Friday, September 16, 2011

A 1994 Bunting Lesson From The Scooter

He was 77 years old then. Boy, do we miss him! a h/t to my old LES teammate, "Cutter Shoom" for sending this along.
from a nytimes article entitled Hills Alive With Sound of Huckleberries by RICHARD SANDOMIR 
Seventeen years ago, on a baseball field outside Vienna, Phil Rizzuto tried to wedge a batting helmet onto his head. “What you really need is a square one,” Ralph Branca cracked from his seat in the dugout, a former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher incongruously wearing a Yankees uniform.
Nearby, Yogi Berra stood at home plate and lunged for a ceremonial first pitch. Then he went out and played second base.
At first base, Whitey Ford turned to a video camera and said: “Isn’t life wonderful, folks? Austria on a Sunday afternoon. We’re beating the Austrians, 10-4, and we’re having a lot of fun.” With “My Way” blasting from a loudspeaker, Ford turned to a camera to add, “And Frank Sinatra’s singing!”
Watching Rizzuto, Ford and Berra — in video never seen publicly — on a diamond in Austria during a baseball season appears to make little sense. After all, Rizzuto still had a job then as a Yankees announcer.
But this was mid-September 1994. Major leaguers had been on strike for more than a month and the World Series was about to be canceled. ......

1 comment:

  1. Where's Alphonso? Enough with this cuteness. We need juju.

    ReplyDelete

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