el_dano

One of the funniest and nicest broadcast commentators in the business. I was so happy this year when the baseball season started, not only because I like baseball, but also because I love listening to him up in the booth. He’s awesome. Go D’Backs!

From what I understand from listening to King Missle, he was WAY cool.

Because I’ve loved him in just about everything he’s done. And Lloyd Dobler was kind of my role model when I was in high school.

Met him one night in a bar in New York City—one of the three “Blarney Stone” dives within a three-block radius of Penn Station. A comic geek friend of mine knew someone who knew him, and had drunk with the man before when he was in town, and he was invited out one night when Warren was passing through, and, thoughtfully, he invited me. I don’t remember much about it, honestly—as I recall, we all got pretty fiercely drunk. Which, I think, is as it should be.

I was, as many young boys are (or were, back in the day), obsessed with baseball when I was growing up. We lived just outside of Philadelphia, and I was in the fourth grade in 1980, the year the Phillies won their only World Series title. The summer of 1980 was a good one to be a young baseball fan in those parts; it was even better for my brother and me, because sometime earlier that summer the family drove up to Cooperstown, NY to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. As we started our trip home, we stopped at a diner somewhere south of Cooperstown to have lunch. The place was deserted, mostly—just us, and a whole table full of elderly gentlemen sitting at the back of the restaurant. We ordered, and while we were waiting for our food to come, my dad happened to look at the table full of old guys, and his eyes got as wide as dinner plates, and he whispered, “I think that’s Joe DiMaggio” to us. We didn’t believe him at first, of course—it seemed too crazy that, given where we’d just been, we’d find ourselves sitting in a restaurant a few tables away from Joltin’ Joe. But Dad was pretty sure, and so he stood us up, and walked us over to the table, and said, with his own boyish reverence, “Excuse me, are you Joe DiMaggio?” The old man smiled, and agreed that yes, yes, in fact he was. He shook all of our hands, and signed whatever bits of Hall of Fame paraphernalia that we happened to have brought into the restaurant with us—for me, he signed “Best Wishes, Joe DiMaggio” on the back of a postcard showing the Hall of Fame building. We went back to our table, and presumably our food arrived and we ate it and we left—I honestly don’t remember anything else about that lunch. We were back in the car, back on the highway, when it occurred to my dad to wonder, aloud, who all the other old men at that table were, and whether they were Hall of Famers as well. But it was pretty cool—meeting the Yankee Clipper himself, on the way home from the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was the perfect ending to what, to my eight-year-old mind, was a perfect trip.