Tag: Milo Hamilton

Milo, you’re no Hall of Famer and I can prove it

Listening to a baseball game on the radio is a special treat, but I haven’t been able to tune in to my Houston Astros since the mid-1980s because I cannot abide the play-by-play announcer.  So I was quite pleased recently when Milo Hamilton announced he was retiring from the broadcast booth after the 2012 season.  Appreciation of one broadcaster or another is to some degree a matter of taste, I grant you; in this case, I’m finally getting the bad taste out of my mouth after more than 30 years!

In the days of my first experience with cable television in Austin, Texas in the late 1970s, when all you got was a dozen or so channels in total including the local stations, the special offerings including the independent “super stations” WTBS (originally WTCG) in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago which carried a ton of syndicated programming plus all the games of the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs baseball teams.  To a fledgling broadcaster and long-time baseball fan it was pretty cool to see how stations in other cities put on their broadcasts, and since the Cubs played all their home games in the afternoon back then I saw them a lot.  In a very short time I decided that I did not care for the style of either of the Cubs play-by-play men, Harry Caray and Milo Hamilton.

By 1985 I was back in Houston, and was disgusted at the news that the Astros hired Hamilton to be the second play-by-play guy behind long-time local favorite Gene Elston.  By 1987 Elston was unceremoniously dumped and Hamilton had the top spot in the radio broadcast.  He has some ardent fans—most notably Astros management, that hasn’t fired him in all these years—but Hamilton is the subject of high derision and ridicule, and it’s not just me: check out the comments forum at Houston’s Leading Information Source, or even the Astros’ own website,  when the news broke that Hamilton was going to announce his retirement.

Among the things I’ve always loathed, right after his increasing inability over the years to stay focused on the game playing out right in front of his damn eyes, has been Hamilton’s pomposity, his exuberant affection for all things Milo and his assumption that you love all things Milo too.  This includes the unbecoming habit of reminding the listener that he’s a Hall of Fame broadcaster, referring to the fact that he won the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1992.  Well, during the big doings over the retirement announcement I saw a story in the Houston Press that gave me pause: John Royal asserted that Hamilton is not a member of the Hall of Fame, just the winner of an award the Hall gives.  I had to find out for myself:

HOF

There you have it boys and girls, the bar-bet-settling evidence straight from Cooperstown!  Milo Hamilton, no matter which halls of fame you claim, you are not a member of baseball’s hall.  Happy trails!  Oh, frabjous rapture!

But as joyous as the news is, as wonderful the feeling of smacking down a hated asshole can be, it’s raised an issue.  My friend Mark Sterling, a product of Detroit who shares my distaste for Hamilton’s on-air style, and who is a lover of the late long-time Tigers broadcaster who also won the Frick, had this response to the notice heralding my achievement:

A fine piece of investigative work, indeed; certainly adding proper perspective to Milo’s body of work.  However, in the case of fellow “award winner” Ernie Harwell, Red and I will stand like the house by the side of the road, and watch that one [Craig’s assessment] go by…

Oh crap, what I have I done?  (Milo, what have you done?  You’ve gone and screwed it up for everybody.)

And then it hit me: this is only a problem for creeps like Hamilton who’ve overreached and taken credit for something they’re not entitled to.  We’ve all heard other Frick Award winners referred to as Hall of Famers by others, but the mikemen don’t bear the responsibility for that error.  They’re all in the Hall, in the exhibit in the Museum, and we who appreciate their work aren’t wrong to think of them as being in the Hall.  (Donna Stell, another friend who read the Hall’s response to my question, wondered if that makes Hamilton an exhibitionist; yes, I believe it does.)

So, I was relatively proud of myself for coming up with information that like-minded baseball lovers can appreciate.  I shared it among a group of friends, and made the parenthetical aside that “this may be the most worthwhile thing I have done this week;” my friend Tom Adolph, no doubt voicing the sentiment shared by many others, replied “This may be the best thing you have ever done.”  If so, I can live with that.

Houston’s News Authority has left the building

Today they smothered the last vestige of what once was the most kick-ass radio news station in Houston when KTRH Radio fired morning anchors Lana Hughes and J.P. Pritchard.  “Eh, yeah, 27 years…but it’s just not working out for us; we feel like we need to go in a new direction.”

JPP(Full disclosure: I worked with Lana and J.P. at KTRH, liked and respected them both.  I anchored afternoon drive with Jean Jangda, and then Tom Bacon, while they held down the mornings.  In fact, I was already at the station when they were hired, separately, and then when they were made the morning drive team.)

Today’s KTRH (740 on your AM dial) is just a faint echo of the real news organization it once was: full of reporters and writers and producers who bested every other broadcaster in town, and competed with two daily newspapers despite the papers’ overwhelming advantage in resources.  But that station is long gone, and I haven’t listened to KTRH in years.  It lost all depth of coverage, all its authority…become almost feathery, just a series of short readers ping-ponged back and forth between the morning anchors, and the rest of the day filled with Limbaugh and Limbaugh imitators, local and syndicated.  I can’t even turn it on for the Astros’ game (this part is not the station’s fault) because the Astros won’t can Milo Hamilton.   Lana and J.P. were the last link to that past.

As is the norm in these cases, station management has nothing but the highest praise for those so hastily dispatched—“been blessed to work with” them—and J.P. is quoted as saying he knows this is “nothing personal,” just part of a changing business.  But management let them know about “the change” after they got off the air this morning, and after 27 years they just won’t be back.  Makes you wonder: if they were so valued, and so loved, why weren’t they given an opportunity to say goodbye on the air?  To the audience, they will simply vanish, perhaps to be referred to by the new people, in mock reverent tones, for a week or two.  And why has every scintilla of evidence of their existence already been scrubbed from the website, like they were never there?

Station management reportedly admits that this decision means the end of a “traditional morning news show” on the station, and they hope for something more like “Fox and Friends.”  (Great.)  They say they’re making this change based on research and feedback—ah, the magic words that signal another victory for consultants…

In 1984 KTRH was the powerhouse news/talk station in Houston, making a ton of money, when it committed ritual hara-kiri of the talk component because a new program director (who would go on to become a consultant!) proclaimed that talk was a dying format that appealed only to the older demographic…well, we’ve all seen how right he was about that!  Since then subsequent management slowly brought back in the talk shows to fill time, because no one can bear to listen to the same news stories over and over and over again all day, but you need to keep the cume ratings up.  Then the station was bought, and ended up absorbed into Clear Channel Communications, and like most of the other tentacles of that beast it became a rebroadcaster—of right-wing talk, and right-wing news.  Today, they announce they’re going all the way…back to news/talk, but now with a partisan political point of view.

Hey, it’s their station (broadcasting on my airwaves and yours, free of charge), and they can do with it what they want.  What they want is to make money, and I’m fine with that—but don’t any of you for one minute think that they’re trying to do anything other than that.  Any informing or educating or entertaining, or whatever, that happens along the way, is gravy—they’re here to make money.  Today’s decision is, ultimately, undoubtedly, one they believe will make them more money (which, as I said, I’m fine with).  Any consideration about serving “the public interest, convenience and necessity” is an afterthought.

Lana and Jeeps: well done, old friends…sleep in.

Dear Drayton McLane,

McLane and CraneI heard your announcement today that you have a deal to sell the Houston Astros and I just wanted to drop you a note to say thanks for getting the hell out of the way.

Like most Astros’ fans back in 1992, I was pleased that you bought the team from John McMullen because that got rid of the guy who ran off Nolan Ryan.  With his team meandering in the bottom half of the division, McMullen didn’t want to pay a 41-year-old power pitcher despite the fact that he was still effective and was (and still is) a local icon; bad enough, but Ryan ended up having another five years (three winning seasons) and two more no-hitters and thus became wed to another team which he now, in fact, owns, and whose cap he wears in Cooperstown.  Not that I’m bitter.

It’s not that I felt you would be a big improvement, mind you; since I wasn’t involved in the grocery business or Wal-Mart I didn’t have any idea who you were.  But you weren’t McMullen, and that was good enough.  My mistake.  What I didn’t know then was that you weren’t capable of trusting the people you hired to run your business—even though it was a business you readily admitted you knew absolutely nothing about—and that you’d turn into a pain in the neck meddler who eventually chased off the best baseball leaders this franchise has ever known.

Some say that you were too cheap to spend the money it took to win; that’s not true.  You spent plenty of money, but a lot of the time you spent it on questionable free agent pickups (Greg Swindell?  Carlos Lee?  Miguel Tejada?) rather than the things that keep a team and an organization strong and competitive: high draft choices, pitching and defense.  Some think your legacy is the team’s winning record, and it’s true the Astros have had success on the field during your tenure: the majority of playoff appearances, and the only World Series appearance in franchise history.  Congratulations on that, it was a great ride…and seems so long ago now.  But we still have a few things we’ll be able to remember you by:

Like Minute Maid Park!  Beautiful ball park, I agree…good thing, too, since you used my money to build it—ironic, too, since you’re the one who’s the billionaire and the owner of a company that employs dozens 1402_Minute_Maid_Park_and_Rooftopof millionaires, and I’m not.  But you blackmailed all of Astros Nation and even the parts of the city that never gave a damn about baseball when you threatened to move the team—the ball club and the economic engine—if we didn’t front you the money for a new ball park to boost your revenue streams, or some such business euphemism.  Insisting that taxpayers finance a private business construction project was surely a surprising position to see from you, being such an outspoken supporter of capitalism and all.

And there’s the new level of tasteful presentation: oh, all the advertisements in said Minute Maid Park!!  You know, back when the doors opened in 2000 I thought that my ass was the only flat surface in there that didn’t have an ad slapped on it, but over the years you worked your ass off and proved me wrong.  The Chick-fil-A Eat More Fowl poles is a monumental achievement, and dovetails nicely with wonderful and all-too-serious promotional events like Dog Day in the Park—I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard howling about that one!

Finally, you’re leaving us with the excitement of watching a young baseball team come into its own.  Sure, they have the worst record in the National League right now, but we play in the same league as the Pirates so I expect to jump up and nestle into fifth place any day now.  The best part of that is, this is a gift that could just keep on giving for years to come!

So, fair winds and following seas, Drayton, as you shove off…no hard feelings, but I’m pleased you’re leaving.  As was the case in 1992, I don’t know much about the new guy; although he knows baseball in a way you never did, we’ll have to wait and see what he does when it comes to running the business.  But if his first decision is to pull the plug on your buddy Milo, I’ll be lining up for World Series tickets!