RetroSimba

While Bill White visited his former teammate, Mike Shannon, in the broadcast booth at Busch Stadium on April 5, 2011, Albert Pujols stepped to the plate in the bottom of the first inning of the Pirates-Cardinals game.

As he did in his March 2011 phone interview with me, White said he hadn’t seen Pujols play much.

Shannon interrupted to say that:

_ The smartest player he ever saw was Giants outfielder Willie Mays. “I never took my eyes off of him on the field,” Shannon said.

_ The second-smartest player he ever saw was Pujols. “He is very intelligent on the field,” Shannon said.

White, in St. Louis to promote his autobiography “Uppity: My Untold Story About The Games People Play” (2011, Grand Central Publishing), chatted with Shannon and his Cardinals broadcast partner, John Rooney, during the first and second innings.

Teammates on the 1964 Cardinals team that won the World Series championship, White and Shannon clearly enjoy one another.

White said of Shannon, “This guy kept us alive (in 1964). Mike came in (from the minor leagues) … and had a lot of fun.”

“We had a lot of fun,” Shannon confirmed.

“You had a lot of fun,” White said, tweaking the free-spirited Shannon.

That prompted Shannon to launch into a story about conducting an interview with Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt. According to Shannon, Schmidt told him, “I really admired you … You had so much fun when you played.”

Shannon said he stopped the interview, turned off the tape recorder, and pointed out to Schmidt that he hit 548 home runs and Shannon hit only 68. “And you didn’t have any fun?” Shannon said incredulously. “No,” Schmidt replied.

“Mike (Schmidt) was a very serious person,” White said.

Shannon later chortled, to a clearly amused White, that he still sometimes goes to bed at 5 a.m. and still sometimes awakes at 5 a.m.

When the conversation turned to Johnny Keane, the manager who led the Cardinals to the 1964 World Series title and then resigned to join the Yankees, Shannon said, “I knew when he went over there (to New York) it would kill him.” (Keane died in January 1967, eight months after the Yankees fired him).

After explaining that Keane inherited a New York team that “was too old and couldn’t run,” White revealed that Yankees scout Mayo Smith (who later managed the 1968 Tigers in the World Series against St. Louis) used to ride on the Cardinals’ team bus in the latter part of the 1964 season.

“We should have realized then that he was there to talk to John about managing the Yankees,” White said.

With two out in the top of the second inning, Shannon turned over the microphone to a surprised White and tried to coax him into doing play-by-play. White was a good sport and tried to describe a pitch or two, but, clearly uncomfortable, told Shannon he hadn’t done any play-by-play since the 1980s when he and Phil Rizzuto were the Yankees’ broadcasters.

“It’s like riding a bike,” Shannon implored. “You never forget.”

White politely declined. “Besides,” he said slyly, “you’re not Rizzuto.”