Longtime Broadcaster Joe Garagiola was one of game’s most endearing personalities.
The 2016 baseball season recently began without one of its greatest ambassadors. Joe Garagiola died shortly before Major League Baseball teams departed from their respective spring training homes in Florida and Arizona.
For those who didn’t get the pleasure of getting to know Garagiola, he was one of baseball’s great broadcasters and television analysts.
If you were a baseball fan in the 1970’s and 1980’s and before the advent of modern cable or satellite TV, Garagiola was a constant voice on NBC’s Game of the Week and he was your insider for Major League Baseball.
During NBC’s baseball heyday, Garagiola was the one constant voice. He worked alongside guys like Vin Scully and Curt Gowdy. He also had stints with Bob Costas (another legendary baseball voice of the 1980’s and 1990’s whose legacy has since faded a bit due to his political correctness). Garagiola also worked many games with former New York Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek, and unabashed pinstripe lifer, who never made any secret that he was always a Yankee.
Garagiola knew the game and he certainly came by his knowledge of America’s National Pastime honestly — he learned the hard way. He had a modest career as a catcher. It lasted less than a decade. He did get four hits in a game of the 1946 World Series, where he helped his hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, to a title as a 20-year old rookie.
He grew up in the Hill Neighborhood of St. Louis, and didn’t live far from Hall-of-Famer Yogi Berra, another former catcher, who had a larger-than-life personality that was (and later superseded the game of baseball.
“Not only was I not the best catcher in the league, I wasn’t even the best catcher on my street,” Garagiola once said.
Baseball is a humbling game for most. And it probably was to Garagiola. If you listened to him broadcast a game or provide color commentary, he was your friend.
He had a true passion for the game. He called Mickey Mantle’s 500th career home run. He was a regular in the postseason and World Series games when NBC ruled the roost (along with ABC’s Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell; as the two networks alternated years doing the Fall Classic).
Like Cosell, Garagiola was glib; he was not, however, obnoxious like Cosell or Kubek.
He never spoke down to his audience or never played favorites when he did Cardinals games.
He was Midwestern, humble and down-to-earth and that’s why he had success.
His broadcasting career also landed him a spot as a contributor on NBC’s “Today” show and as a guest host on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”
Joe Garagiola also hosted “To Tell the Truth” in 1956 and later hosted “He Said, She Said” and “Sale of the Century.”
Those gigs exhibited his versatility as a broadcaster and television personality.
After leaving NBC, Garagiola went to work for the Angels and Arizona Diamondbacks (where his son Joe, Jr. worked in the front office).
Joe, Sr., who led a one-man crusade against smokeless tobacco in baseball, worked for the Diamondbacks until the end of the 2012 season. He officially retired in February 2013.
Recently, while in failing health, he was out of the limelight. He will be sorely missed by those fortunate enough to welcome him into their living rooms on Saturdays when he called one of only two games in town. ABC had Monday Night Baseball and Cosell, Don Drysdale and Jackson. But NBC had the man that Hall-of-Fame first baseman Tony Perez of the Red, Expos, Red Sox and Phillies, called Joe Go-Rilla. And Joe Go-Rilla’s legacy will live long into the future.
