Phil Rizzuto and Joe DiMaggio at the 45th Yankees Old Timers Game, July 27, 1991.
New York Daily News
Wednesday, August 15th 2007, 9:49 AM
This was Joe DiMaggio talking about Phil Rizzuto once. We were sitting in the dugout of a ballpark in Fort Lauderdale before a charity baseball game DiMaggio used to have down there, and this was one of those days when DiMaggio had opened up about the old days, about breaking in with Lou Gehrig and playing out the string next to Mickey Mantle, had talked about what it was like to play for Joe McCarthy and behind as tough and wonderful a Yankee as there ever was: Scooter Rizzuto.
"People loved watching me play baseball," DiMaggio said. "Scooter, they just loved."
Only as much as any Yankee who ever lived. More than any of them, Rizzuto was family.
The old men, not just the great DiMaggio, loved Rizzuto for the way he played the game, played bigger than he was on the biggest Yankee teams of them all, on Yankee teams that won five World Series in a row between 1949 and 1953. The rest of us loved him as a broadcaster, over all the 40 years when he was at the mike for Yankee games, loved him for "Holy Cow!" and birthday greetings, mostly loved him for all the fun he had.
They will argue forever about whether he really should have gotten into the Hall of Fame as a ballplayer. Let them. The truth is that they should have put him into the broadcasters' wing in Cooperstown before the Veterans Committee finally put him there 13 years ago this month for all the Yankee shortstop he played.
And Scooter Rizzuto, who made such wonderful noise around the Yankees from the time he showed up to play shortstop in 1941, the year of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, can never be measured with numbers or honors or even the long amazing run he had as a Yankee. You measure Rizzuto in the way people felt about him, and the way they felt about him was this:
They never had a better friend than this with the Yankees. Not Ruth or Gehrig or DiMaggio or Mantle, not Yogi or Whitey or Mattingly or Bernie or Jeter, not Mo Rivera or Joe Torre. Rizzuto was the one who came from the neighborhood to Yankee Stadium and never left.
"You think about this," he said one night outside the Yankee broadcast booth, getting ready to work a game in the early '90s. "You see that ballpark out there? It's been the only office I ever had."
Then he went in and did another game until it was time to beat the traffic, talked about birthday greetings to somebody's aunt or uncle or father or son, talked about the cookies or cake or cannoli somebody had sent to the booth that night, all the while doing what he had done since he retired as a player and became one of the voices of the Yankees - the New York voice, the sidewalk voice - after that: Made every announcer who ever worked with him look and sound better.
He was born in Brooklyn and came out of Richmond Hill High and the sandlots of his city and dies as famous a baseball name as the city has ever produced. There were better Yankees than him, some of the greatest ballplayers of them all. Never better company in this world.
He came out of the time when there weren't this many baseball voices in the summer, came out of a New York when people said you could walk down the street in Brooklyn on a summer afternoon and hear Red Barber's voice, before Barber went with the Yankees, and not miss a pitch. Phil Rizzuto was a character without trying to be one, the way so many modern announcers do. He was unforgettably and spectacularly himself.
"There's a part of me that's still the kid my Uncle Mikey used to bring to the old Stadium," he said another time. "And by that I mean the kid from the neighborhood who can't believe he's actually inside Yankee Stadium."
"You know what he told me one time?" Mel Allen said once in the Yankee dugout, getting ready for another Opening Day. "Scooter said he'd turn around sometimes during the game and just look at DiMaggio. I asked him why and he said, 'Because it made me feel good.'"
And after he was the great Yankee shortstop before Jeter, after he was MVP in 1950 and a part of all that winning, after he was DiMaggio's teammate and Yogi's teammate and finally Mantle's teammate, he made a career out of making the rest of us feel good every time we heard his voice on radio or television, saw him run out on the field before a playoff game, or for another Old Timers' Day.
Only at the end, in these last years, was he finally absent from Yankee Stadium, gone from the biggest Yankee occasions for the first time in more than 60 years. And yet: Nobody ever had a run like this. Kid from Richmond Hill who got inside the most famous ballpark in this world and became one of the most famous Yankees of them all and did not leave us until yesterday.
And somehow, even when he did let go at 89, it was still all the summers yesterday and all the years. Somehow it was the First of October in 1961, and Scooter was at the mike, and Roger Maris' 61st home run was in the air at the Stadium, on its way toward a young guy named Sal Durante on the other side of the right-field fence.
"Here's the windup," he said that day. "Fastball hit deep to right. This could be it! Way back there! Holy cow! He did it! Sixty-one for Maris! Look at 'em fight for that ball out there!"
Sometimes in sports it really does feel like a death in the family. I was 9 when I first heard that call. We all heard it again yesterday. We heard that neighborhood voice one more time and, for one more afternoon, were all young again.
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