Camweck's
TV before coming out to Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
The story of you getting that job is a pretty
remarkable thing, including the fact that you had a very
creative way to send your packaging of your interview, and
also the fact that you really hadn't done an actual
baseball game when you did some recording. When you did
the recordings that would eventually met you a major league job.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
Yeah, at the time, Danny, the Booths in both Wrigley Field,
Comiski Park Chicago and Bush Stadium in Saint Louis doing
cable TV or anything else, and most big league clubs
at that time did radio only and once in a
while maybe weekend TV games, and so there were a
lot of mp booths and WMBD in Peoria as well
(20:05):
as WJBC and Bloomington both being Cardinal affiliates. Well, I
had that in and I wrote the Cardinals and asked
him if I could bring a friend and a tape
recorder down to Saint Louis and do a game as
I was auditioning or going to for another job, and
they said, sure, come on down. So my friend Charlie Brannon,
(20:26):
and I went down to Saint Louis and set up
the recorder and I did a game and then took
it home, listened to the whole game, and then I
took I don't know, two or three half innings, which
I thought maybe were representative of the way I would
broadcast a game. I did an inning where there was
a couple of runs scored. I did and picked out
(20:48):
an inning where nothing happened and I had to kind
of fill in, and then another half inning which I
thought might be okay, and then I sent that to
them in a package, the people that were screening the
applicants for the number two job with the Royals, And
that's how I started that process.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Why don't you tell the audience what the creative way
that you tried to get some attention with the packages
that you sent to them.
Speaker 6 (21:13):
It's pretty corny that they worked. And it was a
kind of the brain child of a friend of mine
who lived in Peoria, and he said, you know those
little metal trays when you go into a bar and
the waiter waitress will bring a beer whatever your chips
(21:34):
over in a tray that has in this case, Schlitz
beer was the number one sponsor for the Royals. And
so I asked a local bar if I could have
their little tray, and they had more than one, and
it had Schlit's logo on it and appropriately enough, and
(21:56):
so I took my tape and I put a picture
and my resume on the tape, wrapped it up and
I had a little note about I hope you don't
think this is really corny. I don't think don't think
I am a bush bush leaguer meeting a minor leaguer.
Don't think I'm a bush leaguer for having done a
(22:18):
cardinal game. But this is my last pitch for the
Kansas City Royals job. Isn't that something? Wasn't that great?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Well, like you say, it worked, it did work.
Speaker 6 (22:29):
I don't know. But then I had I had an
interview with Buddy Blander. They had He told me at
one time they had about right around two hundred and
fifty applicants and for the job, and they kept whittling
them down through the summer through the fall, and then
now we're into the late fall. And he called and
he said, would you come down to Saint Louis and
(22:52):
we'll sit down. And he had a real nice finished
basement with a little bar, and he said we'll have
a some pizza and just sit around a chat. And
I said, yeah, it sounds like fine. And he said,
why don't you come down around get down here around
fourst about a two and a half three hour drive
from Boomington. He said, get down here about four and
we'll just go down to the basement and they'll have
a you know, chat. Sounded good, So I told my dad.
(23:13):
I said all right, and he was excited about it.
Who wasn't. I was kind of thrilled, but I had
known about Buddy Blattner obviously, he was a national broadcaster
of no ill repute, and so I told my dad.
I said, okay, I'm gonna I'll be down there about
four and then I figured. We talked for you know,
two three hours, and I said I'll be home by ten,
(23:34):
and went down and we sat there and we talked
and we talked and we talked, and it was four
or four thirty in the morning, and Buddy said, well,
I said, well, I said, better to be going. He said, well,
he said, I just stay here and you know, get
up in the morning and drive back. And I said, now,
I said, I'll go back. So we talked for a
while longer, and then about seven in the morning, I
(23:57):
finally so that was up, and I jumped to my
car and made the two and a half three hour
drive back to Bloomington, and they pulled into the drive by.
My dad was doing something in the grind. I got
out of the car and I said, I told you
i'd be home by ten. They a Saturday or not
Friday night, You must have.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Felt like you had a pretty good chance at the job.
Then if you spoke to the man for twelve hours
or more than that.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
Yeah, Yeah, we just hit it off, and I obviously
admired him, and he was a great storyteller. And I'm
not sure I said all that. He sat there and
listened to some great stories and we had some laughs,
and it was it was an evening, of course, into
the wee hours of the morning. I'll never forget, but
(24:46):
you're right. I had a really nice feeling about it
when when I got home on that Saturday morning and
then Tuesday night, why they called from the agency, wouldn't buddy,
but they called from the agency, and the guy said,
I guess you know you got the Royals job. And
I said, no, I didn't know that, but thanks for
doing me. It's good to know. About about two weeks later,
(25:10):
I came out and signed the contract with the Royals,
and away we went.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
The rest is history, As they say, do you have
Did you at the time have any sense how amazing
it was that you got that job over all those
all those contestants, at your age, in those circumstances, it's amazing.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Yeah, And no I didn't. I had I had no clue.
Like I said, I was pretty naive about the whole thing,
but I just kind of did it on the ark.
I thought, well, make a tape, and the buddy said.
I asked him later when we were working together, and
you know, we really knew each other, and I said,
why did you pick me? I know there were a
(25:54):
lot of guys and he said, well, we had applications
from everywhere. He said, guys were doing recreatations and their basement.
Guys were making things up and going out and doing
a high school game. He said, we had tapes of
every kind from everywhere. And he said, but two or
three things really stood out when we listened to your tape.
He said, number one, you were applying for a major
(26:15):
league job. And he took the time in the trouble
to go to Saint Louis and tape a major league game.
And he said number two, he said, I knew you
had played. He said, I could tell that you knew
the game. He said, even strategically and talking about different plays,
why that play worked, why that play didn't. That you
had played and you had a good feel for that,
(26:35):
and he said number three, he said, you were very young,
and he said, it's a brand new team. He was
my dad's age, and he said, I just thought it
would be good to get a young guy. And his
idea was to work for another four five six years
or was a definitive number, but he was looking at retirement.
(26:57):
And he said, I can kind of you know you
the ropes, introduce you to people, bring you along. And
he was true to his word, and he taught me
a lot about the fundamentals of putting together a Major
League Baseball broadcast. And he was a great teacher. He
was a great, great tutor, and we got along great
and I obviously tried to learn a lot from him,
(27:21):
and hopefully I did.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It was the time when basically one person would do,
you know, the innings, and the other person would do
the innings, and there, you know, there wasn't a lot
of talking back and forth. But he liked to have
you listen. There didn't he.
Speaker 6 (27:35):
Yeah, that was we'd go out and have pizza. This
is spring training now, my first year, and once twice
a week we didn't go out and have pizza and talk.
And he said, there's one thing that you have to do,
and he said that is concentrate. He said, you have
to listen to everything I say because I'm going to
do the first two innings, you'll do the next two.
And I didn't want you repeating exactly what I said
(27:57):
in the first two innings and your two innings he said,
do it sound awful? And he said, I want you
to develop your own style. I want you to do
the game the way you want to do it. He said,
don't think you have to do an imitation of me,
because if you try to imitate me, what we'll get
is a crumming imitation to me. He said, I want
you to do the game the way you want to
(28:18):
do it. And I thought, you know what, that makes
a lot of sense. That sounds pretty good. So he
also said, if you want to talk back and forth
during your innings, we can do that. If you want
to jump in when I'm on the air doing play
by play, please do. He said, you'll see things that
I don't. I'll see things that you don't, and we
(28:38):
can compress that into a nice informative broadcast. But his
basic rule was I'm here for you, but I'm going
to stay out of your way when it's your three innings.
I did three, four and seven. When it's your innings.
If you don't want to talk to me or you
want to have a conversation. Fine, if you want to, fine,
(29:02):
but I'm not going to press you. I'm not going
to jump onto every other thing you say. I'm going
to get out of your way. That you develop the
way you want to develop and do the game the
way you want to do it. And I thought that
was a pretty good strategy.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Did you feel like, when you think back, that you
basically had your style pretty much from the start? Did
you Obviously you're going to refine things and learn things,
there's no question about that. But did you feel like
pretty early on that you had a handle on how
you wanted to broadcast a baseball game.
Speaker 6 (29:39):
That's a good question. I don't know. I've never thought
of that. I think what evolved was over time, you
do evolve into what you do, and it changes. I mean,
there's going to be subtle changes. I think we all
go through that and every aspect of the business. I'm
sure you will say the same thing. You've evolved in
(29:59):
the way you things from the time you started, and
I think that was true with me. And you get
into a comfort zone you do you do it the
way you feel most comfortable and where you can be
the most informative. Obviously, the thing I've always focused on
is just absolutely detail. Describe the play. That's that's the
(30:23):
main job of what we do is to describe the
play on radio, paint the word picture and be as
accurate as you possibly can. And there are several elements
that follow that you have to Bud he always said, well,
you have to you have to entertain. But he said, I,
if you're going to be a real good radio baseball broadcaster,
(30:46):
not only do you have to tell the audience what happened, now,
you have to tell him how it happened and why
it happened. And so. In other words, he was telling
me you not only have to be your play by
play guy, You've got to be your own analyst. And
aside from Bud, with rare exceptions, I've never worked with
(31:09):
anybody who had played baseball that much. Certainly no major
league player in the broadcast booth. Now. John Watton very
briefly worked on the radio side. Paul Splittorff I did
some of the Royals playoff games starting in eighty five.
(31:32):
We did some of the Royals broadcasts together. But aside
from that, I've never had an ex player sitting beside
me in the booth. So I've had to not only
do the play by play, I've also had to analyze,
not only tell them what happened, but tell them how
and why.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
What was life for you like away from baseball and
you're you know, you're in you're a young man, you're
in your twenties. The Royals got good pretty fast, So
that's an aspect we don't really have to visit that
you didn't have to do a lot of bad baseball
that would that would come later. But well, yeah, what
was it like moving to Kansas City?
Speaker 6 (32:08):
You know?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
As a young man away from.
Speaker 6 (32:11):
Base that was great. I was the same age as
the players. In fact, quite a few of the players
were older than I when I started, and so I
developed very good friendships and relationships with them. And rather
than hang out with the manager and the coaches who
were much older. And Buddy was my dad's age, and
(32:32):
they would they would socialize, but he was great friends
with some of the Royal managers and a lot of
the coaches, and they'd go out and do their thing,
and I'd go with the players and do our thing.
And the funny thing happened though after about twenty twenty
five years, so I got older, but the players didn't
(32:53):
all of a sudden, I'm where buddy was when I started,
so and that changed and so on that It was
great when I was that age and away from home
for the first time and no worries in the world.
And I had been a couple of the big league ballparks,
but not many, but West Coast, East Coast. I got
(33:15):
to see all those for the first time. So yeah,
it was a great ride for a lot of years.
And I had had some wonderful relationships and friendships with
a lot of the players. Marty Patten, who pitched for
the Royals. He and I knew each other from high school,
college and junior legion summer ball because we had played
(33:38):
against each other quite a few times. And of course
I knew Marty and we became really good friends there.
But so many of the guys who were basically my
age really formed a nice friendship and bond with What
did you.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Like to do away from baseball as a young man
for like hobbies or things that you know, How did
you spend your.
Speaker 6 (34:00):
Time well off season? Why I was involved in playing hockey.
I always enjoyed playing hockey when I got into college.
One of my buddies in college got me into playing hockey.
It's a little bit late to start that, but I
got to the point where I could play reasonably well.
(34:22):
So i'd play hockey in the wintertime and watch hockey,
and I had chances to do some football, basketball and
hockey became X called now asked me if I wanted
to do some of the Blues games on radio one year,
and I didn't. I wouldn't. I wasn't interested. And I
remember Buddy saying, well, now you're going to work your
(34:43):
tail off for seven months with your baseball job. You're
not going to have any holidays off in the summer.
You're not going to have any weekends off. And he
said to your off season is your vacation. That's your time.
He said, you've given the Royal seven months almost daily, nightly,
and he said, you do what you want to do
in the winter time. He said, if you want to
(35:05):
do other sports radio TV, I'm all for you. If
you don't, I don't blame you because he didn't do
it either, And so I took that to heart and
I thought, yeah, that's it's a long grind. The baseball
season isn't grind, no matter how you slice or cut it,
and it was nice to have time off and not
have to worry about catching a bus or getting on
(35:26):
an airplane or being at the ballpark at a certain
time every evening. So it was a nice break from that,
and I thought it was important to recharge the battery.
And they get away from it and then bloy spring
training comes along and you're ready to go again, and
that's always an exciting thing.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
The Royals, as I mentioned, you got, became a good
baseball team very quickly, and an incredible story for an
expansion team, and they were competitive within just a handful
of years, and so you would go on a long
run of doing really you know, important baseball and they
were good all the time, and this city really reacted
to it well, and the attendance was great and no doubt,
(36:08):
especially in a time when there were very few games
on television. I mean, you were the eyes and ears
of you know, thousands and thousands of fans and that
must have been a cool.
Speaker 6 (36:18):
Feeling, yeah, for sure, And it was. We had a nice,
big network all over the Midwest, and the Royals were
good from year one. Actually, the Royals. It's easy to
remember in nineteen sixty nine, the Royals first year, they
won sixty nine sixty nine wins in sixty nine, and
that's how they launched that ship and felt, excuse me,
(36:41):
fell back a little bit in year two, and then
by year three you could see that Seddry Tallis, who
was the general manager, was made some really good trades
and almost exclusively with National League teams, which was very
smart because National League was quite frankly a better league
than the American League at that time, and he got
(37:01):
some really good players. None of the National League teams
and the Royals all of a sudden after year three
and the A's were really good. The A's and Baltimore
were the two best teams of that era, and all
of a sudden during year three you could see the
development of the Royals and they were starting to chase
the A's and it only took another two or three
years before they did chase him down and go to
(37:24):
the playoffs for the first time in seventy six. So yeah,
it was. It was pretty good from the very.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Start, and it culminated with a World championship obviously in
nineteen eighty five, and you know, the rules had had
a lot of disappointment. They've been a very good team,
but their postseasons had been filled with disappointment. There was
you know, it wasn't multiple layers of playoffs then and
you know, you won your division, you played somebody else
there and you know, you know, oftentimes it was the Yankees,
(37:51):
and the big bad Yankees beat him to So when
he get when you got to eighty five and the
Royals had now been a championship caller team for a
decade and then finally hit the mountain top, maybe in
the most unusual fashion, sort of like you know the
Kansas City Chiefs, maybe with fallen behind all those times
in the in the Super in the playoffs last year.
(38:13):
But what was it like when you know, you went
through the disappointments and you were friends with these guys obviously,
and then they won it all.
Speaker 6 (38:22):
Yeah, it was pretty sweet, obviously, And as I say,
you could really see it feel it coming. And Whitey
hear Zog had been named manager by that time, and
he really put the team together beautifully. His his managerial
skills were second to none. Whitey was always I felt
(38:43):
two or three innings ahead of the other manager and
he was the type of guy who made every one
of the twenty five players on the roster I feel
like they were the most important guy on the roster.
He had his starting nine is starting eight in the picture,
and then his bench guys, the extra guys, and he
(39:07):
might have had five or six of those. He would
spend time with them and make them feel like they're, hey,
you're really a big pun of this thing, and they
He just had a great way of making everybody feel
like they were a very important part of that team.
And the one thing to fight he could never get
enough of was a left handed pitcher in his bullpen.
(39:30):
If he could have had thirty seven pictures left handed
in his bullpen, he would have fas because the Yankee
think about this. The Yankees had those great left handed
hitters at the time, and they had seems like they
had about twelve guys in the dugout who were all
left handed hitters. They'd run him out there in the seventh, eighth,
and ninth inn He's bench hitters, so and he had
(39:50):
the short porch of the old Yankee stadium too. So
that's why the Yankees are so predominantly left handed hitting.
Not only starting lineup, but also bench and white He
always wanted to counter that with left handed pitching out
of the bullpen, and he could never get enough. But
those were great rivalry. That was a great rivalry from
(40:12):
the mid seventies to nineteen eighty. And of course the
Yankees prevailed three times. And Whitey always said, if he
had Rich Gossage in his bullpen RF Forrester, any guy
who was a power pitcher out of the bullpen, why
the Royals, instead of losing all three to the Yankees,
would have won at least two of those. So obviously,
(40:36):
when they finally beat the Yankees in eighty, it was
getting the monkey off the back. But people don't remember, well,
a few people don't remember the great games the Royals
and the Yankees played, not in the playoffs necessarily, but
during the regular season. My goodness, they were classics. They
were some great, great games during the regular season, and
(40:56):
of course most people remember the details of all the playoffs.
But yeah, that was a very heated, the very great
rivalry Royals and Yankees for quite a few years.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
The Royals would become a different kind of franchise after
they won the championship. They'd spend more money and bring
stars in things like that, but still an extremely relevant team,
drawing incredible crowds and you know, coming close to selling
out the games. It was really a glorious time for
the Royals.
Speaker 6 (41:26):
Yeah, you're right. They did start to spend a little
extra money on free agents, but it's interesting the free
agents that they got usually didn't work out all that well.
But that was true not only with the Royals but
with other teams. Once in a while there was a
free agent who really contributed to whatever team he happened
to be on. But the Royals were still very good
(41:47):
for a long period of time. And then, of course
everything in sports seems to be in cycles, and then
the Royals at the down skids a little later on,
starting putting mid early you the mid nineties, I guess,
and the cohile to dig out of that.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
More of Danny's Reasonably Irreverend podcast after this.
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Speaker 2 (43:43):
Danny Matthews is our guest these Baseball Hall of Famer
obviously Royal's Hall of Famer accolades. I think one of
the lines is your dad told you if you hang
around long enough and you do your job reasonably well,
you're going to start to get a bunch of awards.
Certainly you have, and you've deserved every bit of them,
hauls of fame and right as well. I want to
ask you when that transition came. The strike came. Basically,
(44:04):
the Royals sort of decline as a team sort of
coincided with the baseball strike. They were having a very
good season when the strike came, and then it would
be a long stretch of non competitive baseball. After all
those years of winning and doing relevant games. How much
of a challenge was it for you, after really a
couple of decades of good baseball, to call bad baseball.
Speaker 6 (44:28):
I always felt any that if the team wasn't real good,
I had to be a little better. So that was
my press when I would go to the ballpark every night.
And actually, even though the team wasn't very good and
you weren't going to win the Pennant, well, out of
one hundred and sixty two games, so there's going to
be quite a few that were really good games, win
(44:51):
or lose, And so I would always go to the
ballpark hopeful that both teams played well. It was a
very interesting game, obviously hoping the Royals would win. But
even if they didn't, and both teams played well and
it was a good game, it was a good broadcast.
Why hey, I had no control over it. I didn't
feel the ground ball, that didn't throw a pitch, I
(45:12):
didn't swing the bat, So I was beholden to what
happened down in the field. So you try to make
it as interesting as possible. You'd try to have some
fun with it. And so that was my tact. When
the team wasn't all that good, I would show up
at the ballpark hoping that both teams played well. Now
there were times when you go to the ballpark, one
team would play really well and one team wouldn't and
(45:34):
the final score was eight to one. Well, I wouldn't
you know, exactly a classic. And then other times when
neither team could get out of their own way in
a game and the final score would be eight to
six or something, and he'd had some fun with that
because there were going to be some goofy things that happened,
no doubt, but neither team played very well. But yeah,
(45:54):
both teams are playing well. Why that's those are fun
to do.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Obviously, by this time you'd been doing in a long
long time, and at one point I think you maybe
came back from a flight and you get stuck in
traffic or something like that, and you thought about the
fact that you might want to retire when you were
fifty years old. Obviously that didn't happen, but there was
that in any way, shape or form serious.
Speaker 6 (46:16):
I guess if you go through life, you have some
funny thoughts from time to time. But yeah, I thought,
after you know, some long road trips, and now it's
the end of August, and you know, you're pretty well
worn down by the long baseball season game. You know,
it might be kind of nice to not have to
do one hundred and sixty two games this next year.
(46:37):
And I think Ryan Fever and I were talking about
it one time, and we decided that you shouldn't consider
retirement either at the start of the baseball season or
at the very end of the baseball policies right for
obvious reasons. So I think that's a pretty good rule
of thumb, and I think we both agree to that.
But neither one of us has retired yet.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Your style has is one that I just really love
very matter of fact. You do the details of the game.
You don't often get very excited, but you get excited
at the proper times. If anything has ever been criticized
about your work in some people's eyes, it's the fact
that maybe sometimes you should get a little bit more excited.
(47:20):
I don't think that in any way, shape or form.
Have you ever thought about what your style is and
how people's reaction to it is. I know that you
enjoyed the fans at fan Fest, because that's really the
only kind of feedback you can get, and they love
your work generally, But how do you feel about the
way you present a baseball game?
Speaker 6 (47:41):
Well, as Studdy told me in the long ago, do
the game and the way you are most comfortable doing it.
And yeah, I've heard, Well, how come you don't get
more excited, Well, how do you know how excited I am?
We all show excitement in different ways, right right? And
how does you know, Sam know that I'm not excited?
(48:03):
You don't You don't sound excited. Well, I am excited now.
Sometimes if there's something really exciting, you'll know and I
will be and it will show. But you know, I
can be really excited about something that it may not
sound quite like that. That's that's me. That's just my personality.
That's my style. I guess I when I when I
(48:26):
played sports, I didn't get overwhelmed by, you know, something
that happened that was very positive, and I didn't get
really distressed and down about, you know, a bad game.
And I remember talking. I did an interview with Carlia
Streemsky a long time ago, and he said, in the
(48:47):
long baseball season, to get through it, you can't get
too up or too down. You have to have an
even keel and you'll make it. But he said, if
your sky high today and down in the dumps two
days from now, hey, by the All Star break, you're
going to be a mess. So you know you sound
(49:09):
and think about that.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
There's a lot to that no question about that. But
after finally, after a lot of years of bad baseball,
the Royals would once again become relevant, and you obviously
hung around for the entire ride of it. You're still
doing it. Did it make it extra rewarding for you?
That maybe you you could have walked away at a
(49:31):
couple of three points and finished in a time when
the Royals had been bad for quite a long time.
How rewarding was it when they started to be good again?
Speaker 6 (49:40):
Well, it was terrific. And you could see it coming.
You could you could see it, you could hear it,
you could smell it.
Speaker 7 (49:48):
You.
Speaker 6 (49:49):
Yeah, from maybe two years before they won the World Series,
and then there'd be one year when they got to
the World Series and the and the Giants prevailed. But
the year or two before that, the Royals went from
a team that you could beat them pretty easily. They
make one mistake or two mistakes, the other team would
jump all over it and you lose and you lost
(50:11):
ninety three or four or five games. Well, two years
before they got to the World Series for the first time.
During that season, the Royals were a lot more difficult
to beat. And there's a big difference between being easy
to beat and being hard to beat all of a sudden,
being very very hard to defeat. The Royals. You can
see them improving in all areas. The next year they
(50:35):
were really really good. I mean they didn't make to
the World Series. Boy it was they were right on
the brink. And then of course came the next two years.
You play in the World Series, you lose that one,
and then you play the Mets and you win it.
But it was a process and you could see the
evolution beginning four four and a half years prior to
(50:56):
the night where everybody was jumping around the ballpark in
New York after having beaten the Mets in the World Series.
But yeah, it was really fun just to see that
transition from not really very good to you know what,
we're getting to be pretty hard good and now we're
(51:17):
tough to beat and now we're winners. And yeah, that
was a four four and a half year process which
was fun to watch.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
Just before the Royals started to get good again. You
get the ultimate honor for baseball, the Ford Frick Award,
being named to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the
broadcasting wing. That's an incredible honor. Obviously, it's maybe one
a year, not always even that, But what was that like?
What was it like to get up there in front
of all those people at a beautiful place like Cooperstown
(51:50):
and get the ultimate honor that a baseball announcer can get.
Speaker 6 (51:55):
Well, before I went, George Braddick done in years before.
I asked him about the experience and he said, it
will go He said, it'll be four of the fastest
days of your life. It'll be four of the most
exciting days of your life. And he said, if you
(52:15):
can do it, slow it down and just ingest every
bit of it that you can. And I tried to
do that, and I think I did pretty well. I
did go fast. It was right, but it was just
full of great people, incidents, conversations, events, playing in the
(52:39):
golf tournament with Carlton Fisk and Whitey four they were
my partners, sitting around with Harmon Killerbrig Johnny Bench at
breakfast and hear them tell jokes and stories. And then
to the day of the induction, which was a Sunday afternoon,
(53:00):
and because cal Ripken was one of the inductees, Baltimore
and Cooperstown aren't that far apart, and a lot of
people they were judged to have the biggest crowd ever
for an induction. They had ninety five thousand people, and
it's an outdoor stage and you could see people way
(53:21):
way off in the distance, maybe a half mile. And
then there's a gentle rolling hill and this is Upper
New York, which you could see and there were people
at the very edge of that hill, and that was
a half a mile win. They said there were ninety
five thousand people. And so then you have to get
up and do your speech and you're sitting there with
(53:41):
eighty five Hall of Famers behind you on the stage
and ninety five thousand people in front of you and
your family and friends, and it's a daunting experience. Tom
Sieber introduced me and we talked about it before the event,
and he said, how do you feel about this? He said, well,
(54:03):
I said, I'll tell you what. I played college football,
and there's a process where you go from Monday to
Saturday and the emotion, the excitement builds from Monday's practice
until you hit the field on Saturday and it's game day.
And I told Tom sever I said, it's game day.
That's how I feel.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
You have always for somebody who's in such a public position.
You've always been a very private person, and I think
that you probably are less known. I think people probably
know less about you than they do about many other
famous people in Kansas City or maybe anywhere else. It
was that just a personal choice of yours that it
(54:48):
just so happened that way.
Speaker 6 (54:51):
It's okay, yeah, you know, Yeah, it's fine. I don't
need to be on a camera, on mike, on stage
every other day or night. No, it's just, you know,
I do what I do and internally enjoy it. I
enjoy the fans, I enjoy the listeners. I get a
(55:12):
lot of feedback from Royal fans all over the area.
People will sometimes recognize me when I'm out running errands
in public doing different things and chat with them. But yeah,
I mean, I don't I don't have this great desire
to be on I'm on plenty once me, once baseball starts,
(55:36):
and I really don't need to keep reinforcing that. So
and you're right, I'm pretty pretty private, and that's my choice,
I guess. And I don't think I'm all that exciting.
I don't know what people would find exciting about me,
and as I you know, play hockey and hit somebody
in the lips with a shot or something. But no,
(55:57):
I just have chosen, you know, be myself, and I
think I'm friendly enough. I don't shun people, and I
think most people I get I meet get along with
me fine, and yes, everything, So yeah, it's just one
of those things. I don't really think about it that much.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Well, now you've done this for over fifty years, and
you know, some people mentioned Vince Scully and things like that.
You obviously went way past fifty years. When do you
and you've been able to now tailor your schedule a
little bit and not travel as much, and of course
last year was completely different and we hope we don't
have to replicate that that again. But when do you
(56:41):
think about you know, each year, Like you say, you
don't think about it right at the end of the year,
You don't think it at the start of the year,
but you got you must think about it sometimes.
Speaker 6 (56:49):
Oh sure, yeah, I think everybody has, you know, a
plan in front of them. Whether it'll work or not
or even eventually who knows. But yeah, you think about
those things. And the old story about this guy's day
to day or week to week. Why I think it's
just season to season, or time probably day to day
(57:09):
if you really want to get right down to it.
But now I just continue on until it becomes a
burden and you have to force it. But yeah, cuming
back has really helped. As I say at one hundred
and sixty two, and making every trip is a grind
and it takes a lot out of you, and it's
becoming more and more common. I'm sure you've noticed broadcasters
(57:33):
now are taking time off, and I think it's really
important because you do need to get away from it
for a bit, recharge the battery, relax, enjoy a little
bit of the summer, which you don't have you think
about it. You go to spring training in late February
and you don't emerge from the baseball schedule until early October.
(57:53):
And really around here, I found that when I was
doing all the games and I finally got to the
off season, that October was really the only quality weather
wise month that you had to enjoy some outdoor things.
So having regained some of the summer, and I think
a lot of the other baseball announcers are beginning to
(58:13):
realize that too, and there's more and more taking time off.
Why it's pretty nice to have some of those beautiful
summer days in summer evenings. For yourself, what do you.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Feel like you've brought to Kansas City. You've been such
an important person here and you've been you know that
you've brought the stories of the Kansas City Royals to
dedicated fans, through good and through bad. What do you
feel like your legacy is.
Speaker 6 (58:40):
Well? I would hope that people are comfortable inviting me
into their environment, whether they're catching the game, maybe a
two or three innings while they're in the car, maybe
they're out on their back patio on a summer night
listening to the game, whether it's a lot of people
that work nights and they're in a shop, they have
their your company, and they have invited you into their environment,
(59:06):
and so that's a compliment. And if they enjoy your
company and enjoy the game, why that's all I could
hope for.
Speaker 1 (59:15):
This podcast was made possible by our great sponsors like
Eastern Roofing, the presenting sponsor of Kansas City Profiles at
the Danny Kling Scale, Reasonably Irreverend Podcast, Eastern Roofing, where
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Welcome to the Danny Clinkscale, Reasonably irreverent podcast, insightful and
witty commentary, probing interviews and detours from the beaten Path.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Welcome to Kansas City Profiles, presented by Easton Roofing. The
word iconic is probably wildly overused, and maybe it's been
rather overused as far as this particular podcast is concerned,
but there's no question that Denny Matthews is the iconic
baseball announcer for the Kansas City Royals. A Baseball Hall
of Famer, a member of multiple Halls of Fame, Denny
(00:37):
Matthews has been one of the Royals announcers and the
lead announcer for most of the Kansas City Royal since
their very inception. He got a baseball job just a
couple of years after college, after never having called a
baseball game before technically a real baseball game on the radio.
Certainly his resume was called at a Major League baseball park,
(00:57):
and we'll get into that. But he has seen the
Royals go through rather quickly good times than a lengthy
period of bad times, and then the good times once
again and then got it back to the bad. He
has seen it all and called it all in his
own inimitable style. He is playing and straightforward. He is
somebody who knows the game so well, having played it.
He played college football with never having played high school football.
(01:19):
He's done a string of remarkable things in his career,
all the while keeping himself as a rather private person
here in Kansas City. For somebody who is so important
and such an integral part of the sports scene of
Kansas City. He tells great stories, he is amiable, he's funny,
and it's an absolute pleasure to have Denny Matthews as
my guest on Kansas City Profiles, presented by Easton Roofing.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
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Oh Danny, this is a really exciting time at the brewery.
We're starting at New Brynt Saturdays and Sundays, starting at
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You were born in Jacksonville, Florida, but moved early on
(04:31):
to Bloomington, Illinois. What are your very first memories of
being little? Denny Matthews.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
I don't remember anything about Florida because I was taken
away by my parents who grew up in Illinois. So
I was there six weeks, so very few memories of Jacksonville,
I would think, not.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
So what are your first memories of Bloomington.
Speaker 6 (04:55):
Well, my dad was in the service, he was in
the Navy, and he came back after about a year,
and of course I had no idea who he was,
why he was there, but lived with my mom, my grandparents,
her mom and dad, and I remember those flashes of
memory from oh, probably three years old, maybe two and
(05:18):
a half, three, three and a half. My grandfather worked
on the railroad and he was an engineer in the
yards in Bloomington, and every once in a while, my
grandmother would take me down to the train yard and
he was a switch engineer, and he would come across
the tracks, pick me up, take me back to the engine.
He'd hand me up to the fireman in the cab
(05:39):
of the diesel and I'd ride around with him for
an hour. And of course, when you're four or five
six years old, that's the.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Big leagues, absolutely the case. When did you start to
get your interest in sports?
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Well, when my dad came back from the service, and
again I'm four four and a half. He was a
basketball and baseball player excuse me, at Illinois State University.
In fact, he was the first All American baseball player
at Illinois State University and had a chance to sign
(06:16):
with either the White Sox or the Cincinnati Reds. But
then something called World War Two came along and that
kind of took care of that.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
And obviously he was a very good athlete, so he
passed some of that along to him. Was so you're
was it a natural thing for you? Did you like it?
Did he I'm not saying force you, but did he
encourage you?
Speaker 6 (06:41):
Yeah, very much. Baseball, basketball, everything in season and three
younger brothers, and he taught really all four of us
how to play the game, especially a Baseball and basketball
were his two specialties, So all four of us grew
up in a sports atmosphere, so to speak, and he
(07:02):
was very supportive. He was as you say, and I
wish I could have seen him play that It was impossible,
but a good athlete to play at a college of
that stature in both baseball and basketball and really be
praised for his baseball acumen and ability.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Both of your parents worked worked for State Farm Insurance.
How would you describe their relationship.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Well, they met. My dad grew up in Danville, Illinois,
came to Bloomington Normal for college at Illinois State. At
the time it was Illinois State and Normal University. Bloomington
Normal or Twin City is separated by only a street
and much like state line here in our area. But
they met when he was in college. My mom was
(07:50):
I think three years younger and married and I was
the first of four to come along, all boys. But
they had a great relationship. My mom was always very
blunt and to the point my dad was scaring enough,
but very supportive. They both were supportive, obviously of all
of our endeavors and it was really a very enjoyable childhood.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I would say, obviously it's a college town that's pretty
big school probably obviously not quite as big then. But
what was what was it like growing up in the
forties in Bloomington.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
Well, Elinois State was in normal Elini Westland, where I
ended up, was in Bloomington and again separated only by
a boulevard and a city division street of all things.
Someone very cleverly named the division Street to separate the
two little towns, and it's pretty creative, right, Yeah, But
(08:53):
Elini west and Ilinois State had a great rivalry in
all sports. Then subsequently in the sixth these, when I
was involved a year after my final year of football
at Illinois Westland, where they didn't play football anymore, Illinois
State was about twenty six twenty seven thousand in only
Westland was still about thirteen hundred students. Here was quite
(09:17):
a difference. So they still played basketball and very competitively,
and to this day still compete in baseball.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
You did something pretty darn unusual, is you played college
football and you didn't even play high school football. Is
that correct?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
That is correct? I was. I played baseball and basketball
in high school, but I just felt like I was
too small to play football. And as I got into college,
I became very good friends with Vic Armstrong, who was
a quarterback at Illinois Westland. And by that time I
had kind of grown out of my childhood in a sense,
(09:55):
and I was well I ten one seventy. I used
to watch college and pro football and TV, and I
always like to watch the wide receivers. Elleno Westland never
had a wide receiver offense until Vick had a great
arm was the quarterback, and he and I worked together
(10:17):
at State Farm Employees Park in the summer. We had
our summer job, three month job, and we'd talk and
play catch with a football, and he told me one day,
we're going to go to a wide receiver offense, and
when we play catch, you catch everything, and why don't
you come out? And in the back of my mind,
(10:38):
oddly enough, before he had even said that, I had
thought that that it might be fun, it might work.
Who knows, like you said, I never played high school football,
so there was no basis of comparison. I had no
idea what it would be like. But I did went
out and Dick and I had a great relationship. He
(10:59):
finished at eleventh in passing. I was eighth in past
receiving small college, and it was a good tandement worked out.
It was great fun and I still could play baseball,
and I started to broadcast some sports on the local
(11:19):
radio station in between football and baseball seasons during my
sophomore year in school. In college, how would.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You describe yourself as a baseball player?
Speaker 6 (11:34):
Well, pretty good. I was left handed. Infield or second
base was my position. I worked out after my first
year in college with the San Francisco Giants farm team
in Decatur, Illinois. Geene Thompson was the area scout for
the Giants at the time, and he scouted our games
(11:57):
in the central part of Illinois, and he invited me
to come down to a Decatur in August of the
summer and work out, which I drove down about an
hour drive and worked out. And there was another player
there working out who went to school Indicator Saint Teresa
(12:17):
High School of Decatur, who later became a Big leaguer.
His name was del Uncer, who was a good outfielder
played in the Big League for a number of years,
and they worked both of us out, and Dell subsequently
signed a professional contract I went home and Geenet invited
me to come back and work out. This was in
(12:40):
mid August of the summer, and I had decided to
play football. That was my sophomore year. I was going
to go out and play football or try for the
first time. And my dad said, well, he said, look
at it this way. You're all jazz stuff about playing football,
so it'd be silly to sign there at the end
of their minor league season anyway, And if you play
(13:01):
baseball at Illinois Westley and you're good enough in three
years from now, if you're still you know, a decent
player and they think you are, why, you might have
that chance. So that was fun. That was an interesting
There were two guys that I worked out with who
were playing for the Giant's farm team that year. Was
He was an outfielder pitcher, great big guy named Ollie
(13:23):
Brown who was a good big leaguer. And then Tito Flintis,
who was a longtime big league infielder and I worked
out together at second base. We had no idea obviously
that he was going to be in the big leagues eventually.
But the one thing that stood out for me working
out with Tito was he had about one hundred and
(13:43):
twelve pounds of chains around his neck, and when we
were fielding ground balls, I was saying for jangling and
rattling Rod, I'm thinking, how can you feel ground balls
with all that jewelry around you and all those noises?
And he turned out to be pretty good and I
never did get any next change.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Your college sort of mate in the middle infield was
Doug Rader, right, is that correct?
Speaker 6 (14:08):
Yeah? After two years, Doug played short, I played second,
and he signed with the Houston Astros after his sophomore year.
And yeah, he was a terrific college player. Obviously, big
tall guy. He was kind of skinny at Westland, but
he sure grew into that body. He was about six three,
(14:29):
could run well, great arm, and a good hitter. I know.
We played Overton Notre Dame one Saturday afternoon. He got
hit on the wrist and it broke his wrist, So
that was kind of a blow. But yeah, they were
all over him, all the scouts from different teams. I
knew all about him, and it was just taken for
(14:50):
granted that after that second year at Westland he was
going to sign with the Astros.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
So you mentioned that between playing football and football and
baseb ball, you spent some of those short months doing
some broadcasting. How did that develop for you?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I know, you know in reading a lot of stuff
about you that you just loved listening to the radio
and being in the Midwest you could hear all kinds
of different broadcasts, particularly at night. And was that something
that was there ever an inkling that that was something
you wanted to do? With that develop in college?
Speaker 6 (15:21):
Yeah? That came in college, because I think when you're
in high school, I'm even into college, you're more concerned
with playing than you are with broadcasting. I mean, that
was well down on the list probably. But the athletic
director ATLI westl And Jack Hornberger, was very good friends
with the sports and news director at WJBC, the very
(15:42):
good local radio station in Bloomington, and Jack told Don
Neuburg that he thought that I might be interested in broadcasting.
And there were four high schools and the two colleges
in the Twin Cities at the time, and they did
a lot of basketball high school and of course the
two college and they didn't have a large staff, and
(16:02):
they were always looking for two or three people to
kind of fill in on the on the basketball broadcast.
They might even have as many as three games in
one night. They do one live and then type record
the other two play those after the live broadcast and
U So Don Neuberg came out to west Land and
(16:23):
we sat down and he said, Jack Cortereer told me
that you might be interested in broadcasting, and I said, well, yeah, yeah,
it'd be fun. I guess nothing about it, but you're right.
I used to listen to all the all the baseball games,
and I'd flip around during the nighttime hours, and in
that locale in central Illinois, we could get a lot
(16:45):
of the broadcast. But WJBC, the hometown radio station, was
a Cardinal affiliate, had been for a while and to
this day they still are. And so it was Jack
Buckerry Carey, Joe graigi Olda for a couple of years,
and hot summer night I'd play by the radio there
in the living room and just listen to the games,
(17:07):
and really no thought of broadcasting. But later on I
realized that I was getting a pretty good education sublimberly,
I guess you could say, just listening to those guys
describe baseball. And so it was almost like having a
college course, I think laying there and listening to the
(17:29):
games I have to do any homework, that was one
good thing about it. But I think I was learning
some pretty good lessons from some pretty darn good broadcasters.
Now we could get the Chicago guys too, so yeah,
it was good and we were in a good location
for that.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
When you finished college, you still did have an opportunity
to play professionally, But at this point you had to
make a sort of a life decision, I guess. And
it's a funny story. Eventually that Buddy Blattner told you
that you actually had a better chance to play professional
baseball than be a major league announcer because of the
amount of jobs. But how did you decide to make
the decision at that point in time and maybe not
(18:05):
pursue professional baseball at least for a little while.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Well, by that time, I was pretty enamored with broadcasting,
and I figured, you know, that might be a kind
of a cool job if you could podcast for a
major league baseball team. I had no idea. I was
so naive that there were, you know, hundreds of guys
trying to do the same thing, I guess, But as well,
I could have it by the Royals were born in
sixty nine, and I went back to work at State
(18:34):
Farm after I got out of college for a few months,
and then had a chance to go over to WMBD
Radio NTV in Peoria, which was a bigger market and
only about forty minutes from Bloomington, and then from Peoria.
After I spent a few months there, I went down
to Saint Louis and did some TV on the weekends
at Camox TV, And while I was there, I got
(18:58):
the job with the Royals. So that was kind of
the quick transition from college to State Farm. For a
few months to I was still doing part time at WJBC,
but then I went full time in Peoria full time,
well not totally full time. I did weekends at Camweck's
TV before coming out to Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
The story of you getting that job is a pretty
remarkable thing, including the fact that you had a very
creative way to send your packaging of your interview, and
also the fact that you really hadn't done an actual
baseball game when you did some recording. When you did
the recordings that would eventually met you a major league job.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
Yeah, at the time, Danny, the Booths in both Wrigley Field,
Comiski Park Chicago and Bush Stadium in Saint Louis doing
cable TV or anything else, and most big league clubs
at that time did radio only and once in a
while maybe weekend TV games, and so there were a
lot of mp booths and WMBD in Peoria as well
(20:05):
as WJBC and Bloomington both being Cardinal affiliates. Well, I
had that in and I wrote the Cardinals and asked
him if I could bring a friend and a tape
recorder down to Saint Louis and do a game as
I was auditioning or going to for another job, and
they said, sure, come on down. So my friend Charlie Brannon,
(20:26):
and I went down to Saint Louis and set up
the recorder and I did a game and then took
it home, listened to the whole game, and then I
took I don't know, two or three half innings, which
I thought maybe were representative of the way I would
broadcast a game. I did an inning where there was
a couple of runs scored. I did and picked out
(20:48):
an inning where nothing happened and I had to kind
of fill in, and then another half inning which I
thought might be okay, and then I sent that to
them in a package, the people that were screening the
applicants for the number two job with the Royals, And
that's how I started that process.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Why don't you tell the audience what the creative way
that you tried to get some attention with the packages
that you sent to them.
Speaker 6 (21:13):
It's pretty corny that they worked. And it was a
kind of the brain child of a friend of mine
who lived in Peoria, and he said, you know those
little metal trays when you go into a bar and
the waiter waitress will bring a beer whatever your chips
(21:34):
over in a tray that has in this case, Schlitz
beer was the number one sponsor for the Royals. And
so I asked a local bar if I could have
their little tray, and they had more than one, and
it had Schlit's logo on it and appropriately enough, and
(21:56):
so I took my tape and I put a picture
and my resume on the tape, wrapped it up and
I had a little note about I hope you don't
think this is really corny. I don't think don't think
I am a bush bush leaguer meeting a minor leaguer.
Don't think I'm a bush leaguer for having done a
(22:18):
cardinal game. But this is my last pitch for the
Kansas City Royals job. Isn't that something? Wasn't that great?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Well, like you say, it worked, it did work.
Speaker 6 (22:29):
I don't know. But then I had I had an
interview with Buddy Blander. They had He told me at
one time they had about right around two hundred and
fifty applicants and for the job, and they kept whittling
them down through the summer through the fall, and then
now we're into the late fall. And he called and
he said, would you come down to Saint Louis and
(22:52):
we'll sit down. And he had a real nice finished
basement with a little bar, and he said we'll have
a some pizza and just sit around a chat. And
I said, yeah, it sounds like fine. And he said,
why don't you come down around get down here around
fourst about a two and a half three hour drive
from Boomington. He said, get down here about four and
we'll just go down to the basement and they'll have
a you know, chat. Sounded good, So I told my dad.
(23:13):
I said all right, and he was excited about it.
Who wasn't. I was kind of thrilled, but I had
known about Buddy Blattner obviously, he was a national broadcaster
of no ill repute, and so I told my dad.
I said, okay, I'm gonna I'll be down there about
four and then I figured. We talked for you know,
two three hours, and I said I'll be home by ten,
(23:34):
and went down and we sat there and we talked
and we talked and we talked, and it was four
or four thirty in the morning, and Buddy said, well,
I said, well, I said, better to be going. He said, well,
he said, I just stay here and you know, get
up in the morning and drive back. And I said, now,
I said, I'll go back. So we talked for a
while longer, and then about seven in the morning, I
(23:57):
finally so that was up, and I jumped to my
car and made the two and a half three hour
drive back to Bloomington, and they pulled into the drive by.
My dad was doing something in the grind. I got
out of the car and I said, I told you
i'd be home by ten. They a Saturday or not
Friday night, You must have.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Felt like you had a pretty good chance at the job.
Then if you spoke to the man for twelve hours
or more than that.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
Yeah, Yeah, we just hit it off, and I obviously
admired him, and he was a great storyteller. And I'm
not sure I said all that. He sat there and
listened to some great stories and we had some laughs,
and it was it was an evening, of course, into
the wee hours of the morning. I'll never forget, but
(24:46):
you're right. I had a really nice feeling about it
when when I got home on that Saturday morning and
then Tuesday night, why they called from the agency, wouldn't buddy,
but they called from the agency, and the guy said,
I guess you know you got the Royals job. And
I said, no, I didn't know that, but thanks for
doing me. It's good to know. About about two weeks later,
(25:10):
I came out and signed the contract with the Royals,
and away we went.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
The rest is history, As they say, do you have
Did you at the time have any sense how amazing
it was that you got that job over all those
all those contestants, at your age, in those circumstances, it's amazing.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Yeah, And no I didn't. I had I had no clue.
Like I said, I was pretty naive about the whole thing,
but I just kind of did it on the ark.
I thought, well, make a tape, and the buddy said.
I asked him later when we were working together, and
you know, we really knew each other, and I said,
why did you pick me? I know there were a
(25:54):
lot of guys and he said, well, we had applications
from everywhere. He said, guys were doing recreatations and their basement.
Guys were making things up and going out and doing
a high school game. He said, we had tapes of
every kind from everywhere. And he said, but two or
three things really stood out when we listened to your tape.
He said, number one, you were applying for a major
(26:15):
league job. And he took the time in the trouble
to go to Saint Louis and tape a major league game.
And he said number two, he said, I knew you
had played. He said, I could tell that you knew
the game. He said, even strategically and talking about different plays,
why that play worked, why that play didn't. That you
had played and you had a good feel for that,
(26:35):
and he said number three, he said, you were very young,
and he said, it's a brand new team. He was
my dad's age, and he said, I just thought it
would be good to get a young guy. And his
idea was to work for another four five six years
or was a definitive number, but he was looking at retirement.
(26:57):
And he said, I can kind of you know you
the ropes, introduce you to people, bring you along. And
he was true to his word, and he taught me
a lot about the fundamentals of putting together a Major
League Baseball broadcast. And he was a great teacher. He
was a great, great tutor, and we got along great
and I obviously tried to learn a lot from him,
(27:21):
and hopefully I did.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It was the time when basically one person would do,
you know, the innings, and the other person would do
the innings, and there, you know, there wasn't a lot
of talking back and forth. But he liked to have
you listen. There didn't he.
Speaker 6 (27:35):
Yeah, that was we'd go out and have pizza. This
is spring training now, my first year, and once twice
a week we didn't go out and have pizza and talk.
And he said, there's one thing that you have to do,
and he said that is concentrate. He said, you have
to listen to everything I say because I'm going to
do the first two innings, you'll do the next two.
And I didn't want you repeating exactly what I said
(27:57):
in the first two innings and your two innings he said,
do it sound awful? And he said, I want you
to develop your own style. I want you to do
the game the way you want to do it. He said,
don't think you have to do an imitation of me,
because if you try to imitate me, what we'll get
is a crumming imitation to me. He said, I want
you to do the game the way you want to
(28:18):
do it. And I thought, you know what, that makes
a lot of sense. That sounds pretty good. So he
also said, if you want to talk back and forth
during your innings, we can do that. If you want
to jump in when I'm on the air doing play
by play, please do. He said, you'll see things that
I don't. I'll see things that you don't, and we
(28:38):
can compress that into a nice informative broadcast. But his
basic rule was I'm here for you, but I'm going
to stay out of your way when it's your three innings.
I did three, four and seven. When it's your innings.
If you don't want to talk to me or you
want to have a conversation. Fine, if you want to, fine,
(29:02):
but I'm not going to press you. I'm not going
to jump onto every other thing you say. I'm going
to get out of your way. That you develop the
way you want to develop and do the game the
way you want to do it. And I thought that
was a pretty good strategy.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Did you feel like, when you think back, that you
basically had your style pretty much from the start? Did
you Obviously you're going to refine things and learn things,
there's no question about that. But did you feel like
pretty early on that you had a handle on how
you wanted to broadcast a baseball game.
Speaker 6 (29:39):
That's a good question. I don't know. I've never thought
of that. I think what evolved was over time, you
do evolve into what you do, and it changes. I mean,
there's going to be subtle changes. I think we all
go through that and every aspect of the business. I'm
sure you will say the same thing. You've evolved in
(29:59):
the way you things from the time you started, and
I think that was true with me. And you get
into a comfort zone you do you do it the
way you feel most comfortable and where you can be
the most informative. Obviously, the thing I've always focused on
is just absolutely detail. Describe the play. That's that's the
(30:23):
main job of what we do is to describe the
play on radio, paint the word picture and be as
accurate as you possibly can. And there are several elements
that follow that you have to Bud he always said, well,
you have to you have to entertain. But he said, I,
if you're going to be a real good radio baseball broadcaster,
(30:46):
not only do you have to tell the audience what happened, now,
you have to tell him how it happened and why
it happened. And so. In other words, he was telling
me you not only have to be your play by
play guy, You've got to be your own analyst. And
aside from Bud, with rare exceptions, I've never worked with
(31:09):
anybody who had played baseball that much. Certainly no major
league player in the broadcast booth. Now. John Watton very
briefly worked on the radio side. Paul Splittorff I did
some of the Royals playoff games starting in eighty five.
(31:32):
We did some of the Royals broadcasts together. But aside
from that, I've never had an ex player sitting beside
me in the booth. So I've had to not only
do the play by play, I've also had to analyze,
not only tell them what happened, but tell them how
and why.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
What was life for you like away from baseball and
you're you know, you're in you're a young man, you're
in your twenties. The Royals got good pretty fast, So
that's an aspect we don't really have to visit that
you didn't have to do a lot of bad baseball
that would that would come later. But well, yeah, what
was it like moving to Kansas City?
Speaker 6 (32:08):
You know?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
As a young man away from.
Speaker 6 (32:11):
Base that was great. I was the same age as
the players. In fact, quite a few of the players
were older than I when I started, and so I
developed very good friendships and relationships with them. And rather
than hang out with the manager and the coaches who
were much older. And Buddy was my dad's age, and
(32:32):
they would they would socialize, but he was great friends
with some of the Royal managers and a lot of
the coaches, and they'd go out and do their thing,
and I'd go with the players and do our thing.
And the funny thing happened though after about twenty twenty
five years, so I got older, but the players didn't
(32:53):
all of a sudden, I'm where buddy was when I started,
so and that changed and so on that It was
great when I was that age and away from home
for the first time and no worries in the world.
And I had been a couple of the big league ballparks,
but not many, but West Coast, East Coast. I got
(33:15):
to see all those for the first time. So yeah,
it was a great ride for a lot of years.
And I had had some wonderful relationships and friendships with
a lot of the players. Marty Patten, who pitched for
the Royals. He and I knew each other from high school,
college and junior legion summer ball because we had played
(33:38):
against each other quite a few times. And of course
I knew Marty and we became really good friends there.
But so many of the guys who were basically my
age really formed a nice friendship and bond with What
did you.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Like to do away from baseball as a young man
for like hobbies or things that you know, How did
you spend your.
Speaker 6 (34:00):
Time well off season? Why I was involved in playing hockey.
I always enjoyed playing hockey when I got into college.
One of my buddies in college got me into playing hockey.
It's a little bit late to start that, but I
got to the point where I could play reasonably well.
(34:22):
So i'd play hockey in the wintertime and watch hockey,
and I had chances to do some football, basketball and
hockey became X called now asked me if I wanted
to do some of the Blues games on radio one year,
and I didn't. I wouldn't. I wasn't interested. And I
remember Buddy saying, well, now you're going to work your
(34:43):
tail off for seven months with your baseball job. You're
not going to have any holidays off in the summer.
You're not going to have any weekends off. And he
said to your off season is your vacation. That's your time.
He said, you've given the Royal seven months almost daily, nightly,
and he said, you do what you want to do
in the winter time. He said, if you want to
(35:05):
do other sports radio TV, I'm all for you. If
you don't, I don't blame you because he didn't do
it either, And so I took that to heart and
I thought, yeah, that's it's a long grind. The baseball
season isn't grind, no matter how you slice or cut it,
and it was nice to have time off and not
have to worry about catching a bus or getting on
(35:26):
an airplane or being at the ballpark at a certain
time every evening. So it was a nice break from that,
and I thought it was important to recharge the battery.
And they get away from it and then bloy spring
training comes along and you're ready to go again, and
that's always an exciting thing.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
The Royals, as I mentioned, you got, became a good
baseball team very quickly, and an incredible story for an
expansion team, and they were competitive within just a handful
of years, and so you would go on a long
run of doing really you know, important baseball and they
were good all the time, and this city really reacted
to it well, and the attendance was great and no doubt,
(36:08):
especially in a time when there were very few games
on television. I mean, you were the eyes and ears
of you know, thousands and thousands of fans and that
must have been a cool.
Speaker 6 (36:18):
Feeling, yeah, for sure, And it was. We had a nice,
big network all over the Midwest, and the Royals were
good from year one. Actually, the Royals. It's easy to
remember in nineteen sixty nine, the Royals first year, they
won sixty nine sixty nine wins in sixty nine, and
that's how they launched that ship and felt, excuse me,
(36:41):
fell back a little bit in year two, and then
by year three you could see that Seddry Tallis, who
was the general manager, was made some really good trades
and almost exclusively with National League teams, which was very
smart because National League was quite frankly a better league
than the American League at that time, and he got
(37:01):
some really good players. None of the National League teams
and the Royals all of a sudden after year three
and the A's were really good. The A's and Baltimore
were the two best teams of that era, and all
of a sudden during year three you could see the
development of the Royals and they were starting to chase
the A's and it only took another two or three
years before they did chase him down and go to
(37:24):
the playoffs for the first time in seventy six. So yeah,
it was. It was pretty good from the very.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Start, and it culminated with a World championship obviously in
nineteen eighty five, and you know, the rules had had
a lot of disappointment. They've been a very good team,
but their postseasons had been filled with disappointment. There was
you know, it wasn't multiple layers of playoffs then and
you know, you won your division, you played somebody else
there and you know, you know, oftentimes it was the Yankees,
(37:51):
and the big bad Yankees beat him to So when
he get when you got to eighty five and the
Royals had now been a championship caller team for a
decade and then finally hit the mountain top, maybe in
the most unusual fashion, sort of like you know the
Kansas City Chiefs, maybe with fallen behind all those times
in the in the Super in the playoffs last year.
(38:13):
But what was it like when you know, you went
through the disappointments and you were friends with these guys obviously,
and then they won it all.
Speaker 6 (38:22):
Yeah, it was pretty sweet, obviously, And as I say,
you could really see it feel it coming. And Whitey
hear Zog had been named manager by that time, and
he really put the team together beautifully. His his managerial
skills were second to none. Whitey was always I felt
(38:43):
two or three innings ahead of the other manager and
he was the type of guy who made every one
of the twenty five players on the roster I feel
like they were the most important guy on the roster.
He had his starting nine is starting eight in the picture,
and then his bench guys, the extra guys, and he
(39:07):
might have had five or six of those. He would
spend time with them and make them feel like they're, hey,
you're really a big pun of this thing, and they
He just had a great way of making everybody feel
like they were a very important part of that team.
And the one thing to fight he could never get
enough of was a left handed pitcher in his bullpen.
(39:30):
If he could have had thirty seven pictures left handed
in his bullpen, he would have fas because the Yankee
think about this. The Yankees had those great left handed
hitters at the time, and they had seems like they
had about twelve guys in the dugout who were all
left handed hitters. They'd run him out there in the seventh, eighth,
and ninth inn He's bench hitters, so and he had
(39:50):
the short porch of the old Yankee stadium too. So
that's why the Yankees are so predominantly left handed hitting.
Not only starting lineup, but also bench and white He
always wanted to counter that with left handed pitching out
of the bullpen, and he could never get enough. But
those were great rivalry. That was a great rivalry from
(40:12):
the mid seventies to nineteen eighty. And of course the
Yankees prevailed three times. And Whitey always said, if he
had Rich Gossage in his bullpen RF Forrester, any guy
who was a power pitcher out of the bullpen, why
the Royals, instead of losing all three to the Yankees,
would have won at least two of those. So obviously,
(40:36):
when they finally beat the Yankees in eighty, it was
getting the monkey off the back. But people don't remember, well,
a few people don't remember the great games the Royals
and the Yankees played, not in the playoffs necessarily, but
during the regular season. My goodness, they were classics. They
were some great, great games during the regular season, and
(40:56):
of course most people remember the details of all the playoffs.
But yeah, that was a very heated, the very great
rivalry Royals and Yankees for quite a few years.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
The Royals would become a different kind of franchise after
they won the championship. They'd spend more money and bring
stars in things like that, but still an extremely relevant team,
drawing incredible crowds and you know, coming close to selling
out the games. It was really a glorious time for
the Royals.
Speaker 6 (41:26):
Yeah, you're right. They did start to spend a little
extra money on free agents, but it's interesting the free
agents that they got usually didn't work out all that well.
But that was true not only with the Royals but
with other teams. Once in a while there was a
free agent who really contributed to whatever team he happened
to be on. But the Royals were still very good
(41:47):
for a long period of time. And then, of course
everything in sports seems to be in cycles, and then
the Royals at the down skids a little later on,
starting putting mid early you the mid nineties, I guess,
and the cohile to dig out of that.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
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Speaker 2 (43:43):
Danny Matthews is our guest these Baseball Hall of Famer
obviously Royal's Hall of Famer accolades. I think one of
the lines is your dad told you if you hang
around long enough and you do your job reasonably well,
you're going to start to get a bunch of awards.
Certainly you have, and you've deserved every bit of them,
hauls of fame and right as well. I want to
ask you when that transition came. The strike came. Basically,
(44:04):
the Royals sort of decline as a team sort of
coincided with the baseball strike. They were having a very
good season when the strike came, and then it would
be a long stretch of non competitive baseball. After all
those years of winning and doing relevant games. How much
of a challenge was it for you, after really a
couple of decades of good baseball, to call bad baseball.
Speaker 6 (44:28):
I always felt any that if the team wasn't real good,
I had to be a little better. So that was
my press when I would go to the ballpark every night.
And actually, even though the team wasn't very good and
you weren't going to win the Pennant, well, out of
one hundred and sixty two games, so there's going to
be quite a few that were really good games, win
(44:51):
or lose, And so I would always go to the
ballpark hopeful that both teams played well. It was a
very interesting game, obviously hoping the Royals would win. But
even if they didn't, and both teams played well and
it was a good game, it was a good broadcast.
Why hey, I had no control over it. I didn't
feel the ground ball, that didn't throw a pitch, I
(45:12):
didn't swing the bat, So I was beholden to what
happened down in the field. So you try to make
it as interesting as possible. You'd try to have some
fun with it. And so that was my tact. When
the team wasn't all that good, I would show up
at the ballpark hoping that both teams played well. Now
there were times when you go to the ballpark, one
team would play really well and one team wouldn't and
(45:34):
the final score was eight to one. Well, I wouldn't
you know, exactly a classic. And then other times when
neither team could get out of their own way in
a game and the final score would be eight to
six or something, and he'd had some fun with that
because there were going to be some goofy things that happened,
no doubt, but neither team played very well. But yeah,
(45:54):
both teams are playing well. Why that's those are fun
to do.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Obviously, by this time you'd been doing in a long
long time, and at one point I think you maybe
came back from a flight and you get stuck in
traffic or something like that, and you thought about the
fact that you might want to retire when you were
fifty years old. Obviously that didn't happen, but there was
that in any way, shape or form serious.
Speaker 6 (46:16):
I guess if you go through life, you have some
funny thoughts from time to time. But yeah, I thought,
after you know, some long road trips, and now it's
the end of August, and you know, you're pretty well
worn down by the long baseball season game. You know,
it might be kind of nice to not have to
do one hundred and sixty two games this next year.
(46:37):
And I think Ryan Fever and I were talking about
it one time, and we decided that you shouldn't consider
retirement either at the start of the baseball season or
at the very end of the baseball policies right for
obvious reasons. So I think that's a pretty good rule
of thumb, and I think we both agree to that.
But neither one of us has retired yet.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Your style has is one that I just really love
very matter of fact. You do the details of the game.
You don't often get very excited, but you get excited
at the proper times. If anything has ever been criticized
about your work in some people's eyes, it's the fact
that maybe sometimes you should get a little bit more excited.
(47:20):
I don't think that in any way, shape or form.
Have you ever thought about what your style is and
how people's reaction to it is. I know that you
enjoyed the fans at fan Fest, because that's really the
only kind of feedback you can get, and they love
your work generally, But how do you feel about the
way you present a baseball game?
Speaker 6 (47:41):
Well, as Studdy told me in the long ago, do
the game and the way you are most comfortable doing it.
And yeah, I've heard, Well, how come you don't get
more excited, Well, how do you know how excited I am?
We all show excitement in different ways, right right? And
how does you know, Sam know that I'm not excited?
(48:03):
You don't You don't sound excited. Well, I am excited now.
Sometimes if there's something really exciting, you'll know and I
will be and it will show. But you know, I
can be really excited about something that it may not
sound quite like that. That's that's me. That's just my personality.
That's my style. I guess I when I when I
(48:26):
played sports, I didn't get overwhelmed by, you know, something
that happened that was very positive, and I didn't get
really distressed and down about, you know, a bad game.
And I remember talking. I did an interview with Carlia
Streemsky a long time ago, and he said, in the
(48:47):
long baseball season, to get through it, you can't get
too up or too down. You have to have an
even keel and you'll make it. But he said, if
your sky high today and down in the dumps two
days from now, hey, by the All Star break, you're
going to be a mess. So you know you sound
(49:09):
and think about that.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
There's a lot to that no question about that. But
after finally, after a lot of years of bad baseball,
the Royals would once again become relevant, and you obviously
hung around for the entire ride of it. You're still
doing it. Did it make it extra rewarding for you?
That maybe you you could have walked away at a
(49:31):
couple of three points and finished in a time when
the Royals had been bad for quite a long time.
How rewarding was it when they started to be good again?
Speaker 6 (49:40):
Well, it was terrific. And you could see it coming.
You could you could see it, you could hear it,
you could smell it.
Speaker 7 (49:48):
You.
Speaker 6 (49:49):
Yeah, from maybe two years before they won the World Series,
and then there'd be one year when they got to
the World Series and the and the Giants prevailed. But
the year or two before that, the Royals went from
a team that you could beat them pretty easily. They
make one mistake or two mistakes, the other team would
jump all over it and you lose and you lost
(50:11):
ninety three or four or five games. Well, two years
before they got to the World Series for the first time.
During that season, the Royals were a lot more difficult
to beat. And there's a big difference between being easy
to beat and being hard to beat all of a sudden,
being very very hard to defeat. The Royals. You can
see them improving in all areas. The next year they
(50:35):
were really really good. I mean they didn't make to
the World Series. Boy it was they were right on
the brink. And then of course came the next two years.
You play in the World Series, you lose that one,
and then you play the Mets and you win it.
But it was a process and you could see the
evolution beginning four four and a half years prior to
(50:56):
the night where everybody was jumping around the ballpark in
New York after having beaten the Mets in the World Series.
But yeah, it was really fun just to see that
transition from not really very good to you know what,
we're getting to be pretty hard good and now we're
(51:17):
tough to beat and now we're winners. And yeah, that
was a four four and a half year process which
was fun to watch.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
Just before the Royals started to get good again. You
get the ultimate honor for baseball, the Ford Frick Award,
being named to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the
broadcasting wing. That's an incredible honor. Obviously, it's maybe one
a year, not always even that, But what was that like?
What was it like to get up there in front
of all those people at a beautiful place like Cooperstown
(51:50):
and get the ultimate honor that a baseball announcer can get.
Speaker 6 (51:55):
Well, before I went, George Braddick done in years before.
I asked him about the experience and he said, it
will go He said, it'll be four of the fastest
days of your life. It'll be four of the most
exciting days of your life. And he said, if you
(52:15):
can do it, slow it down and just ingest every
bit of it that you can. And I tried to
do that, and I think I did pretty well. I
did go fast. It was right, but it was just
full of great people, incidents, conversations, events, playing in the
(52:39):
golf tournament with Carlton Fisk and Whitey four they were
my partners, sitting around with Harmon Killerbrig Johnny Bench at
breakfast and hear them tell jokes and stories. And then
to the day of the induction, which was a Sunday afternoon,
(53:00):
and because cal Ripken was one of the inductees, Baltimore
and Cooperstown aren't that far apart, and a lot of
people they were judged to have the biggest crowd ever
for an induction. They had ninety five thousand people, and
it's an outdoor stage and you could see people way
(53:21):
way off in the distance, maybe a half mile. And
then there's a gentle rolling hill and this is Upper
New York, which you could see and there were people
at the very edge of that hill, and that was
a half a mile win. They said there were ninety
five thousand people. And so then you have to get
up and do your speech and you're sitting there with
(53:41):
eighty five Hall of Famers behind you on the stage
and ninety five thousand people in front of you and
your family and friends, and it's a daunting experience. Tom
Sieber introduced me and we talked about it before the event,
and he said, how do you feel about this? He said, well,
(54:03):
I said, I'll tell you what. I played college football,
and there's a process where you go from Monday to
Saturday and the emotion, the excitement builds from Monday's practice
until you hit the field on Saturday and it's game day.
And I told Tom sever I said, it's game day.
That's how I feel.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
You have always for somebody who's in such a public position.
You've always been a very private person, and I think
that you probably are less known. I think people probably
know less about you than they do about many other
famous people in Kansas City or maybe anywhere else. It
was that just a personal choice of yours that it
(54:48):
just so happened that way.
Speaker 6 (54:51):
It's okay, yeah, you know, Yeah, it's fine. I don't
need to be on a camera, on mike, on stage
every other day or night. No, it's just, you know,
I do what I do and internally enjoy it. I
enjoy the fans, I enjoy the listeners. I get a
(55:12):
lot of feedback from Royal fans all over the area.
People will sometimes recognize me when I'm out running errands
in public doing different things and chat with them. But yeah,
I mean, I don't I don't have this great desire
to be on I'm on plenty once me, once baseball starts,
(55:36):
and I really don't need to keep reinforcing that. So
and you're right, I'm pretty pretty private, and that's my choice,
I guess. And I don't think I'm all that exciting.
I don't know what people would find exciting about me,
and as I you know, play hockey and hit somebody
in the lips with a shot or something. But no,
(55:57):
I just have chosen, you know, be myself, and I
think I'm friendly enough. I don't shun people, and I
think most people I get I meet get along with
me fine, and yes, everything, So yeah, it's just one
of those things. I don't really think about it that much.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Well, now you've done this for over fifty years, and
you know, some people mentioned Vince Scully and things like that.
You obviously went way past fifty years. When do you
and you've been able to now tailor your schedule a
little bit and not travel as much, and of course
last year was completely different and we hope we don't
have to replicate that that again. But when do you
(56:41):
think about you know, each year, Like you say, you
don't think about it right at the end of the year,
You don't think it at the start of the year,
but you got you must think about it sometimes.
Speaker 6 (56:49):
Oh sure, yeah, I think everybody has, you know, a
plan in front of them. Whether it'll work or not
or even eventually who knows. But yeah, you think about
those things. And the old story about this guy's day
to day or week to week. Why I think it's
just season to season, or time probably day to day
(57:09):
if you really want to get right down to it.
But now I just continue on until it becomes a
burden and you have to force it. But yeah, cuming
back has really helped. As I say at one hundred
and sixty two, and making every trip is a grind
and it takes a lot out of you, and it's
becoming more and more common. I'm sure you've noticed broadcasters
(57:33):
now are taking time off, and I think it's really
important because you do need to get away from it
for a bit, recharge the battery, relax, enjoy a little
bit of the summer, which you don't have you think
about it. You go to spring training in late February
and you don't emerge from the baseball schedule until early October.
(57:53):
And really around here, I found that when I was
doing all the games and I finally got to the
off season, that October was really the only quality weather
wise month that you had to enjoy some outdoor things.
So having regained some of the summer, and I think
a lot of the other baseball announcers are beginning to
(58:13):
realize that too, and there's more and more taking time off.
Why it's pretty nice to have some of those beautiful
summer days in summer evenings. For yourself, what do you.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Feel like you've brought to Kansas City. You've been such
an important person here and you've been you know that
you've brought the stories of the Kansas City Royals to
dedicated fans, through good and through bad. What do you
feel like your legacy is.
Speaker 6 (58:40):
Well? I would hope that people are comfortable inviting me
into their environment, whether they're catching the game, maybe a
two or three innings while they're in the car, maybe
they're out on their back patio on a summer night
listening to the game, whether it's a lot of people
that work nights and they're in a shop, they have
their your company, and they have invited you into their environment,
(59:06):
and so that's a compliment. And if they enjoy your
company and enjoy the game, why that's all I could
hope for.
Speaker 1 (59:15):
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