Braves in his blood
Why Gary Caruso thinks Warren Spahn is the man—and did something about it BY RACHELE MEADERS Either you choose baseball or it chooses you. If you choose it, you are a fan (hopefully not one who puts the “fanatical” in “fan,” empties rooms and dampens parties). If it chooses you and really wants you, you get paid to play it, like Warren Spahn of Buffalo, N.Y., who signed with the Boston Braves in 1942 for $150. But if you and it choose each other, you move to Atlanta and endure a series of soul-sapping jobs before presiding over your team’s official magazine and writing a book or two. Then you get the Braves Museum and Hall of Fame on your side, convince former Brave Tom Glavine to write letters soliciting support, and collect checks from him, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux, Chipper Jones, Bobby Cox, Elton John and assorted household names. You do this to buy a big expensive statue of your childhood hero, which will take its place alongside those of Hank Aaron, Phil Niekro and Ty Cobb at Turner Field. That’s how Gary Caruso did it. A freshman pitcher, he lettered twice, not as a player but as a freshman and junior varsity coach. That’s OK: Now he’s editor of ChopTalk magazine, kept happily afloat by readers in 50 states and 20 countries, and author of “The Braves Encyclopedia” (Temple University Press), an unprecedented chronicle of Braves history from 1871 to 1995 that debuted in 1995, when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series. Last year, he waged a private campaign to get the $95,000 required by Oklahoma-based sculptor Shan Gray to immortalize Spahn—baseball’s winning-est left-handed pitcher—with 9 feet of bronze. Spahn, 81 and retired to Broken Arrow, Okla., fairly bristles at the suggestion he might remember getting a Christmas card from a sixth-grader named Gary of East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1960, nor does he recall responding in kind. But Spahn won’t soon forget Gary: “I know him, yes,” he says. “And I know there’s been a lot of effort putting that statue up, though I never even played in Atlanta.” Paths that didn’t cross for years met destinations arrived at in the usual ways: Spahn by fate; Gary by accident. Spahn, who had a career the minute he left high school, would become the most victorious pitcher of the post-World War II era. Spahn was 25 when he won his first game and 39 when he pitched his first no-hitter (he pitched another one the next year). Then again, he only played a season before he joined the Army, got wounded and got a Purple Heart—the only major-leaguer ever to receive a battlefield commission. He rejoined the Boston Braves in 1946 and, 11 years later, helped beat the Yankees to win the 1957 World Series. He was 36 (Gary was 8). Spahn played for what he still proclaims as “my ball club” until 1964. Then there’s Gary, who graduated, worked at an Ohio newspaper and was summoned to Atlanta by a mysterious force he calls “the lure of the Braves.” No job awaited the 23-year-old until he found work in construction. Gigs as freelance writer, reporter, insurance-agent-in-training (for six months), public relations (a job that sent him to the 1980 Olympic Games at Lake Placid, N.Y.) followed. He put in 10 years at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution as a reporter and, at 27, became baseball writer (and eventually executive sports editor). But what he’d believed to be his “dream job” wasn’t. “The Braves were lousy,” he says. “When I went into the clubhouse after every game, it was like visiting a morgue.” He even started his own magazine, Softball Atlanta. In its first and only year, it impressed the sport’s governing body enough to grant it an award, but failed to have a similar effect on his creditors. “I ran it into the ground,” he freely admits. A “career car wreck”—bumping into opportunities, careening into jobs and backing into situations—is nothing a scrappy Rust Belt kid born to a steelworker and a hairdresser can’t handle. Especially a kid whose unwavering loyalty to the Braves frequently landed him on the “boycott” list of his peers, equally tough and fiendishly devoted to the Pittsburgh Pirates. First, there was the 1957 World Series victory. He also liked the uniforms—similar to what they wear now—and “the romance,” as he calls it: Three Braves were in the Baseball Hall of Fame: Spahn, Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews. Spahn won the Cy Young that year, and Gary identified with him: “He was a pitcher; I was a pitcher. He was from a blue-collar background and so was I,” he says. Ohio’s Marietta College is one of the nation’s best small “baseball colleges”; Mathews and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Jim Tracy are alumni. So is Gary, who made his own impression on the big leagues his freshman year: He’d written to the Braves and gotten himself a “screaming Indian” patch; his mom sewed it onto his black sports jacket. The mascot, a relic long vanished, had mojo: He was compelled to stride onto the field during batting practice, “just like I knew what I was doing,” and get a little conversation going with the players, especially Aaron. “They probably saw the patch and thought I was official,” he laughs. The “romance” part paints a similarly amusing picture: that of Gary lugging his radio out onto his dorm roof and gluing himself to Atlanta AM station WSB, its mighty airwaves capable of delivering the play-by-play to the Midwest. When in 1969 the Braves won the division title—their first serious championship since 1958—Gary, a junior, was on the roof and “flying high,” he remembers. “I was 19 and underage, so I got a friend to buy champagne. I didn't drink a lick of it; I ran around and poured it on people's heads.” (Ah, romance.) The speech/television and radio major assumed sports editorship of his college radio and TV stations as well as its newspaper. Then came the rest of the story and, after a contract position in corporate public relations at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in 1993, Gary became editor of the fledgling ChopTalk. Almost 10 years later, he’s enlisted the help of Spahn’s granddaughter, Kara, a college student who spent last summer working at the Braves Museum and Hall of Fame, and people with pull, including Braves chair Bill Bartholomay. Bartholomay owned the team when it was in Milwaukee and moved it to Atlanta, meaning he knows Spahn well enough to contribute $10,000 to the cause. A “Warren Spahn Statue Committee,” including Glavine, Niekro, Aaron and former Brave Dale Murphy, stepped in, and the benefactor list grew (did we mention Ernie Johnson, Joe Torre and Hall-of-Famers Yogi Berra, Stan Musial and Nolan Ryan?). Within months the statue was fully funded and Gary will see it unveiled Aug. 12 in conjunction with the Braves’ annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Smoltz is also very involved, and why not? He and Spahn have a mutual admiration society: “He’s a copy of me when I pitched,” Spahn observes, “with the high-leg thing. And he throws hard and he throws confident.” “You don’t have to be a baseball history buff to know and appreciate Warren Spahn,” Smoltz enthuses. “Making a contribution toward the building of a statue in his honor was just a small part of doing whatever I can to add to the glory of the game. He was, foremost, a Brave, and a great pitcher. I was glad to do something to honor him, his family and all of baseball.” Currently, the only permanent tribute to Spahn is his number, 21, cast as a monument at Turner Field. But a number says little about the feisty southpaw and first-ballot member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame (in 1973), one of the first four inductees into the Braves Hall of Fame (1999) and Braves record-holder for number of victories (356). Enter Gary, and “what can I say?” Spahn says. “I’m thrilled there’s going to be a statue about me in Atlanta! It’s in my honor, but I also know it’s Atlanta’s statue and it’ll be there a long time after I’m gone. And if you’re wondering, Gary still has the autographed postcard Spahn sent him as well as a copy of “Warren Spahn, Immortal Southpaw,” a tattered, faded, oft-taped and dog-eared paperback. He knows it by heart. Especially the part that urges its young readers to “set your goals high.” Rachele Meaders is an associate editor at GEORGIA Magazine.
|
