Jim Kaat by Jim Kaat

Author:Jim Kaat [Kaat, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637270271
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2022-04-19T23:11:09+00:00

5. Broadcasting

As a broadcaster I was fortunate—thanks to Tony Kubek and Don Drysdale—to be able to travel on my own and stay in a different hotel from the ballclub. That’s always a good policy in my opinion. I’m not one of the team members. I’m an honest and objective announcer. I always cringed when I would hear an announcer say to me, “We are making too many mistakes on the bases.” It’s not we! It’s the New York Yankees or the Minnesota Twins.

I never spent much time with other broadcasters unless we happened to stay at the same hotel. When I was doing Yankees games in 1986, I stayed at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. So did Tim McCarver when he was announcing New York Mets games. Once or twice a season, we would be in town at the same time and get together for dinner. My broadcast partners like Ken Singleton, Dick Bremer, and Bob Costas would get together for dinner on occasion, and some of our production team would join us as well.

MaryAnn and I made our winter home in Florida but moved to Madison, Connecticut, for the summer of 1994. It was just an hour’s commute from ESPN’s studios in Bristol, Connecticut. It was well worth the commute to live in this beautiful seaside village. I soon found out that my gig on Baseball Tonight was more window dressing than in-depth baseball analysis. John Walsh and Steve Anderson were the men who hired me. They made a lunch date to see how I thought things was going for me. I was brutally honest with them. I told them that they were paying me a lot of money to sit on the Baseball Tonight set and not say very much. Their philosophy was that they wanted a big league presence on the set while Chris Berman, Chris Myers, or Craig Kilborn went through all the highlights of the day’s games. I didn’t have to say much. I thought that they could have put a cardboard cutout of me on the set with the host. I understood their reasoning. It was a highlight-driven show. Fans tuned in to see the highlights and find out who won. There was not much analyzing to do. I also did some MLB games as part of my job. I suggested that perhaps I could contribute more if I were at a big league ballpark and made some contribution to the show from the parks.

Then a surprising event changed my life and my career. MaryAnn and I enjoyed rollerblading. The streets on Middle Beach Road in Madison had just been freshly blacktopped—perfect for that exercise. One afternoon as we skated past a house, I heard my name called. “Hey, Kitty!” I knew if they called me Kitty, they knew me. That’s a nickname Chuck Stobbs gave me in 1958. It’s a play on those who pronounced my name “Cat” instead of “Cot.” I was (at least then) the young cat, the “kitty cat.”

So we stopped and went back to see who had called out to me by my nickname.

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