“Where the hell’s the 325 sign in left field?”
Central Michigan University Sports Information Director, Fred Stabley Jr., April 1985
That’s it, time to come clean. It was me, the radio play-by-play guy, the voice of Chippewa Baseball, who stole the 325-foot marker. My overwhelming sentimentality for the game got the best of me. More to the point, so did eight beers and a couple shots of tequila.
One day, I was sitting in the press box calling the action of Central Michigan University baseball, making reference to the 325-foot stretch down the right and left field lines, 375 feet or whatever it was to the power alleys, and 400 feet to straightaway centerfield. The next day, early in the first inning I went with, “It’s 325 down the lines here at Alumni Field . . . hey, wait, the marker in left field appears to be missing. That’s odd.”
Despite being hungover and a lousy actor, I got away with it. I was somewhat well respected in student media circles and a pretty decent play-by-play guy. No one in the press box that day would suspect me of stealing the sign the night before. My secret was safe, until now.
What happened in the dark of night between those two baseball broadcasts was a secret I had planned to take to my grave. Then my ten-year-old son asked me one day, “Hey, Dad, what’s that big metal sign in your closet mean?”
“Well, son, I was hammered one night, didn’t get laid, so I decided while I was walking home in the middle of the night to rip it off the outfield wall at my college ballpark.” This is the explanation I didn’t go with. I think I said it was a gift. Realizing I was just compounding the evil, I’ve decided to tell the real story, which begs the question, can I still be charged or punished?
Central Michigan University was an all-around delightful experience. The education was decent, not at the level of the University of Michigan or one of the bratty, small private schools around the state, but decent enough. We had a very solid regional broadcasting program. Just as important, it was a flourishing party school in those days, sixteenth on the Playboy national list of party schools, with horny and hot suburban and small-town coeds ready to experiment. Utopia, some would call it; the party atmosphere was the main reason I extended my attendance to five years.
Spring was obviously in the air in April 1985 when I met some friends at the “soccer house” on the north end of campus. The soccer house wasn’t an official designation; it was simply a small home on North Franklin Street where a number of the school’s soccer team members resided. Soccer was a club sport at the time, not varsity, so it wasn’t taken all that seriously. The house was legendary for its booze consumption.
The fraternity scene was lame for the most part, with just a small “Greek” population on campus, so most of the good stuff occurred at random house parties between campus and downtown Mt. Pleasant.
To get to the area, my housemates and I had to travel about two miles. We lived in a brand-spanking-new apartment complex called Chippewa Village, about three-quarters of a mile west of campus. It was townhouse style, each unit with its own private entrance, and we lived in A-1. They were all three-storey, five-bedroom bachelor or bachelorette pads, overlooking a central courtyard. Other pals from Thorpe Hall, our jock dorm down the street where we previously lived, also got past the waiting list and had hip pads at Chip’ Village. Scott Smith, or “Smitty,” whom I rode with to the party on the night of the theft, had the bedroom next to me on the top floor.
I don’t remember whom I drank with, whom I chatted with, or for how long I stayed at the soccer house that April night. I’m sure it was a combination of the semi-regulars I hung out with and some randoms; all I know is that the proceedings got very liquid. But I somehow remember the remainder of the night, after I left the party, like it was yesterday.
Smitty was long gone by the time I started stumbling home at about three o’clock in the morning. The CMU campus is flat and rather cozy. The soccer house sat just a few doors up from Bellows Street, which runs across the north end of campus. It’s only about a mile and a quarter south to Broomfield Street, which runs along the south end. Preston Street splits the difference, running parallel to the others, just a little north of centre. Just off Preston, in the heart of the campus, is where old Alumni Field sat.
I was a few steps north of the ballpark, meandering my way south, when I suddenly convinced myself I had to take a little piece of CMU baseball home with me. I mean, c’mon, in my mind I was the next Ernie Harwell (Detroit Tigers legendary broadcaster), and if things stayed the way they were, I’d be the first kid ever to broadcast Chippewa baseball as the main play-by-play guy for three (and then four) years, starting as a sophomore. Baseball broadcasting was my life. It was only my junior year, but I had to have the large memento right then. In my sloshed mind, I had to give myself an early twenty-first birthday present.
Stealing that sign is the perfect example of an item literally being “ripped off.” It wasn’t easy.
Had I been caught, years three and four of my CMU broadcasting career likely never would have happened. On top of the impending theft itself, I was carrying a couple cans of beer as I proceeded to the scene of the crime: open beer on campus, yet another infraction. Logic, utter embarrassment, arrest, possible secondary discipline of all kinds, my future — none of this seemed to enter my mind as I sipped my cold frothy outside the ballpark down the left-field line. In my enthusiastically devious, plastered mind, this outfield sign would forever make a delightful wall hanging.
It should come as no surprise at this point, being a pathological dolt, that I then began to do my best Bluto Blutarsky imitation. Bent at the knees, wide stance, head on a swivel, arms in the ready-to-wrestle position, I hopped back and forth in semicircles while humming the related music.
“Do-do, do-DO, do-do-da-Dooooo.” I would pretend to be John Belushi in Animal House at least three more times during my escape.
At almost six-foot-six, I had an advantage. I could easily reach up to the top of the fence that ran along the outside of the playing field and pull myself up, and I was in decent enough shape to do so. But it was still going to require a pretty solid effort, and I’d have to do it quickly to avoid being seen or heard. I knew I needed a really good burst, and I knew I could get scraped up pretty good or snap a leg. Call it drunken adrenaline: if I hadn’t been loaded, I never would have tried it.
I grabbed the top of the fence, jumped, and pulled my head and shoulders up enough to get my right elbow on top of the barrier. I pushed off with my feet, shuffled them up, and lunged until half of my body was over and inside the fence and the other half was outside. I looked like a human teeter-totter. With the wood digging into my gut and my hands in an awkward and painful position, I instantly spun right, brought both feet around so I was parallel with the top, and then awkwardly swung both feet over and let go. I landed on the warning track in foul territory.
At that point, I wished I had brought one of the beers over the wall with me. It was a baseball paradise. I sat down, rested briefly, and stared out at the ball field, the evergreen trees that encircled part of it, the press box, and the stars above. I savoured the peacefulness of the diamond.
After a quick scan for car lights and people in the distance, I turned my attention to the sign. Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous. It was dark, there was obviously no one at or around the ballpark, and I was hidden in the extreme corner where the outfield fence met the barrier I had
just scaled.
I stood face to face with the metal sign on a wooden fence, a maroon 325 on a gold background, with a maroon outline. And God Bless America, there were only two bolts. They were big, intimidating bolts, but instead of four, one in each corner, there were only two, one above and one below the middle digit.
Yank up, or yank down? I asked myself. I’d get more strength pulling down. And do it quickly. I grabbed the top of the sign with one hand on either side of the bolt and yanked. Nothing. “Shit!” This sucker was on the wall. I’d have to give it everything I had.
One, two, three, PULL! I yelled in my mind. The
sign-bolt-and-fence made a hideous sound of metal on metal, metal on wood. But it moved. In fact, it moved enough so that the nut at the back end of the bolt had partially wedged into the fence. With the nut held in place, I was able to manoeuver the sign and unscrew the bolt by hand the rest of the way.
The sign spun down and around until it was upside down, with the lower bolt now at the top of the dangling sign. Using the leverage of the sign itself against the fence, I was able to pry the second bolt out of the wall.
Success on one hand, doubt on the other. What the hell am I doing? I thought. I was at the point of no return. Leave it or take it?
I decided to go for it. I walked twenty feet along the fence towards home plate and with two hands, tossed the piece of sheet metal over the wall like a Frisbee. The six-pound sign, one-sixteenth of an inch thick, thirty inches long and two feet wide, landed without a clang. It landed upright on one of its corners with a thud, digging into the ground, and then fell over. I then walked back to the corner, thinking somehow I was distancing myself from the goods, before climbing up and out.
After a quick Belushi, I walked to the sign, picked it up, and began a nerve-racking mile-long walk home.
At times I jogged. Other times I walked very slowly. When a car came, I dropped the sign, walked away, only to return a few moments later. When another car came, as I crossed the western edge of campus, I pointed the sign at the vehicle lengthwise and followed the car’s movement. I thought this way, if they looked at me, they’d have only a sixteenth of an inch of sign to notice. I proceeded cautiously across a well-lit parking lot and then through an open area along Crawford Road, behind CMU’s largest dorm complex, the Towers.
I knew I was home free for the most part when I arrived at the woods that separated campus from a cluster of apartment complexes on the other side. I ran through the trail in the dark for an eighth of a mile. I hurried around and through a couple of complexes, scurried to Chip’ Village, came along the empty courtyard, entered my dark apartment, and rushed upstairs. No one was awake. I zipped to the third floor, hopped into my room, and slid the sign between my mattress and my box spring. Mission accomplished.
You, I thought, are an idiot. But I was really happy I got the sign.
The now infamous sign.
~
It wasn’t long after this that I learned karma can be a bear. Cue John Lachance.
The same age as me, I believe, he was a big dude, almost as tall, six-foot-five or so and, I’d guess, about twenty or thirty pounds heavier. He was somewhat loud and extremely assertive, especially when it came to developing and solidifying his position as a student journalist in the CMU Broadcast and Cinematic Arts Department.
Lachance could be an intimidating figure, but he was as sweet as molasses when he approached me that spring and asked if he could join me for a couple of baseball broadcasts. I agreed, figuring it was no big deal, and rationalized that although I was the student “Voice of Chippewa Baseball,” I had no right to deny another kid an opportunity, albeit a brief one.
We did a couple of games together with Central hosting the Bowling Green Falcons. I recall doing play-by-play for the first three innings and the final three, with him as my color commentator, and allowing him to do play-by-play for the middle three innings.
I still have the air-check tapes. At one point, I announced, “. . . checks the base runners and delivers . . . hit harrrd, base hit to right field past the first baseman . . . this should be two runs, Fisher rounds third, here comes the throw to the plate, he is safe at home! A two-run single for Bob Podschlne [pronounced Po-chell-knee] as he does the job, and the Chippewa lead is five to one.” The cheers subsided a bit.
John’s color: “Once again, Rob, let’s go back, they got the first man . . . up, got him on the base.” That was pretty much it. I then reviewed the rally hitter by hitter.
Shortly thereafter I said, “Kevin working with a four-run margin, his Chippewas have done a good job offensively today . . . the next onnnnne, just on the outside corner. The umpire seemed to take about ten seconds to make the call, but it’s a two-two count now.”
John: “That would be par for the day for him, wouldn’t it be?”
The cool part for both of us was that we were watching a future major-leaguer pitch a complete-game victory for CMU. Chippewa ace Kevin Tapani blew through the Falcons line-up and racked up ten strikeouts with his ninety-four-mile-per-hour fastball.
Three years after his senior-year no-hitter against Eastern Michigan in 1986, “Tap” made his major-league debut on July 4, 1989, for the Mets against the Astros. After a trade to Minnesota a year later, he went on to help win a World Series for Minnesota in 1991 and was a workhorse starter in the bigs for thirteen seasons. In 1999, he was elected to the CMU Athletics Hall of Fame, joining other baseball honorees like Tom Tresh, Chris Knapp, and Curt Young.
When the weekend was all said and done, I thought, Well, that’s one less competitor for any future play-by-play gigs, that’s for sure.
Au contraire.
Lachance moved along, and I did the rest of the season on my own or with my eventual regular sidekick Rick Maklebust. He was a nice kid, with a good set of pipes, and it was a delightful spring. We had the opportunity to improve our craft and hang around the ballpark and talk baseball.
As the season slipped toward summer, there was only one date remaining on the calendar that meant anything to any of the kids in the broadcast department: the spring meeting for the fall football telecasts.
CMU football games were handled top-to-bottom by an all-student crew on the campus television station, which at that time was a rare opportunity. Central was a top-notch regional broadcasting school and one of the best in the nation for actual hands-on vocational opportunities. Longtime NBC Sportscaster Dick Enberg, who attended CMU as an undergrad before getting his masters at Indiana, was our poster boy.
A couple of weeks later, the football meeting arrived. Two or three dozen students eagerly took their seats in a large lecture auditorium in Anspach Hall. It had shaped up to be an exciting time for each and every young broadcast student, whether one planned on being a camera-person, a runner, a tape guy or gal, a producer, or, in my case, the clear choice to handle play-by-play. But it was at that meeting that a bombshell fell into my young broadcasting life, and I learned a hard lesson about how things would eventually work in the real world.
Filling talent positions sometimes has very little to do with talent.
When the meeting began, the instructor who ran the television side of the broadcast department, Greydon Hyde, took the stage as expected. The appearance of Lachance close alongside was a shock to all of us.
They distributed handouts, including an outline of production plans and a list of jobs. Students could rank, one through three, what they were interested in, with “most interested in” being number one and “less interested in” being number two and then three. Producer was a popular one, as was camera operator for those more interested in the technical side. Oddly, “play-by-play” wasn’t listed, just color commentator.
Then the announcement: John Lachance was the student executive producer or coordinating producer AND play-by-play guy. He had essentially named himself to the crème-de-la-crème position. Hyde made the announcement.
How the hell had Lachance pulled this off? Ass-kissing? Intimidation? Had they become drinking buddies? Had Lachance used, “I did some baseball games,” to convince Hyde to give him the gig? As Maklebust and I looked over at one another, our mouths agape from shock, the overwhelming sentiment was “What the fuck?”
So there it was. Pissed off, sick to my stomach, in disbelief. What was I gonna do about it? That was the true, gigantic question.
Option one: stand-up and say, “How the hell did this guy give himself the play-by-play job and why is there no audition? I want at least a fair crack at this thing. Are you freaking kidding me?” Or at least something along
those lines.
Option two: sit, squirm, stew, and say nothing.
Sadly, I chose option two. I never complained and, soon after, it was case closed once summer break arrived.
I actually ended up taking the color commentary job and sat with Lachance in the booth as he did play-by-play. He pretty much sounded exactly like a college student broadcaster doing college football play-by-play. Maybe that was the point of the whole thing. Maybe it was time to give someone else a shot. I just didn’t like the way I think he went about it.
For the second game of the season, against Bowling Green, we actually shared the telecast with a professional regional broadcast group, with longtime Detroit sportscasting stalwart Dave Diles doing play-by-play on a separate broadcast feed. Lachance, being in on the planning, managed to get the lone student position, sideline reporter, for that regional telecast.
With Lachance out of the box, I jumped over and did play-by-play for our local market. My one chance to do what I thought I deserved to do in the first place, and my one chance to hopefully get a decent demo tape.
But that was pretty much it for me. I didn’t go
passive-aggressive with the whole situation; I went passive-passive. After three games, I quit and handed off the color gig to Maklebust. My handling of the whole scenario showed just how immature, naïve, and unprepared I was for the real deal. In this case, just like in other businesses, personal politics (or ethnicity, or age, or gender, or aesthetics), often factor in more than knowledge and ability. It’s a fact a young broadcaster needs to prepare for. Never expect or assume anything.
At that point, I turned the rest of my CMU career into a holiday. I was, as we used to say a lot back then, “over it.”
That school year I had landed the operations manager job at the student radio station, 91-Rock-FM. It was essentially the top student executive position. I think I showed up for two of the twenty-six weekly board meetings. I bagged out of air shifts, I went to class when I had to, I caroused and chased coeds. I was a child. I had acute fifth-year senioritis. By the time June 1986 rolled around, I had a diploma, I had training, I had my talent and ability, I had a sense of what to expect in the real world, and I had one very large, metal memento.
~
The outfield is still symmetrical at the new ballpark called Bill Theunissen Stadium in Mt. Pleasant, but it’s now 330 feet down the foul lines. So I guess they’re not missing the 325 marker. It’s been put to practical use only once, on the outfield fence of a Wiffle ball field on Nantucket.
John Lachance persevered in another side of the business. He’s apparently been at ESPN since 2004 and he’s reached a senior executive operations position. He didn’t return my voice messages.