NYT : Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop, Dies at 89

Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop, Dies at 89

By RICHARD SANDOMIR | August 15, 2007

Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed the Scooter who extended his Yankee life as a popular, even beloved, broadcaster, punctuating his game calls with birthday wishes to fans and exclamations of “Holy cow!” died Monday night. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Patricia said yesterday. Rizzuto, who had been in declining health for several years, died at a residential facility in West Orange, N.J. He had lived in Hillside, N.J.

Monday was the 12th anniversary of the death of Rizzuto’s teammate, Mickey Mantle.

Rizzuto joined the Yankees in 1941 and played 13 seasons (he missed three while in the Navy during World War II) until 1956. His departure was abrupt. No longer willing to carry an aging, seldom-used infielder, the Yankees cut him on Old-Timers’ Day. Soon after, he began calling Yankee games for WPIX-TV Channel 11 and remained in that job until 1996.

Rizzuto played an integral role on the dynastic Yankees before and after World War II. He was a masterly bunter and defensive specialist for teams that steamrolled to 10 American League pennants and won 8 World Series championships, including 5 in a row from 1949 to 1953.

He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound spark plug who did the little things right, from turning a double play to laying down a sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.

“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” Rizzuto said. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”

His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 563 runs batted in. But he was named to five American League All-Star teams, and in his best season, 1950, he batted a career-high .324, drove in 66 runs and won the A.L.’s Most Valuable Player award.

Rizzuto was frequently compared to other shortstops of his era, like Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons, Rizzuto was the best.

“The little guy in front of me, he made my job easy,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great center fielders. “I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”

One of five children of Rose and Fiore Rizzuto, a construction foreman and trolley motorman, Philip Francis Rizzuto grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Glendale, Queens, when he was 12.

A major league career was not foreordained. While attending Richmond Hill High School, he tried out for the Dodgers, but the manager, Casey Stengel, told him he was too small. The New York Giants also told him to get lost, but Stengel’s rejection — “Go get a shoeshine box,” he told him — was the most vivid.

“When he became the Yankee manager in 1949, I reminded him of that, but he pretended he didn’t remember,” Rizzuto said of Stengel. “By ’49, I didn’t need a shoebox, anyway. The clubhouse boy at the Stadium shined my Yankee spikes every day.”

The Yankees signed him in 1937 and sent him to their Class D minor league team in Bassett, Va. But attending spring training with the Yankees in 1941, he soon established himself, replacing the veteran Frank Crosetti, and hit .307 in his rookie season.

After serving in the South Pacific, Rizzuto resumed his role as a bulwark of the Yankees’ infield, forming superior double-play combinations with second basemen Joe Gordon and Jerry Coleman (who in the 1960s joined Rizzuto in the broadcast booth). He also developed into an eccentric — funny, superstitious, afraid of thunder and the target of teammates’ pranks.

Two plays in 1951 were emblematic of Rizzuto’s career.

In the first, Rizzuto, a right-handed batter, was at the plate facing Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, in the middle of a pennant chase, the score tied at 1-1. DiMaggio was on third base. Rizzuto took Lemon’s first pitch, a strike, and argued the call with the umpire. That gave Rizzuto time to grab his bat from both ends, the sign to DiMaggio that a squeeze play was on for the next pitch. But DiMaggio broke early, surprising Rizzuto. Lemon, seeing what was happening, threw high and behind Rizzuto, to avoid a bunt. But with Joltin’ Joe bearing down on him, Rizzuto got his bat up in time to lay down a bunt.

“If I didn’t bunt, the pitch would’ve hit me right in the head,” Rizzuto said. “I bunted it with both feet off the ground, but I got it off toward first base.”

DiMaggio scored the winning run. Stengel called it “the greatest play I ever saw.”

Later that year, Game 3 of the World Series against the Giants provided Rizzuto with an enemy he would fulminate about for the rest of his life.

With one out in the fifth inning, the Giants’ Eddie Stanky drew a walk against the Yankees’ pitcher Vic Raschi. The next batter was Alvin Dark, and the Yankees intercepted a hit-and-run sign to him. Berra, the catcher, signaled a pitchout, and his throw to Rizzuto at second base beat Stanky by 10 feet. But Stanky slid and kicked the ball out of Rizzuto’s glove into center field with his right foot. Stanky ran to third, Rizzuto was charged with an error, and the Giants scored five unearned runs.

“I was nonchalanting it,” Rizzuto admitted sheepishly. “I was looking at the TV camera.”

Rizzuto was shocked when the Yankees released him in 1956 to sign outfielder Enos Slaughter. But he soon accepted a job in the Yankee radio and TV booth alongside Mel Allen and Red Barber, two towering figures in sportscasting.

“You’ll never last,” Howard Cosell, then a radio sportscaster, told him. “You look like George Burns and you sound like Groucho Marx.”

Despite occasional threats to resign, Rizzuto lasted in the Yankee booth until 1996. To those who heard him exclaim “Holy cow!” for a play (or a cannoli) that excited him or chide a player as a “huckleberry” for committing an error, he was an endearing, idiosyncratic voice despite his lack of professional credentials.

Over four decades, he transformed himself from a conventional announcer with a distinctly New York voice into an often comic presence. And he became well known outside New York. The comedian Billy Crystal parodied him, and Meat Loaf used Rizzuto’s broadcast voice in his 1978 hit song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Rizzuto also became a spokesman for The Money Store in its television commercials.

As for his trademark expression “Holy cow,” he said he adopted it in high school at his baseball coach’s suggestion, to replace profanity.

When the Yankees celebrated Rizzuto with a day in his honor in 1985, retiring his uniform No. 10, the team presented him with a cow wearing a halo, which promptly stepped on his foot and knocked him over.

Rizzuto often diverged from actual game-calling, pausing to extend birthday, anniversary and confirmation congratulations. He never used the first names of his partners at WPIX-TV — they were “Coleman,” “Murcer,” “White,” “Messer,” “Seaver” or “Cerone,” never Jerry, Bobby, Bill, Frank, Tom or Rick. Listeners heard about Rizzuto’s wife, Cora (he called her “my bride”), an employment appeal for their son, Philip Jr. (known as Scooter Jr.), reports of his golf game or exultations about a new Italian dish.

Rizzuto had met Cora Ellenborg at a communion breakfast in Newark in 1942; her father was a fire chief there. The Rizzutos were married 64 years, and Mrs. Rizzuto survives her husband. Besides their daughter Patricia, survivors also include Philip Jr.; two other daughters, Cynthia and Penny, and two granddaughters.

Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors. But his fans adored him as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of W.W. — wasn’t watching.

After many years of failing to get into the Hall of Fame, Rizzuto was elected in 1994 by the Hall’s veterans committee, which reconsiders candidates not voted in by sportswriters. Friends like Berra, White and Reese sat on the committee.

Rizzuto abruptly resigned from WPIX in August 1995, distraught that he had remained to broadcast a game at Fenway Park rather than join former teammates at Mickey Mantle’s funeral in Dallas. He watched the services on television from the booth.

“I took it hard and knew I made a big mistake,” he said later. “I got more upset as the game went on and left in the fifth. They tried to drag me back, but I wouldn’t.” He returned in 1996 for a final season, persuaded by fans, Mantle’s sons and George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner. The pull of his cherished team was too strong. He was, after all, someone who practically saw the world filtered through Yankee pinstripes.

When the news came in 1978 that Pope Paul VI had died, Rizzuto said on the air, “Well, that kind of puts the damper on even a Yankee win.”