Goodbye to the real Commish

Rick Hummel told baseball stories to generations of Cardinal fans, and saved a few for his many friends.

Put Whitey Herzog and Tony La Russa in a Venn diagram and their borders would touch only once. Both managers of the St. Louis Cardinals liked and respected Rick Hummel.

But then most of the Major League Baseball community and most of the inhabitants of BirdLand, a vast congregation of Midwesterners who have a huge capacity for Anheuser-Busch consumption, heat absorption and red attire, felt the same way. Hummel was a point of consensus in baseball and newspapering, two places that rarely grow it.

Hummel covered the vast majority of games the Cardinals played from 1978 through 2002 and all of their waiver-wire transactions, their signings, their trades, their drafts and their culture for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He first covered their games in 1973 and began writing columns after he left the daily beat. He only retired in 2022, and passed away Saturday, at 77, from an illness he kept quiet.

In February he came to Cooperstown as a member of the Historical Overview Committee, which compiles a list of Hall of Fame candidates who have slipped through the cracks and sends it to the Veterans Committee. That is how Ted Simmons, longtime Cardinals catcher, entered the Hall. In walking from the Giamatti Center, where the committee meets, to the souvenir shop, Hummel would pass the exhibit for the winners of the Career Excellence award, which was once known as the Spink Award, and remains the brightest distinction a baseball writer can receive. The winners aren’t in the Hall of Fame per se, but they’re just around the corner. Hummel won it in 2012, in his first try and in a landslide. If they ever name it after a person again, he will be a prime candidate.

He spent innumerable hours in two Busch Stadium press boxes. The newer one, which was situated much higher than Hummel preferred, is named after Hummel and former sports editor and baseball writer Bob Broeg.

Few teams can match the Cardinals’ scrapbook. Hummel was around Simmons, Albert Pujols, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Joe Torre, Bruce Sutter, Al Hrabosky, Keith Hernandez, Ozzie Smith, Garry Templeton, Jack Clark, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Scott Rolen, Jim Edmonds, Larry Walker, Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright and a rich supporting cast. He forged productive bonds with them all, whether he actually liked them or not. Even George Hendrick would talk to Hummel, although very rarely on the record, and usually about the Lakers.

Hummel covered 11 Cardinal managers, too. The final one was Oliver Marmol, who was born 41 years after Hummel was. Baseball was their bridge, and they talked the game as often as possible, to the point that Hummel would needle Marmol about the usefulness of the sacrifice bunt, and urge him to actually wear a jersey instead of a cutoff red jacket, the way managers used to. On Monday, after he learned of Hummel’s death, Marmol indeed put on a jersey.

Strategically Hummel could navigate a game as well as any skipper. He certainly watched the games as intently. He had that peculiar memory chip that could recall various matchups, circumstances and knotty problems, and he could always tell you why the Cardinals brought in certain relievers or why they didn’t use certain extra men, or why they should have or shouldn’t have. He had a habitual thoroughness. There were no small details.

In 1973, he covered a Cardinals-Expos game as a pinch-hitter, freed temporarily from his duties as a high school and softball writer. Mike Tyson, no relation to the future heavyweight champ, was an infielder who would play 1,017 major league games and hit 27 home runs. He hit his first of those homers, and his only one of the year, off Montreal’s Balor Moore in a rain-shortened game, and St. Louis won, 1-0. Hummel went to both clubhouses, and informed Moore that Tyson’s home run was not only man-bites-dog, but maybe man-outruns-cheetah.

He wrote, “Lefthander Moore, a vision in canary yellow as he left the Expos’ locker room, wrinkled his nose and asked, ‘That was his first major league home run,, eh?’’’ Thus Hummel had taken the readers underneath the stands and into the wings, a pattern he would repeat for generations.

He was known as The Commish, because he used to run a league of APBA dice-baseball players, but it stuck because he was the final word on so many questions and issues within the nine innings, and because he had an effortless authority about him. He was also known as “Mister Ricky,” because that’s what the one and only Joaquin Andujar used to call him. “You can ask Mr. Ricky Hummel because he is a smart m———-r,” Andujar would say. For his part Hummel said Andujar was his least forgettable Cardinal.

Covering a baseball team for six months and repeating it for 24 years, can enrich and warp you simultaneously. It helps if you’re receptive to routine. Hummel showed up early, carried a bulky Portabubble word processor that continually played hurt, and made the rounds daily, including a once-a-series trip to the umpires’ room, where he was always welcome.

He met people on their turf. Back then players noticed how often the writers were actually there, and how well they attempted to understand baseball lives. If a writer only approached during the 4-for-4s and not the 0-for-4s, they noticed that too. To a man they sensed Hummel’s sincere interest, and they read his criticisms as they were intended. If Hummel ever quoted himself or bragged about some line that he’d uncorked in the paper, I never heard about it.

In that way Hummel could adjust to La Russa’s molten intensity, but the manager he enjoyed most was Herzog, a fellow Illinois native who spent pre-game hours telling stories. One early June afternoon in 1986 the Cardinals came to Houston, and they were already buried by the eventual world champion Mets. Herzog proclaimed that day that the N.L. East race was “over,” which irritated the Mets when they heard it.

This was the first day of the free-agent draft. “Didja watch the College World Series last night?” Herzog asked. “Florida State had this second baseman who bunted with a guy on second and two out. Can you believe that? A real pesky hitter.”

Coleman, the stolen base champ who had been waylaid by pickoffs in recent games walked by the office. “Hey, Pickles,” Herzog called out. “That’s what I call him now. He’s always in a pickle.”

C.J. Cherre, the traveling secretary, dropped by.

“Who’d we draft?” Herzog asked.

“I think his name is (Luis) Alicea,” Cherre said. “He’s the second baseman from Florida State.”

Herzog shook his head. “That pesky guy,” he said. “Good.”

Days like that keep a beat writer going. Nights were eventful, too. Hummel’s home away from home, and sometimes his home, was the Missouri Bar & Grill on Tucker Avenue, downtown St. Louis. It might be considered a dive to some, and some dives might object to that, but it had a topnotch jukebox and very cold beer and a representative contingent of baseball folks after each home game. Occasionally Country Joe West, the umpire who fancied himself a singer, would get out his guitar. The writers stayed anyway.

During the 1987 World Series, Herzog held his off-day press conference there. It saved the writers a stop, he reasoned.

“You guys come in my office the first game of a series, and you got all these questions,” Herzog told a group of Philadelphia writers. “The second game you got maybe two or three. The third game, none of you guys have anything to say. What the hell does Hummel do to you guys, down at the Grill?”

There are frequent rain delays in St. Louis, so to fill up the time, Hummel and Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz compiled a list of managers and the animals they resembled. Bobby Cox was the Jackal, Mike Scioscia the Hog, Bruce Bochy the Bison, Jim Leyland the Panther. My personal favorite was Terry Francona: the Eel.

The Commish and Bernie would then look on the scoreboard and handicap each series. For instance, the Raven (San Diego’s Bud Black) would be able to fly away from the clutches of the Whooping Crane (Pittsburgh’s Clint Hurdle). But what happens when the Aardvark (the Yankees’ Joe Girardi) runs into the Beaver (Kansas City’s Ned Yost)? There could be blood.

The managers themselves weren’t supposed to know about this, but Hummel told Houston’s Larry Dierker that he was the Giraffe. Dierker, a long-necked fellow who never took himself too seriously, thought for a minute and brightened. “You know what? I AM a giraffe,” he said.

The Commish would periodically stop by a newstand for copies of the Evening Whirl, a newspaper entirely devoted to St. Louis criminals and the heroic cops who chase them, like detectives “I Gotcha” Gilmore and “Stick ‘em Up” Upchurch. It described each case in gaudy and sometimes grisly detail, particularly in a column called “The Gun Club,” and rumor has it that the Whirl found its way to the Grill on some late nights and was the subject of dramatic readings at 2 a.m. or later. World Series history was made in 1987 when such a reading occurred in the visiting dugout at Busch, with Twins bullpen coach Rick Stelmaszek applauding.

The outpouring from the Cardinals and their fans was unusually personal. Pujols, a difficult interview in most circumstances, noted that he told Hummel, “We’re both going out together,” and they indeed both retired in 2022. Except that Hummel was doing wire-service stories and other projects this year and said he was busier than before. The night before he died, he watched the Cardinals-Dodgers game from home and filled out his scorebook.

Trips to St. Louis will be grim without Hummel greeting you with “Whaddaya say?” like Stan Musial, or without him quoting Herzog on why you should always tell the truth. He will be missed by those who knew him and a lot more who didn’t, as well as animals and managers who won’t be named later.