Catching up with gregarious Garagiola
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Where have you gone, Joe Garagiola? Out of the national mainstream, but certainly not out to pasture. Now 82, the former big-league catcher, network baseball commentator and game-show host appears a bit more frail and slower afoot, but figuratively he hasn't slowed down.
An Arizona resident, he still writes the occasional book (Just Play Ball was published in 2007), remains a nationally outspoken opponent of what he calls "spit" tobacco and still works a dozen or so Arizona Diamondbacks games a year for TV. On Saturday, he delivered the commencement speech only the second such address of his life at Saint Leo University, where the Times caught up with him to discuss the state of baseball, his detestation of chewing tobacco and boyhood pal Yogi Berra.
Q: It's hard to believe you're 82. How's your health?
A: Pretty good. My legs are giving me some fits, and I would imagine the birth certificate tells you, "Hey, you're going to have arthritis." Every finger on this (right) hand has been broken, and I have big arthritis here (pointing to left knuckles).
These guys today, they're smarter than we were. We caught with two hands because of the glove. These guys put their hand behind them when there's nobody on base, which is a wise thing to do, but we couldn't do that with our gloves. It was always two hands; you catch the low ball coming up, the high ball coming down.
Q: What are you involved in these days?
A: I'm still going with my anti-tobacco campaign. The Diamondbacks have started a tobacco campaign for the youngsters, which I would hope will spread; we've got a chance. When I was growing up as a kid, they had what they called a Knothole Gang, and you would be going to the ballpark, probably chaperoned, and you sat in leftfield. It was free.
So what the Diamondbacks have done is, if you join what we call the "No Chew Crew," and you pledge that you're not going to use tobacco, you get a T-shirt which says "No Chew Crew," and on the back of it is a cartoon from Bil Keane of Family Circus. I believe very strongly that's the way you get the people's respect is not nagging them and loving them, because it is an addiction.
Q: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask Joe Garagiola, one of baseball's great ambassadors, about steroids in baseball. What do we do about the hitting records being set in the steroid era?
A: I don't think you can do anything. I think you're handcuffed.
You can't change the record books and put an asterisk because then you'd say, "Wait a minute, what about when there were only 16 teams like when I played? Now there are 30 teams." You can't change it, and it's sad.
Q: What are your thoughts on the scandals swirling around Roger Clemens?
A: Same thing. I feel badly for his family. I don't know, I don't want to believe it, but it keeps coming at you.
Q: How often do you see Yogi?
A: I don't see him as often as I talk to him. He's nine months older than I am. I was 82 in February; he's going to be 83 in May. He's in pretty good health, and everybody's tugging at him to go places.
People really think that he's funny. Yogi is not funny. He can't get up and do funny stuff. But he always says things funny. For example, he'll say something and you'll walk away like, "Did I hear that right?" And of course, when people don't know who to hang something on, they'll hang it on him. Like he says, "I didn't say a lot of the things I said."
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