CASUAL
REES, MATTHEW
casual A GEORGE FOR ALL SEASONS My highly imprecise gauge for determining whether you're growing old is this: You are if your childhood baseball heroes are being inducted into the Hall of Fame....
...That home run was the culmination of an extraordinary season...
...George Brett, the Kansas City Royals star I idolized in my pre-teen years, was recently inducted...
...And food after the game...
...Many of them were, of course, outfitted in Royals jerseys with "BRETT" and his "5" on their backs...
...Though Brett would never again give serious chase to .400, he did not stray far from the headlines...
...Tom Boswell of the Washington Post memorably described Brett as someone "who couldn't wait for somebody to come into him spikes high at third base so they could roll in the dirt and see who'd get punched in the mouth more often...
...I'm even more embarrassed to admit that watching television replays of his teary acceptance speech got me a little misty, as it made my childhood days of Brett-worship seem so distant...
...He hit for power, and if his teammates didn't help him get around the bases, he'd try to steal (my favorite set of Brett statistics is that he's the only player ever to have accumulated more than 3,000 hits, 300 home runs, 600 doubles, 100 triples, and 200 stolen bases...
...The most important thing you need to know about Brett is not that he was an extraordinary hitter—you should already know that—but that he frequently looked disheveled, as if he had just come from a barroom brawl...
...Brett hovered around .400 as late as September 19 (he finished with a not too shabby .390...
...Granted, I wasn't alone...
...News accounts indicated that after Brett broke into tears talking about his three older brothers and his late father, there weren't many dry eyes among his thousands of fans who had made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown from Kansas City and beyond...
...And I deeply regret having no memory of September 30, 1992—the day he banged out four hits in a game to reach 3,000...
...There's free beer in the refrigerator...
...There's a rack filled with bubble gum, candy bars, and chewing tobacco...
...The speech will surely become a fixture in Brett lore, though there's another statement of his that I think better reflects what his rough-and-tumble baseball-playing days were all about: "You walk into the clubhouse...
...Amen...
...He capped the 1980 season, for instance, by becoming the only player to sit out a World Series game because of hemorrhoids...
...One of his cheeks was always bulging with tobacco, and from what I recall of his baseball-card mug shots—a key reference point in one's childhood—he looked just angry enough to be intimidating...
...And while my hometown of Lafayette, California, didn't contain many Brett fans, my good friend Matt Steinhaus was enough of a baseball enthusiast to know a close-to-.400 hitter couldn't be ignored...
...What else could anyone want...
...I recall spending countless mornings that summer hunched over Royals' box scores before bicycling off to swim practice...
...Perhaps that explains why I got so sentimental about Brett's Hall of Fame induction...
...Three years later, he provided one of the indelible sports images of all time: When an umpire disallowed his game-winning homerun on the spurious grounds that pine tar extended too far up his bat, he jumped about in such a rage that it looked as if fireworks were exploding in his pants...
...That '85 series was the last time I paid close attention to Brett or the Royals...
...His single greatest hit of all may have come in the 1980 playoffs, when he cracked a Goose Gossage fastball so hard that I recall it still rising when it ricocheted off the upper deck of Yankee stadium...
...Indeed, unlike many hitters with great batting averages, Brett wasn't content to tap out singles and then lollygag on first base...
...MATTHEW REES...
...I only recently learned he won a batting title in 1990 (Brett partisans like noting he's the only player to have led the league in hitting during three different decades...
...Thus our routine poolside greeting each morning was a quick recital of Brett's latest statistics, with roars of approval on those (frequent) occasions when he'd succeeded in boosting his average...
...His athletic feats ceased to be a part of my daily life, and soon enough, I was watching more CNN than ESPN...
...In 1985, Brett led the Royals to victory in the World Series, though Cardinals fans still bellyache that a horrendous call by umpire Don Denkinger cost them game six...
...Had I been there, I would have been tempted to dress the same way...
...I'm embarrassed to admit I qualify...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 46
