When I moved to the Philadelphia area to attend college in the 1980s, I became an admirer of Jayson Stark’s whimsical Sunday baseball column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rumblings & Grumblings. Stark’s tracking of oddball statistics (“last guy to get a hit”) and goofy stories in retrospect were an inspiration to my own approach to baseball writing. But the part where he’d include a weekly “Kinerism” featuring a mangled phrase or goof made by the Mets’ venerable announcer and Hall of Fame slugger never sat right with me.<\/p>\n
To read it, you’d think Ralph Kiner was either a clown on the order of Bob Uecker or a dumb drunken unaware jock-turned-broadcaster like Rick Sutcliffe, but Ralph of course wasn’t either of those things: He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about baseball, could hold your attention when the game got close, and could make you laugh with a story about Branch Rickey. And his screw-ups to me never seemed out of proportion to the sheer volume of his work: the man called Mets games for 50 years after all. There may not ever be anyone with more to say about them.<\/p>\n
So while you trudge through the dozens of #kinerisms you’ll be sure to come across today (many of which are already splintering into urban legend territory: I’ve seen Ralph “quoted” wishing mothers and fathers a Happy Birthday today) please also see pieces by the terrific Marty Noble at mlb.com<\/a> and the Daily News’ Gary Myers<\/a> who express the admiration people held for Ralph, and the fact that when he did screw up, he did it with self-effacing humor and class. RIP Ralph!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I moved to the Philadelphia area to attend college in the 1980s, I became an admirer of Jayson Stark’s whimsical Sunday baseball column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rumblings & Grumblings. Stark’s tracking of oddball statistics (“last guy to get a hit”) and goofy stories in retrospect were an inspiration to my own approach to … Continue reading “Ralph”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[633],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ralph-kiner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2023,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions\/2023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}