For Jack Lang, It’s Been a ‘Hall of a Time’

Jack Lang began covering baseball in this town in 1946, a beat he still covers for the Daily News. Today, in Cooperstown, our Mr. Lang will be inducted into the writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame. We’re giving him the day off, but we did ask him to put together a few memories. The article below first appeared in the New York Daily News Sunday Edition, July 26, 1987. 

 

My first week on the baseball beat I covered two no-hitters. It was my start on a rollercoaster ride through major-league baseball for the next 42 seasons, in which I would cover 11 more no-hitters, more than 6,000 regular season games, more than 200 World Series games and 40 All-Star Games.

What a thrill it has been.

I can’t imagine anyone having a more enjoyable life than I have had for 40 years, going to a game every day. Throw in two months in Florida every year for spring training and you can understand why it wasn’t hard to take. How many people wake up every morning and can’t wait to get to work? I couldn’t.

Oh, it wasn’t always easy. There were all those days and nights on the road and being away from my wife and children. There was endless travel and living out of suitcases arriving home from trips at 3 am with a day game to follow.

But I wouldn’t trade one day of it for anything else I could have done. There were too many pluses to outweigh the minuses if you love baseball as I do.

For more than 40 years I have lived and worked with some of the top people in my craft writers Dick Young, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Dan Daniel, Milt Gross, Dave Anderson, Dan Parker, Bill Roeder, George Vecsey Sr. and Jr. and countless others.

And then there were the players, the great I developed friendships. The greatest of these as an individual and a ballplayer was Pee Wee Reese. But there were so many others … Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Bud Harrelson, Tom Seaver, Johnny Bench, Steve Garvey, Rusty Staub, Harmon Killlebrew, Jerry Koosman, the Torre brothers, Frank and Joe, Stan Musial and Ralph Kiner.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being a major-league baseball writer was the people I got to meet and know intimately. My greatest friendships have developed with the people I worked with, the writers I traveled with and visited in other cities. There is a camaraderie in the baseball writing fraternity that does not exist in other sports. Perhaps it is because we are thrown together to work and live nearly every day for eight months of every year. It’s like family after a while.

Great friendships developed with some of these men, as they did with broadcasters who traveled the same road.

I saw Vin Scully break in as a kid out of Fordham and go on to become the top man in his field. Red Barber, Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, Mel Allen, Kiner, Ernie Harwell and Jack Buck are a few of the play-by-play men with whom I developed strong relationships.

It all began so simply in 1946 when I was fresh out of the Army and working for the now defunct Long Island Press. I had decided shortly out of high school that what I wanted to be a baseball writer. The Press did not cover baseball on a regular basis then, but it leaned strongly on local angles. So I began going to Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium whenever the Dodgers and Yanks were home. I would write feature stories on Long Island players in the majors … Ford, Hank Behrman, Mickey Harris Bob Chipman, Sam Mele, Phil Rizzuto and so many others.

Then one day it happened.

As long as you’re going there everyday,” Mike Lee, my sports editor said to me, “you might as well cover the game.” All of a sudden I was a “beat” writer covering the Brooklyn Dodgers on a daily basis. I covered the Dodgers on a daily basis. I covered the Dodgers during their glory years in Brooklyn from 1946 until they left in 1957. Then I covered the Yankees during the Mantle-Maris era — under the great Casey Stengel from 1958-60 and under Ralph Houk in 1961. And when the Mets were born in 1962, I was assigned to follow them. The Long Island Press went out of business in March 1977, and I was out of work for eight hours before the Daily News hired me. I was “traded” from one paper to another in spring training and never missed a game.

One of the first major-league games I covered was a no-hitter that Ed Head pitched for Brooklyn against the Boston Braves on April 23, 1946. A week later — on April 30 — I covered a no-hitter. I covered 13. The others I covered were pitched by Rex Barney, Vern Bickford, Carl Erskine (2), Sal Maglie, Hoyt Wilhelm, Sandy Koufax, Bob Moose, Bill Stoneman and Ed Halicki. And, of course the perfect game by Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series.

I must confess that I did not see the last inning of a great many no-hitters. When I worked for an afternoon paper, myself and other reporters usually were parked outside a clubhouse door under the stands waiting to rush in to interview the pitcher. We got the final inning by radio or word of mouth.

Of the teams I covered on a regular basis — the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets — the most enjoyable days were spent with the Dodgers from the late ’40s until they left for Los Angeles. Strong friendships with the players developed because we lived together — players, writers, club officials — in the old barracks of what had been a war-time naval air base in Vero Beach. We ate our meals in the same dining room, writers’ families and the players families and in the evening we sat around in the headquarters lobby and played cards, pool, the jukebox or listened to Cal Abrams’ mother play piano. Walter O’Malley was always the big winner in the press-room poker games, and on Saturday nights, we moved the jukebox back into the press room and had parties. It was one happy family.

In those days when the team left Florida, it was usually to barnstorm north through a series of towns. We’d travel in two or three private train cars with a dinner and a club car. During Charlie Dressen’s days every night was a party night in that club car.

Of course the Dodgers of that era had a team that stayed together for so many years — Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Billy Cox, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Rube Walker, Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, and managers Burt Shotton, Charlie Dressen and Walter Alston — so you really got to know each other.

The wives always got together when we went on road trips. Dottie Reese and Millie Walker were my wife’s guests at our home when we were away, and my wife was always invited to the bridal or maternity shower for a player’s wife. Writers today don’t have that kind of relationship with players.

In the early years when I lived in Elmont and Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella lived in St. Albans, they frequently gave me a lift home after day games. I got to know both well. In Vero Beach, we were babysitters for the Campanellas when they went out, and Ruth and Roy sat for us when we went out. We sat for Roy Jr., now a successful Hollywood producer.

Pee Wee Reese was the leader of that club, and he set the tone for the relationships with the writers.

“If I have a bad day, I never read the papers the next day,” Reese would say. “These guys are my friends, but I know they have a job to do.”

Traveling by train overnight, or night and day, you got to know players better than nowadays, when travel is by plane and you’re only up in the air a few hours. There’s not as much conversation between the players and writers as there was then.

A big difference in my early years of baseball writing was that writers remained on the beat until they retired. It was considered the best job on any sports staff. But now, all the night games and extended travel, plus the big emphasis on pro football and basketball, it is no longer the desirable beat it once was. Baseball writers remain on the beat only a few years and move on to something else.

Covering the Dodgers in the ’50s was the greatest experience a writer could have. The team was in the pennant race every year and finished first six of 12 years. Usually, they were in the race up to the final week or final day.

It also was the Jackie Robinson era, and for most of the time, Ebbets Field was packed. It was fun working where so many people were coming to have fun.

When I switched to the Yankees in 1958, the transfer was eased by two people — Whitey Ford and Casey Stengel. I had written about Ford when he was a minor-leaguer from Long Island, so he knew me. His friendship with Mantle and the other “insiders” on the Yankees helped get me accepted by the team.

But being around Casey was the greatest pleasure of all. What a joy he was. Casey was indefatigable, and if you wanted to talk baseball, he would sit and talk for hours. In the dugout, a hotel lobby, a plane or a train, and always at a bar. I closed many a bar with Casey or left him to close them.

Like Reese, Casey also knew what a writer’s job was all about and was always ready with a story.

Next to Casey, what I remember most about my four years with the Yankees was 1961 — the Maris year. In September, when Maris was closing in on Babe Ruth’s home-run record, myself and other writers covering the club wrote about him every day. I don’t think that has happened with any other player, expect maybe Pete Rose. But not before 1961.

Maris was that story, and the games that month were almost incidental. Despite whatever else you might have read, Maris was great with the Yankee beat writers. He made himself available and gave us the stories we were looking for.

The Yankees won pennants three of the four years I covered them, so that made for a much more enjoyable assignment.

I was happy to switch back to the National league in 1962, especially with Casey at the helm of the Mets. But it was the first time I covered a loser. It also gave me the opportunity of keeping records on the club from Day One — records that would provide stories. The Mets — with losses and ineptness — were not inclined to provide writers with records. Because most of those the Mets set were negative, I became known as the “Keeper of the Neggies.” The ballclub, especially team president George Weiss, abhorred the records. The other writers loved them.

Covering the Mets in those early years was like traveling with a circus. We had a ringmaster named Stengel, a bunch of clowns in uniform, and we were welcome in every town we visited. Why not? A visit from the Mets usually meant two or three victories.

One thing about the Mets, though: They may have been awful, but they went first class. Charter flights to and from, and Frank Thomas, the club’s leading home-run hitter, serving the meals. “The Big Donkey,” as he was known, delighted in playing host.

During the Mets’ mediocre seasons after Casey retired, things were somewhat dull until first Tom Seaver and then Gil Hodges arrived. The Mets went from bottom to top in two years, and remained contenders for several years. They lucked into a pennant in 1973 when no one else seemed to want it, and almost beat the Oakland A’s in the World Series.

But it was all downhill after that, and the dreariest years I spent covering baseball were during the late ’70s when Lorinda deRoulet and her daughters operated the Mets. They didn’t have the money required to run a major-league club and they were amateurs.

One day, when they were trying to figure out how to save money, Bebe deRoulet suggested they take the old baseballs, wash them and use them again.

The fans quickly gave up on the team. It was no fun going to empty Shea Stadium night after night.

But Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon poured money back into the club, starting in 1980, and it became a vibrant franchise again, a good club to cover.

Writing baseball has always been fun for me, but a new aspect was added to my job in 1966 when I was elected by fellow writers to the office of secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

My duties have been to conduct the elections every year for the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year Awards, as well as supervise the Hall of Fame voting. In my capacity as secretary-treasurer I get to call the winners. You have no idea what a joy that is. As Billy Williams who goes into the Hall of Fame today, said when he saw me at the All Star Game: “You’re the good-news man.’