Coleman Had a Twist on Name of the Game

Jerry Coleman, the recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence at the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony Sunday at Cooperstown, N.Y., was typically self-effacing in his acceptance speech.

Coleman, a New York Yankee broadcaster before being hired by the San Diego Padres in 1972, recalled once working a Yankee-Cleveland Indian doubleheader.

He said he was told that Sam McDowell and Jack Kralick would be pitching for the Indians. What he wasn’t told was that Kralick would be pitching the first game, McDowell the second.

Coleman said he had McDowell pitching for the Indians for four innings before someone from the Yankees’ television station told him that Kralick was on the mound.

“That put me in the Guinness Book of Records,” Coleman said. “Most innings, wrong pitcher.”

Trivia time: Coleman’s 33-year run as a Padre broadcaster was interrupted in 1980 when he took what job for a year?

A big save: Coleman, who retired as a second baseman for the Yankees in 1957, said Sunday that his first broadcast job was on the “Game of the Week” pregame show for CBS, and his first interview was with the St. Louis Cardinals’ Red Schoendienst.

He said that when it was time to start the interview, his knees turned to mush.

“I looked at Red and said something very inquisitive, like, ‘How’s it going, Red?’ He talked [nonstop] for five minutes.... Red, you don’t know how close you came to getting kissed right on the spot.”

Self-effacing trend: Broadcasters such as Coleman and Milwaukee’s Bob Uecker, who won the Frick Award in 2003, have built careers on making fun of themselves. And it hasn’t been lost on others.

Arizona Diamondback announcer Mark Grace last week in Milwaukee served as the bratwurst in the Brewers’ between-innings sausage race.

“I was brutally slow wearing that big costume,” the former first baseman was quoted as saying by the Daily Herald of suburban Chicago. “It was like carrying a piano on my back.

“In other words, nothing has changed from when I was a player.”

Bottom line: “It seems a few NHL teams are introducing modest cuts in ticket prices,” wrote Randy Turner of the Winnipeg Free Press. “The Toronto Maple Leafs, for example, cut season tickets by 5%. But the vast majority of teams aren’t slashing ticket prices -- despite a 24% rollback in player salaries and the implementation of a cap linked to revenues.

“So it’s true: The NHL did make their nets larger after all.”

Looking back: On this day in 1979, Yankee catcher Thurman Munson was killed in a plane crash while practicing takeoffs and landings at an airport near his home in Canton, Ohio.

Trivia answer: Manager of the Padres.

And finally: Coleman, famous for misspeaking, has produced a wealth of “Colemanisms.” Here’s one of the better ones: “I’ve made a couple of mistakes I’d like to do over.”

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Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.