If they don't have cannolis in heaven, you know somebody's going to be bringing some. Wherever the Scooter is, somebody always brings cannolis

The real Scooter, Philip Francis Rizzuto (1917-2007),
who died Monday night

"I'm gonna miss him."
--New York Yankee great Yogi Berra, last night at Yankee Stadium

"Obviously, he was the greatest shortstop in the history of our organization."
--current Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter (also last night at the Stadium, where the Yankees were drubbed by the Orioles, and everyone was so numb, it hardly registered), obviously the greatest shortstop in the history of the organization, but a gentleman of infinite, one might say Scooteresque, class and grace

It's not hard to see why Yogi and the Scooter got on so well. Clearly, neither the squat, vaguely gnomelike Yogi nor the 5'6" Scooter was designed by nature to be a professional athlete. So they both had to dig inside themselves for every ounce of intensity, skill, and competitiveness they could find, and made themselves not good but great ballplayers.

Probably no one outside New York, no one who isn't a Yankee fan, can appreciate the way Yankee fans love the Scooter. And it probably doesn't have much to do with the excellence of his playing days. After all, he played his last game in 1956. Even I, who often feel like the oldest living person on the planet, have no memories of the Scooter as a ballplayer.

Naturally I'm aware how good a player he was--outstanding in all phases of his game. But then, accomplishments like slick fielding and brilliant bunting don't generally burn your image into the public consciousness as an immortal. Nevertheless, it's easy to appreciate how crucial he was to all those great Yankee teams of the late '40s and early '50s. Playing on a veritable team of league MVPs, the diminutive shortstop was chosen in 1950 as the American League's Most Valuable Player. (That season, Wikipedia notes, "he hit .324 with 92 walks, and scored 125 runs." He "also handled 238 consecutive chances without an error . . . setting the record for shortstops.")

However, it was as a broadcaster--for 40 years on TV and radio--that the Scooter won the hearts and minds of Yankee fans. It took him a long time to find his voice, partly because in those earlier years not much was asked of baseball broadcasters. You could become a legend, like the legendary Mel Allen and Red Barber--early broadcast partners of Rizzuto's--with not much more to offer than a Southern drawl and a stock of meaningless catch phrases, like Allen's famous "How about that?" Yeah, Mel, how about that?

It apparently hadn't occurred to anybody yet that announcers could help viewers really understand the game, to begin to look at it the way people inside the game do. In other words, those were the days before Tim McCarver.

Of course the Scooter wasn't an announcer of the McCarver school. But when he was paired with guys of the caliber of the late Frank Messer (as underrated a broadcaster as stiffs like Mel Allen and Red Barber were overrated) and Bill White, the classy and smoothly articulate ex-jock, we got to see how deep his knowledge of the game was. Come on, you don't play the most difficult position on the field as long and as well as the Scooter did, for the best team in baseball, without knowing an awful lot about the game.

The running joke was that the one thing Phil never talked about on the air was baseball. And it's true that we got to know seemingly everything there was to know about him, his career, and his personal life--including his honestly come-by terror of lightning and his passion for his beloved "cannolis" (yes, they were always "cannolis") and his even more beloved Cora.

In fact, though, Phil talked an enormous amount of baseball. It's just that the digressions could often be more interesting than the game. You knew you'd eventually get caught up on what was happening (and if it was TV rather than radio--in those years the same broadcast crew did both--you could at least see what was happening), and you never knew where the latest story might be leading.

My favorite story was one I tried to recount recently in a post titled "Holy cow! If that huckleberry Irving 'Lewis' Libby really wants to be called 'Scooter,' how about first we get a look at him laying down a bunt?" I still wish I could recall the details better, but that's the thing: You didn't know at the outset that you were hearing a story that would turn out to be literally once-in-a-lifetime.

As best I remember it, it was early in his career--his rookie year?--when he had been taken under his wing by his fellow Italian-American, the great Joe DiMaggio. One weekend Joe D found himself with a scheduling conflict, and asked urgently if his little buddy could fill in for him as the guest at an area church breakfast he had agreed to do.

So the barely known Rizzuto found himself in the basement of the church, psyching himself to face a gathering that had come expecting the Yankee Clipper, the greatest ballplayer of their time (and probably still the greatest ballplayer of all time). He happened to glance across the space to the stairs, where he first saw a pair of legs appearing, which gradually filled out to become the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

And suddenly you realized he was telling the story of the first time he laid eyes on Cora Anne. (Wikipedia claims that the Scooter "credits former teammate and Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio with introducing him to his wife of over fifty years, Cora." Nuh-uh, I don't think so. I think perhaps somebody has misunderstood Phil saying that it was because of Joltin' Joe that he met Cora.)

I think maybe you had to be there, during his run behind the microphone. For a lot of years, it was a magical ride. You sensed that there was no artifice to him, and no malice, that this was just how it would be if you had the opportunity to sit down with Phil and watch a game together, chatting about baseball, and life, and whatever else might come into his head. Only without the cannolis.

It's more than a decade now since the Scooter retired from the broadcast booth, and as a matter of fact, I'm crazy about the current roster of Yankee announcers, even with the loss (to retirement) of the great Jim Kaat. Still, it's never been the same without the Scooter. I don't know what the man was like in real life--though he would have had to be quite an actor to be much different from what he seemed on the air. But then, you never know.

I can tell you what he was on the air, though: a chunk of humanity, the kind that makes you feel unmistakably more optimistic about our species in general. Thanks, Phil. We're all gonna miss you.

Phil and Yogi, when they were doing great things together on the field