This was late one San Francisco night, years ago, and Ralph Kiner was well into a fourth hour of telling stories, filling one more room with laughter and good cheer, a Hall of Famer forever sharing the rare gift of making everyone else at the table feel like the VIP.
“Here’s when I realized the power of TV,” he said. “A few years ago I was chatting with a ballplayer, an All-Star, I won’t embarrass him by giving his name. He wanted to know how I broke into TV. I started to tell him, ‘Well, after I was done playing …’
“And he stopped me. And he said, ‘Wait, you played?’”
He waited for the laughter to die down, smiled, said, “Yeah. A little.”
More laughter. And then the Kineresque kicker.
“I mean, goodness, can you imagine? I’ve never been confused with Walter Cronkite.”
That was Kiner: gregarious yet humble, the owner of a plaque in Cooperstown but also of a rare brand of modesty that forever defied his place in the game, as well as the popular culture of New York City for parts of six decades.
He passed Thursday at age 91, and he takes the last vestige of a glorious age with him. For years upon years upon years it was Kiner, Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson broadcasting Mets games and it was Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer and Bill White with the Yankees, and these six voices were the Greek chorus of so many summers, so familiar and so accessible that they would make Mets fans listen to Yankees games, would encourage Yankees fans to tune in to Channel 9.
White, a few weeks past his 80th birthday, is the only one still with us, but it has been 25 years since he traded in a microphone for the presidency of the National League. Kiner was still on the air last summer, working a handful of day games on SNY, a splendid link to a spectacular baseball past in New York City.
Still telling stories. Still lighting up every room he was in: restaurant, saloon, broadcast booth. Inspiring millions of baseball fans along the way. And more than a few broadcasters.
Howie Rose was a kid working for WHN radio in the spring of 1983. He goes back to the upper deck at Shea Stadium, munching salami sandwiches and living and dying with the Mets, and he bumped into Kiner one night in St. Petersburg, spent his own delightful evening enjoying Kiner’s company, and all but floated back to his room afterward.
“And it occurred to me,” Rose said Thursday, “that if someone had given me a gift certificate for my birthday that would have given me the 3 1/2 hours I’d just spent with Ralph, that would’ve been just about the best gift I’d ever gotten in my life.”
Rose, of course, would become a voice of the Mets in time, would work with Kiner and marvel at just how good he was with people, how he had the talent to both empathize with them and understand them. In 1999, Rose emceed a reunion of the 1969 Mets. And Kiner could see in Rose’s face what that meant to the kid who used to graze in the cheap seats.
“Howie,” he said later, “did you ever think you’d be the one to introduce this team you used to care so much about?”
“It was amazing,” Rose said, “because that’s exactly what I was thinking. To the letter.”
That came across, always, even as he led a life that could easily have been lived from the top of Olympus, safely removed from the masses. There were the 369 home runs, most of them hit for some dreadful Pirates teams, and the years he spent in World War II flying patrol bombers over the Pacific. He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh, and married tennis star Nancy Chaffee.
And perhaps most remarkably, at a time and a place when New York City was the home office of Pop Culture — the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — he was right there in the zeitgeist with “Kiner’s Korner,” a kitschy and catchy show that followed Mets games on Channel 9, whose theme song remains ingrained in every baseball fan of a certain age.
As he said that night in Lefty O’Doul’s, across the street from the St. Francis Hotel: “I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this life.”
And he gave so many of us our full share too, in both laughter and memories. One last story from Rose: It was the last day of the ’98 season, and Kiner was doing a postgame show, same set, same theme song, and he invited Rose to join him. Rose said, “I thought you had to pitch a shutout or hit a game-winning home run to get on Kiner’s Korner.”
And Kiner, waiting a beat, replied, “You know, you’re right. You’re just about the worst guest we’ve ever had on this show.”
Both men broke up. All these years later, Rose cracked up again, remembering. A lot of laughter in one great man’s path. Turns out we all got our money’s worth.