The harmless practical joke that changed baseball
A model of this story initially ran in December 2021.
On Oct. 2, 1983, the Boston Red Sox, their followers and the baseball world mentioned goodbye to Carl Yastrzemski. There was a complete large manufacturing at Fenway Park for his remaining sport, with an hour-long pregame ceremony, the retirement of his No. 8 jersey and a letter, learn aloud to the group, from President Ronald Reagan. For a crew that hadn’t reached a World Series in eight years, and hadn’t received one in 65, it was the most important Red Sox story possible.
But that night time, the Boston sports activities discuss radio present “The Sports Huddle” on WHDH wasn’t speaking about Carl Yastrzemski. It was speaking a couple of comparatively unknown baseball lifer named Vern Rapp. And that little four-hour present was about to alter baseball historical past.
The 1983 Red Sox weren’t a very good baseball crew, 78-84 on the season, and over the season’s final month, and for a lot of the season actually, the one story value speaking about was Yaz’s retirement. It reached such a vital mass that even individuals who cherished Yaz — which was everybody in Boston — had begun to tire of speaking about it. So, Bruce Cornblatt, then a younger producer of “The Sports Huddle,” a weekly sports activities call-in present (and now a producer at MLB Network), thought it might be humorous to softly mock all of the fanfare by doing a tribute to another person, somebody far much less celebrated, on the day of Yaz’s final sport.
“We wanted to pay tribute to the most remote person we could,” Cornblatt instructed me. “We thought that might be funny for a little while.”
The downside was that Cornblatt didn’t know anybody who was retiring. So he went to the library and picked by some latest newspapers, and their sports activities transactions pages. He stumbled throughout a small be aware that the first-base coach in Montreal, a 55-year-old man named Vern Rapp who had beforehand managed the Cardinals, was set to go away his baseball profession on the finish of the 12 months.
“The first-base coach of the Montreal Expos could not possibly be more obscure, at least in Boston,” Cornblatt says. “So we went with him, whoever he was.”
Thus, the ruse was set. Cornblatt and his crew determined the easiest way to verify the joke would land was to play all of it extremely straight: They would run a present as if everybody in Boston, on the night time of Yaz’s final sport, would need to hear an earnest, prolonged tribute to … Vern Rapp.
They tracked down former Minor League teammates of Rapp’s, in addition to associates of his from his time in St. Louis, together with Cardinals broadcaster Mike Shannon, and interviewed them about how nice Vern Rapp was, how a lot baseball would miss him. They made positive to not simply OK all of it with Rapp himself, however even safe his participation. But they nonetheless performed it completely sober.
“It wouldn’t have worked if everybody thought it was a put-on,” Cornblatt says. “Least of all Rapp himself.”
Remarkably, Rapp agreed to spend his final night time in baseball, after the ultimate sport with the Expos, speaking on the cellphone from Montreal to some radio yahoos from Boston about his profession, about taking off the uniform for the final time.
“Honest to God, we weren’t making fun of him,” Cornblatt says. “But he definitely did not understand the bit.”
Cornblatt had even written a tune to ship Rapp off, referred to as “Bye Bye Vern Rapp,” set to the tune of “Bye Bye Birdie.”
Bye Bye Vern Rapp, please inform us it ain’t so
Bye Bye Vern Rapp, hate to see you go …
We’ll miss your bunting indicators
The means you tugged your belt
Vern, would you continue to have left
If you knew how we felt
It was fairly the gag. But as a result of the present took the bit so severely, and performed it so straight, one thing unusual occurred: Everyone received emotional. Shannon spoke eloquently about how a lot Rapp, who handed away in 2015, had meant to the Cardinals group when he was the crew’s supervisor, and Rapp himself, a former navy man hardly identified for outward emotion, broke down in tears a number of occasions trying again at his life in baseball.
Cornblatt and his fellow producers felt obliged to maintain the present going, desperately trying up anybody else who had interacted with Rapp in his profession. He discovered that Rapp had as soon as been part of the Cincinnati Reds group, so, in a rush, he referred to as Sheldon Bender, vp of participant personnel for the Reds, who received on the air, after telling the producers “I didn’t know Vern was retiring,” and instructed Rapp how a lot he revered him.
“Vern got choked up,” Cornblatt says.
As famous, till Cornblatt had referred to as him, Bender was unaware that Rapp was retiring. What Bender knew that Cornblatt (and Rapp) didn’t was that the Reds had been dissatisfied with their present supervisor, Russ Nixon. And that gave Bender an concept.
The basic consensus on the Cincinnati Reds in 1983 was that they had been overpaid, undisciplined and unworthy to be the successors to the Big Red Machine. Sparky Anderson had been gone for 5 years, John McNamara had already been fired, and virtually all the celebs from these groups, from Joe Morgan to Pete Rose to George Foster to Tony Perez, had been lengthy gone. The solely Big Red Machine stalwarts left in 1983 had been Johnny Bench, enjoying in his remaining season, and Dave Concepcion.
Nixon, who had received simply 74 video games in ’83, his solely full season on the helm in Cincinnati, was seen as too relaxed, too pleasant to the gamers, and his contract was up on the finish of the season. Bender knew that basic supervisor Bob Howsam wished a disciplinarian, somebody to whip them into gear. As it turned out, Rapp, who had as soon as fought with Cardinals reliever Al Hrabosky about shaving his signature Fu Manchu mustache, was precisely what he was on the lookout for.
“Vern was as serious as a straight razor,” says Hal McCoy, a longtime Reds beat reporter for the Dayton Daily News and some of the legendary sportswriters of the final 50 years.
Bender admitted on the time that Rapp “was not a candidate until the radio show,” however when he and Howsam met along with his fellow St. Louisian, they felt like they’d their man. They employed Rapp on October 5, simply a few days after the radio gag, and ready for the Big Red Machine to rise once more.
Rapp — who received 83 video games as Cardinals skipper in 1977 earlier than being fired 17 video games into the next season — instantly set about remodeling the clubhouse, or no less than making an attempt to.
“He turned it into a high school locker room,” McCoy mentioned. “He had signs all over the clubhouse, things like, ‘when in doubt, slide.’ Real little kid type of stuff.”
Mark Schmetzer, a beat reporter who lined the Reds for 20 years, says, “Rapp was a very sensitive guy, very sensitive to criticism, and very insistent that the Reds play like they did when he was in their Minor League system. But this was the ‘80s. The players didn’t really work that way anymore. He was a man out of his time.”
Or, extra succinctly, as McCoy places it: “They hated him.”
Greg Rhodes, the crew historian for the Reds, mentioned Rapp struggled with the crew from the get-go: “The players just saw him as this cranky old man who had no business being the manager.”
McCoy mentioned Rapp was so uncomfortable with the media that he would truly write out solutions to reporters’ postgame questions on an index card and browse them aloud to the room.
“By the end of it,” McCoy says, “we would just skip him entirely after the game. We just bypassed his office and went straight to the clubhouse. It was just a mess.”
The Reds had been awful that 12 months, even worse than the 12 months earlier than, and Bender and Howsam, with the crew at 51-70, lastly admitted their radio-show-enabled mistake and fired him. Not that they instructed him first. In a remaining insult, the supervisor discovered of his firing from … McCoy.
When McCoy discovered the news, he walked onto the sphere and requested Rapp for remark. Rapp’s remark: “What?” He instantly stormed into the clubhouse and yelled on the gamers, “I’m your manager until someone tells me otherwise.” Shortly thereafter, somebody did. “The players just snickered,” McCoy says. “Yeah, only time that ever happened in my career.”
So, this Boston radio present, doing an prolonged Yaz joke, ended up getting Vern Rapp unretired and employed by the Reds, who fired him after lower than a 12 months. A shaggy dog story, however all instructed, not that large of a deal. That is, till you take into account who the Reds employed to switch him, and why they did so.
“The players disliked Rapp so much that it was clear the Reds needed to bring someone in the players loved,” Schmetzer mentioned. “And there was one guy they loved more than anybody.”
At the time, Rose was a flailing, declining first baseman and left fielder for a Montreal Expos crew that was going nowhere. He was nonetheless chasing Ty Cobb’s hit document, however slowly: He was hitting simply .259 for Montreal with a meager .295 slugging share. There, he was a 43-year-old man stumbling towards historical past in obscurity. But in Cincinnati? In Cincinnati, he may very well be a legend returning. Howsam, upon firing Rapp, referred to as the Expos and requested what it might take to get Rose not solely to return play for the Reds, however be their supervisor. It ended up costing them utility infielder Tom Lawless.
When Rose was formally employed, the media requests for his opening press convention had been so quite a few that they ended up having it on the sphere of Riverfront Stadium. And for some time, it labored. Rose hit .365 the remainder of the season, and the crew was noticeably higher. They then had a profitable document in 1985, the 12 months Rose broke Cobb’s document, after which once more in 1986, Rose’s final 12 months as a participant.
So, to recap: Vern Rapp retires. He will get a job managing the Reds due to a joke a Boston radio station made to mock Yaz hero worship. The gamers dislike him a lot that he’s fired rather than a supervisor they do love. That supervisor is Pete Rose. And then Rose is banned from baseball for betting on video games he managed for the Reds. That little radio present modified baseball historical past perpetually.
Until I spoke to him, Cornblatt didn’t know who changed Rapp as supervisor of the Reds. “Oh my God,” he says. “That is downright scary. Wow. What a thing. This is like a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. Did I … did I get Pete Rose banned? Am I responsible for that?” Cornblatt laughs, however solely just a little. “What a coda to the story. Our little radio show. Wow.”
