This has been a season of milestones for Cubs broadcaster Steve Stone. He`s in the first year of a unique contract with WGN-Ch. 9, it`s his 10th year with the station and, on Tuesday, the former Cy Young Award winner turns 45.
Not bad for a guy who describes himself as a former ”real mediocre”
pitcher, although his 107-93 record in 11 seasons belies that.
”He keeps getting better,” says boothmate Harry Caray of Stone`s TV work. ”He`s erudite and he`s (college-) educated.”
A fact that makes Stone, who spent an 11-year major-league career with four teams (including the Cubs and two stints with the Sox) before a one-year fling on ABC`s ”Monday Night Baseball,” something of an iconoclast among baseball analysts.
”With the love of baseball I`ve always had,” says Stone, ”this is a great way to stay around the game. And I couldn`t think of a better broadcast situation. It`s the ideal marriage for me . . . in lieu of any other kind of marriage.”
(Rim shot, please).
It`s that kind of humor that helped Stone through his ”most challenging assignment”-playing host to the daily rotating guests WGN paraded through the booth while Caray was recuperating from a stroke in 1987.
”They were such diverse personalities,” says Stone. From veteran announcers like Ernie Harwell and Jack Buck to entertainers like Bill Murray and Jim Belushi they came. But not all the entertainers were, well, entertaining.
”There were guys who didn`t know much about the Cubs, like (actor)
Dennis Franz,” says Stone. ”Being from Chicago, (WGN executives) had him there. But he had lived in Los Angeles for 14 years. He had no idea who was playing for the Cubs. That was one of my more interesting games.”
But those three months ”helped me spread my wings,” says Stone. ”I loved my play-by-play opportunity.”
Thom Brennaman, who works with Stone during the middle three innings of Channel 9 telecasts, says he doesn`t mind having Stone do a little play-by-play. ”That`s where egos can get in the way,” says Brennaman.
While Stone might like another chance at play-by-play, there`s nothing in his new three-year deal that guarantees a change of roles. There`s only an option for Stone to leave at the end of each season. But leaving isn`t on his mind.
”I haven`t talked with anyone about going anywhere,” he says. ”I have a hard enough time figuring out what`s going to happen next week let alone what`s going to happen next year.”
But it was what happened during a recent 2 1/2-hour dialogue between Stone and Caray that may lengthen his tenure in Chicago.
”We discussed every facet of the broacast,” Stone says. They discussed
”the tone of the broadcast, what goes on during the broadcast and what could be done to make things better. It was a really open and free discussion. That conversation was one of the high points of the last 10 years.”
If nothing else, Stone says, the talk helped clear the air on what his role is on the telecasts.
”I tried to tell Harry that being the dominant person on the broadcast, his feelings and moods on a particular day determine the tone of the broadcast, at least at the beginning,” Stone says. ”We really react to Harry. That`s because he`s the play-by-play man and has such a strong personality.”
According to Stone, Caray said that was something he hadn`t considered.
Caray, for his part, rates Stone ”right up there with” all his former broadcast partners, from Gabby Street in St. Louis to Jimmy Piersall on the South Side.
”Street was something special,” says Caray, ”because he was the guy I broke in with.”
Piersall, on the other hand, helped provide ”some of the most uninhibited broadcasts in the history of the game,” says Caray. ”Nothing was ever rehearsed. Everything was spontaneous. Seldom can you do that.”
And Stone doesn`t want to. Stone prefers to add knowledge based on hard work, whether it`s through studying tapes of his previous work or talking to players and club officials before a game.
”As far as I know,” says Brennaman, ”he knows as much about the game as any broadcaster I`ve worked with. He`s outstanding to work with. You know he`s going to be prepared to work.”
Still, Stone knows it`s Caray who carries any WGN telecast. ”If you look at Harry`s broadcasts in the games that are exciting, are close, that mean something, you`ll still see many of the things that made him a Hall of Fame broadcaster,” says Stone. ”While he makes mistakes, he never seems to make those mistakes when the game is on the line. . . . I know we`re partners, but when the game`s on the line, my part is diminished-by design and not by happenstance.”
Also by design, Stone opens himself to criticism, if not by writers then by managers, who can get testy when their strategy is challenged in public.
”If the criticism is valid, I have no problem with it,” says Stone. ”I took a tremendous amount of criticism as a pitcher because most of the time I wasn`t particularly good. But I didn`t ever want them to question my desire.” As a broadcaster, Stone does ”things that run me afoul of managers and players because I am not a homer. I`ve got to criticize a certain play and a certain situation. But the guy at home is saying the same thing. And I always make the first guess, not the second guess. What a player or manager has to understand is that I`m not criticizing him as a person. What I`m criticizing is a play he made or a decision he made in the game. They all have reasons for doing what they did, and I have reasons for saying what I said. Sometimes it works out in my favor, sometimes it works out in theirs.”
Which is why Stone is anything but a ”real mediocre” broadcaster. Happy birthday.
