BROADCAST BLUES : Garagiola May No Longer Be an Announcer, but He Still Talks a Good Game

Baseball without Joe Garagiola is like baseball without hot dogs, or the seventh-inning stretch. It just doesn’t seem right.

Garagiola, baseball announcer and ambassador, worked for NBC for 27 years until he and the network parted company, somewhat bitterly, last November. He has been replaced by Tom Seaver.

He recently finished a two-week tour promoting his 1988 book, “It’s Anybody’s Ballgame,” which is available in paperback. His final stop was Los Angeles, then he returned home to Paradise Valley, Ariz.

So how is he adjusting to life without baseball?

“I’m going through withdrawal,” he said. “I’m still following it like I always did, talking to people and picking up information.”

During spring training, he went out to the Arizona camps near his home to watch games and talk with players and team officials.

One day, he was at Oakland’s camp, sitting on the bench with Manager Tony LaRussa.

“I finally had to apologize for taking so much of his time,” Garagiola said. “I forgot I wasn’t working. I had nowhere to go with the stuff I got.”

And that’s a shame.

“People may think I’ve retired, but I haven’t,” he said. “I’m looking for a job.”

There have been few offers. One came from the (New York) Yankees, but that job involved a full, 162-game schedule, so Garagiola turned it down.

“What I’d like is to do about 40 or 50 telecasts a year,” he said.

CBS will begin televising baseball in 1990, and in the next two months will name two two-person announcing teams. Speculation is that Brent Musburger and Tim McCarver will make up one, and Dick Stockton and possibly Joe Morgan or Joe Torre the other.

Garagiola said the network has not approached him, even though a team of Garagiola and McCarver would figure to be almost as good as the team of Vin Scully and Garagiola.

The thing is, Garagiola lives, breathes and sleeps baseball. He knows everyone in the game and is generally popular among fans. No announcer is liked by everyone, but Garagiola seems to rate high on the popularity scale.

At least a lot higher than Musburger, who nevertheless is the odds-on favorite for the top play-by-play job.

Then there is ESPN, which will begin televising 175 games a season in 1990. Garagiola said there has been no interest there, either.

Would he take a No. 2 job?

“I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “I don’t care about who is No. 1 and who is No. 2. Viewers may care about that, but I don’t. I look at the assignments and the work schedule.”

Garagiola said he would gladly take a job with a team, provided the schedule is right for him.

As for his departure from NBC, Garagiola, who at the time was reluctant to discuss it, was more expansive.

NBC’s version was that it wanted to wait until after negotiations with major league baseball were completed before making a new deal with Garagiola. That, on the surface, makes sense, because NBC ended up losing baseball.

Had it signed Garagiola to a multiyear deal, the network would have had no baseball for him to do after this season.

But Garagiola said that Art Watson, president of NBC Sports, who will be replaced by Dick Ebersol May 1, showed him little respect by dragging out negotiations and then not denying reports that Garagiola’s performance during last year’s World Series would determine if he would be brought back or not.

“After 27 years, I had to go through an audition?” Garagiola said. “Come on!”

Were the reports true?

“I never saw anything to the contrary,” Garagiola said.

In November, Garagiola decided he’d had it. He sent a short letter to Watson, explaining that he was quitting and why.

Two months later, NBC lost baseball to CBS.

“I didn’t cheer,” Garagiola said. “I wasn’t happy about it. I have a lot of friends at NBC. And I’m not really angry at Watson. Disappointed is the word.”

Stunned is the word for his reaction to the news that Watson is being replaced by Ebersol and given a lower position.

“Incredible,” he said.

Watson, although respected and considered straightforward by most, is said by some at NBC to be slow in making decisions. And it appears that his indecision in Garagiola’s case cost him a respected, veteran announcer.

“When Scully came aboard (in 1983) I agreed to go from play-by-play (announcer) to commentator without a whimper. I’d always done whatever they’d asked.

“I don’t think I was treated fairly.”

Meanwhile, he’s excited that the book is selling well.

It’s no kiss-and-tell, that’s for sure, nor is it a dull biography. It’s chock full of interesting anecdotes and quotes, items Garagiola spent years collecting.

He started the book a few years ago with a sportswriter but never really got going on it. He finished it with his 29-year-old daughter, Gina, a broadcast journalism graduate from Pepperdine who lives in Phoenix and writes for Guidepost, a national magazine.

“Gina laid out a proposal to me, and I liked it,” Garagiola said. “Without me knowing about it, she took a chapter we had done earlier about my work with Gerald Ford and his campaign (in 1976). She rewrote the chapter, and it was a lot better. It was still my style, only better.

“Gina is the one who went through boxes and boxes of clippings and notes and organized everything.”

The result is a book that does not really criticize anyone or expose any sex scandals. Sound boring? It isn’t.