Mike Shannon - Tales from the Dugout: The Greatest True Baseball Stories Ever Told

TALES from the DUGOUT

The Greatest True
Baseball Stories Ever Told

MIKE SHANNON

Copyright 1997 by Mike Shannon. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-161261-6

MHID: 0-07-161261-0

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OK, lets get one thing out of the way right now: Im not the ex-St. Louis Cardinals outfielder-third baseman. Im the other Mike Shannon. Not that I mind your asking. For one thing, you bought this book, so... I love you, man! For another, it shows that you were paying attention to baseball back in the sixties when Mike and the rest of the Cards went to three World Series.

And I can understand why you might be momentarily confused. After all, the other Mike Shannon (from my perspective) has been a member of the baseball media for a good while nowMike joined the Cardinals broadcast booth after he retired as a playerand he even lent his name to a baseball newsletter that was on the scene for a brief time. On the other side of the coin, someday somebody is going to watch me play fast-pitch softball and say, Hey, Mike Shannon, didnt you used to play third base for the St. Louis Cardinals? It could happen!

Actually, Mike and I go way back. When I was a Little Leaguer in Jacksonville, Florida, Mike played one summer for our Triple A Jacksonville Suns on his way up to the Show. That right there made Mike my second-favorite player (as cool as it was to have the same name as a major leaguer, I wasnt about to ditch Willie Mays for anybody). Then, at Bishop Kenny High School, a classmate, who knew absolutely nothing about baseball, nicknamed me Moonman. Wow! The same moniker as Mike. Unfortunately, I couldnt get the nickname to stick. I guess I just didnt do or say as many flaky things as Mike. For instance, Bob Gibson tells a Moonman story in A Stranger to the Game about the third game of the 1964 World Series. On the first pitch of the bottom of the ninth inning, Mickey Mantle hit a gargantuan home run off Barney Schultz into the third deck of Yankee Stadium to win the game 21. Gibson remembers watching the soaring home run and seeing the Cardinals rightfielder, Shannon, poised with one leg on the fence as if he were going to jump up and catch the damn thing. Afterward, when Gibson asked him if he really thought he might be able to catch the ball, Shannon said, You never know, Big Boy. You never know.

I did eventually meet the other Mike Shannon. In fact, I interviewed him. It was after I had moved to Cincinnati and started publishing Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. We were doing a special retrospective on Roger Maris in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of his great, record-breaking 61-home-run season of 1961, and I wanted to talk to Shannon about Maris because the two of them had become close friends after Maris was traded from the Yankees to the Cardinals. I caught up with Shannon at Riverfront Stadium during batting practice before a game between the Cardinals and the hometown Reds. Introducing myself only as the editor of Spitball, I asked Mike if hed talk to me about Roger Maris for our special issue. Mike agreed to talk but asked me to catch him later in the press-box dining room after he himself finished conducting some interviews for the Cards radio show that evening.

I didnt mention my name in the press-box dining room either. I wanted to act like a professional writer, not a fan. I didnt think I was nervous, but I must have been. While Shannon ate his dinner (nothing but a bowl of salad), I began the interview, asking, When he first came over from the Yankees, did Mike have any trouble fitting in with the Cardinals?

Shannon looked up from his salad and said, You mean Roger?

Uh, yeah... right, Roger, I blurted in consternation at the mix-up. Shannon went into a lengthy answer, and I listened intently while I studied his faceso this is what Mike Shannon looks like and sounds likeand mentally formulated my next question. And then I did it again.

How instrumental was Mike to the teams success in 1967 and 1968? I asked.

You mean Roger? said Shannon again.

Yes, I mean Roger. Boy, he must think Im goofy, I thought in exasperation.

Thankfully I got through the rest of the interview, which turned out to be pretty darn good, without referring to Roger Maris as Mike, and Shannon kindly never questioned me about my Freudian slips. From one Moonman to another: thanks, Mike.