White Plains CitizeNetReporter - View From The Upper Deck: Give Us a Break, Reggie!

WPCNR PRESS BOX. By John "Baseball" Bailey. February 27, 2003: Poor Reggie Jackson. He's only pulling down $1MM a year in salary and endorsements, and he's unhappy, and he's had to sell off 35 of his antique cars. We must be in a depression.

Not only that, but Reggie is unhappy with his role with the New York Yankees as minor league reporter, and evaluator. He would like a bigger role with the Bombers.

BASEBALL BAILEY'S VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. Wrigley Field, Chicago.
Photo by WPCNR Sports

Reggie, you have a job. You get paid $150G's a year. Stop whining. This was always Reggie's trouble when he was a player. He was always whining about not being appreciated. Thurman Munson didn't whine. Roy White didn't whine. Stick Michael didn't whine. But Reggie did. In this day and age, Reggie is what's wrong with baseball. A handful of the players live in a dream world. They are babies. They have worked very hard, made the show...and still that's not enough. They want to be stroked, too. Instead of contributing they want to be contributed to.

Well, I have news for you Reggie, you never could come up with the big hit when the chips were really down. The Mr. October nickname is such a misnomer. When the Yanks won in 1977 in your first year with them, it was not you that did the job it was Roy White and Paul Blair with their scratch hits in the ninth to ease past Kansas City when the Yanks were down to their last ups in the final game. It was not you who beat the Red Sox in 1978, it was Bucky Dent, and Lou Piniella's heads-up deak.

You excelled at creating team tension when the focus was not on you. I vividly remember your "I'm the straw that stirs the drink" remark that precipitated the Munson feud.

Now twenty-five years later, you're still a baby with the fragile ego. I have had enough of glorification of overrated power hitters with big egos.

Speaking of personalities I do not need, it's sportswriters who go down to Spring Training every year on the dole, soak up the sun and have to find something to write about every day. They write about anything but baseball.

Can we please stop tearing up the pea patch, guys and gals?

Can we stop reporting on Derek Jeter and The Boss having a falling out over Derek's party hours? You guys are just jealous that Derek's single and a swinger, can stay out to 3 AM with two ladies on his arm and still do the job.

What does that have to do with baseball? It's spring training! It does not matter what Derek does.

Derek did not cost the Yankees a Championship last year, the scouts did. Blame the scouts for not getting the inside stuff on Anaheim. The pitchers lost that Championship, because they did not know how to pitch smart to the Angels, because the scouts did not develop a strategy to pitch the Angels that was effective, not Derek J.

As a former minor league player said to me this week, the flap over "The Jet" is ridiculous: "He's got five rings," our player who wished he could have made the show says.

Performance counts. "The Jet," my name for Derek Jeter, is the best shortstop the Yankees have ever had. He plays every day. He hits over .300, has great range and gets a lot of big hits. His .298 last year? So what. That's still solid. His teammates like him, and Reggie Jackson was not the most liked player among his teammates when he played for the Yankees. Thurman Munson disliked him intensely because it was all about Reggie, never about the team, with Reggie.

While we are at it:

Sportswriting has to be the refuge of the news reporter who could not make it, because they report on everything except the game. But miss the big story: the drugs in the game, the betting spreads in the NFL, the womanizing. Had that poor Baltimore pitcher not died, there would have been no stories on that lethal diet drug, ephaedra. Somebody had to die before a sportswriter would have the nerve to write about it.

Pete Rose gambling? Another story no sportswriter ever touched before Pete got banned.

Has a sportswriter ever gone to a game and paid for it? Let them sit in the stands and pay for a major league game: It's a $150 night for the average family of four. Do the Sportswriters ever write about that from a quality of entertainment standpoint. Do they ever write how many boring games there are in a series because of the lousy pitching. No. Far be it from them to criticise management.

Do the sportswriters every cover fastpitch softball and baseball's disgrace of not supporting it like the NBA does the WNBA? No.

Do the sportwriters ever write about the deterioration of the baseball telecast and radiocast? No.

A sportswriter would not know a story if it ran him or her over.

No nose for news. Just controversy that will get people to read the sports section.

Steinbrenner should fire Reggie and let him go to work for the Montreal Expos for his next job. Reggie's whining last week was one of the most absurd public venting I've noted in a long time.

The story written in the Times actually taking Steinbrenner to task for not recognizing poor Reggie's plight sets a new low in news nobody needs to know about.


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