Humor, or course, is a very personal matter. For some, Chevy Chase’s imitation of Gerald Ford falling down a flight of stairs is a good as it gets (and that wasn’t bad). For others, the verbal acuity of, say, Dorothy Parker is necessary (and quite rare, obviously). Therefore, the following list of baseball’s funniest public characters is offered only as a suggestion, but those guys who quietly told the clubhouse boy 5000 great jokes have been excluded. I have allowed myself one fictional ballplayer:
#5 – “Ed Harris”: Expertly played by character actor Chelcie Ross in 1989’s Major League, Ed Harris is that rare comic character who manages to be annoying and hilarious at the same time. Supposedly a born-again Christian, he battles uproariously for most of the film with his team’s voodooist, slugger Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert). Ironically, the publicly pious Harris is a tad challenged, morally. In his most memorable scene he explains to young Ricky Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) his M.O. as an aging pitcher. He’s pointing out the various “illegal” substances he hides on his body and in his uniform: “Crisco…Bardol…Vagisil. Any one of them will give you another two to three inches drop on your curve ball. Of course, if the umps are watching me real close, I’ll rub a little jalapeno up my nose, get it runnin’, and if I need to load the ball up, I just…wipe my nose.” Vaughn responds incredulously, “You put snot on the ball?” Harris explains, “I haven’t got an arm like you, kid.”
#4 – Rube Waddell: As I pointed out in an old piece still on Yahoo! Voices, Waddell may fairly be considered baseball’s “premiere nutcase,” but at the distance of a century, it’s difficult to tell whether the left-handed pitcher was actually a tragic individual with a mental handicap, an alcoholic, or simply someone who never quite grew up. Not particularly funny verbally, Waddell is said to have frequently carried a pistol – that’s when he wasn’t playing marbles with “urchins” under the stands, or being bitten by a lion. He was supposedly an actual hero, having saved thirteen people from drowning, begging the question, is looking for drowning people an actual hobby? Once, however, after hearing a cry for help, he jumped from a houseboat cocktail party to save a floating piece of wood.
Waddell did leave us with at least a few unintentionally funny remarks, including his reply to a manager who fined him for “that disgraceful hotel episode in Detroit.” The pitcher’s angry retort? “There ain’t no Hotel Episode in Detroit!”
#3 – John Kruk: The rotund, lifetime .300 hitter is now an ESPN analyst, and his new occupation has undercut his natural sense of humor a bit. As a member of the 1993 N.L. Champion Phillies, however, Kruk was the best interview available on a team of wacky misfits. His best-known remark is his answer to a female fan who questioned his training “regimen”: “Lady, I’m not an athlete. I’m a baseball player.”
However, my favorite Kruk moment came after a Phillies loss in the ’93 NLCS to Atlanta, 14-3, a game I attended. In it Fred McGriff launched a monster shot into the right field second deck, the only home run I’ve ever seen in person that just went up (until it hit something, of course). As given by Andrew Merz in his small print project, Phillies Wit, after the game Kruk declared: “The game was decided early when Crime Dog killed a family of four in the upper deck.”
#2 – Casey Stengel: For people of a certain age, Stengel’s inclusion is a no-brainer. Baseball’s all-time syntax-mangler, the old Brooklyn Dodger and manager of the majestic Yankees, constantly confounded reporters with the likes of: “They got a lot of kids now whose uniforms are so tight, especially the pants, that they cannot bend over to pick up ground balls. And they don’t want to bend over in television games because in that way there is no way their face can get on the camera,” and “There comes a time in every man’s life and I’ve had many of them.”
#1 – Lefty Gomez: In the case of Vernon Louis Gomez, arguably the best World Series pitcher ever by the numbers, we should just let the player speak:
“I’m throwing as hard as I ever did, but the ball is just not getting there as fast.”
“I was the worst hitter ever. I never even broke a bat until last year when I was backing out of the garage.”
“A lot of things run through your head when you’re going in to relieve in a tight spot. One of them was, ‘Should I spike myself?’”
Gomez knew his game, however, and was an astute evaluator of talent: “He [Jimmie Foxx] has muscles in his hair.”
And finally, as a Renaissance man, Lefty was also an inventor: “I’ve got a new invention. It’s a revolving bowl for tired goldfish.”