RIP Joe Garagiola

Diamondbacks announced it. He was 90:



Had a great run as a baseball broadcaster and after-dinner speaker, but I can't think of him without thinking of Fred Willard's parody of him in "Best in Show."

 

Got a nice image boost from the NBC gig and later statesman role, but between the racism and the blood feud with Musial, he sure did seem to arouse some negative feelings within the game.

 

Great sense of humor. He was excellent on the Today Show before going back to NBC for Game of the Week.

 

Don't know why, but I thought he'd died a long time ago.

 

Dude, 2 hours ago I was watching the roast of Redd Foxx and Garagiola was one of the roasters. Weird.

 

Just yesterday I watched / listened to the YouTube tape of him interviewing John Lennon and Paul McCartney in 1968 as Carson's Tonight Show guest host.

He came off as a complete moron -- like he had never heard of the Beatles. At one point he referred to the (absent) Ringo Starr as the "Elvis" of the group and observed it must be boring for Lennon/McCartney to "play backup" for Ringo as he "danced around for the girls up front."


John and Paul were in NY to announce the formation of Apple Corps. Apparently Garagiola must have thought Ringo was a Don Corleone type who ran the group with an iron fist, who had sent Lennon and McCartney to the U. S. as flunkies and messenger boys while he cooled his heels in London.

Lennon and McCartney were explaining the concept of what they wanted Apple to do (which admittedly was a pretty hazy concept) and Garagiola kept throwing in one-liners that of course they would have to ask Ringo for his approval on everything.

A semi-stoned Lennon kept stopping for "WTF" double takes, and after about 10 minutes he was ready to storm off stage or punch Garagiola. McCartney seemed like he was dozing off.
The only thing that kept the show from complete collapse was a half-drunk Tallulah Bankhead, who did seem to know a little about the Beatles, and who died a month or so after the show.

As for Joe G, he certainly carved out a great broadcasting career for himself. He was pretty much the voice of baseball in the 60s-80s.

 

All the legends from The Hill are leaving us.

 

He was in the office once.
Holy cow, Garagiola was loud.
Never stopped talking for two hours.

 

Were there specific racist incidents he was involved with? I wasn't aware of that element to his past, so I'm genuinely interested.

 

The Real Jackie Robinson Story

 

Unfortunately I haven't figured out a way around the WSJ pay wall as yet. Anyway, I Googled it and see some of these stories about an incident with Robinson, though Garagiola denies it happened.

 

Yeah, that's the biggie. Also he was supposedly besties with Enos Slaughter, who was supposedly the driving force behind the threatened boycott (which the Cardinals deny).

Notice my use of "supposedly." It's a lot of conjecture for sure. But in baseball town St. Louis, there was quite a bit of effort toward smoothing out the local boy's rough edges in retrospect. You still see a lot of writing about what a pest Garagiola was in that era, but again, it is a lot of conjecture.

What isn't conjecture is that he sued Musial over a business deal and they hated each other until Musial's dying day.