You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television by Al Michaels, L. Jon Wertheim Read Free Book Online Page B

call Campanis in Los Angeles to give him a status report.
    Well, six games into that series, Lasorda made his ritual postgame call to Campanis. Garvey had three hits, Buckner had two. Then Tommy added something else: “By the way, the Islanders have this kid who does a great job announcing the games. I know that Scully’s the best, but you might want to keep this kid in mind if there’s ever an opening. His name is Michaels—Al Michaels.”
    Then Lasorda went back to his recap. Davey Lopes did this. The pitchers did that. He finished, and just before they hung up, suddenly something occurred to Campanis. “Wait a second, Tommy,” he said. “This Michaels guy—the announcer.”
    “Yeah,” said Lasorda. “What about him?”
    “How do you know that he’s any good?”
    “Well, I’ve been thrown out of the last four games and I’ve been in the clubhouse listening to him on the radio.”
    It was only a slight embellishment. Lasorda had been thrown out of one game in around the fifth inning. Then he got thrown out of the next game while presenting the lineup card because he was still so flipped off from the night before. He managed to last the entire next game, but the following night, the Indians were getting blown out early, and Lasorda was so crazed, he got ejected from that game, too.
    And in Termite Palace, the visiting team’s clubhouse was maybe a hundred feet beyond the center-field fence. So it’s not like if you got thrown out, you could walk back from the clubhouse through a tunnel and sneak peeks at the action and relay instructions from just behind the dugout. Here you had to walk across the field to the center-field fence—which was 430 feet from home plate—and then walk another hundred feet, with the crowd serenading you the whole way. It was the reverse of a relief pitcher coming in from the bullpen. Oh, by the way, the umpiring crew that threw Lasorda out all those nights included Bruce Froemming, who would go on to have a thirty-seven-year career in the majors, the longest tenure of any umpire in history.
    Spokane’s best player in 1970 was not Buckner, Garvey, Lopes, or Russell. It was a young, tremendously gifted shortstop with speed and power and a dash of panache who’d been such a great all-around athlete that he’d been recruited to potentially replace O. J. Simpson as USC’s tailback. His name was Bobby Valentine. In 1970, Valentine would be named MVP of the Pacific Coast League. As the season wound down, he was neck-and-neck for the league batting title with Islanders outfielder Winston Llenas (pronounced YAY-nuss).
    With the regular season drawing to a close and the team playing well, I went on the road for the first time that year, joining the team in Tucson and Phoenix, where the Islanders—several days before the end of the season—clinched the PCL South Division title. Spokane had clinched the North Division title as well, setting up a matchup in the league championship series. It was Hawaii’s first-ever appearance in the PCL playoffs, and because the team was so popular and drawing so well, the league decided to extend what would normally have been a best-of-five-game series to a best-of-seven. But first, as the regular season wound down, there was still the suspense of the batting title.
    Coming down to the last day, our guy, Llenas, and their guy, Valentine, were in a virtual tie. I was now back in Honolulu, again re-creating the final regular season games that had no impact on the standings. On the very last day of the season, we had heard from Spokane—and remember, this is through rudimentary communication—that Valentine had gotten two hits with the help of very liberal hometown official scoring. When I heard about this, I made a big deal of it during our re-creation. “Llenas should have won the batting title, but because of some local-yokel scoring decisions, Valentine has won the batting title!” So to everyone listening in Hawaii, I had helped turn Valentine