by Jerry Remy
I must admit, it’s one of the few times that anyone in the Red Sox organization had ever asked me to really push something during a broadcast. I believe that day they did reach their goal of 25,000 plus. However, I do know that I never received a dinner.
Now, you’ve got to remember, this was the real hot time with the Red Sox—2003 through 2005. It started right before the old regime left and the new regime—John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino—came in. Ratings on TV were at an all-time high. It was the miracle age of the Red Sox, really, as far as ratings and interest in the team. We were getting 18s in ratings almost every night. People were excited that the team had a legitimate chance to finally beat the Yankees.
My business partner is John O’Rourke, who had been the CEO of a few prominent companies in his day. He came up with the idea of starting a website to sell autographed scorecards and Wally seemed to be a good addition. We kind of took the idea and ran with it. I would autograph the Wally dolls and people would purchase them online. The thing went absolutely bananas. A fan sent an Adirondack chair to the ballpark and I ended up putting Wally in the chair between myself and Don Orsillo, and that became a fixture for a long time. It felt uncomfortable in a way, because here we are sitting with a doll on a chair between us, but the people seemed to like it. I’m sure there were people who hated it but I think most people liked it.
I wound up writing five books on Wally and his adventures.
As we got this website going, all kinds of ideas started to occur to John. At that time, I was probably as popular as I’d ever been. We started selling “RemDawg” T-shirts. These T-shirts were selling, these autographed Wally bean bags were selling, my autographed scorecards from the games were selling. We were selling a “Dial-a-Dawg” service where I would record the outgoing message for someone’s answering machine. For example, “This is Jerry Remy. John and Mary aren’t home right now. Please call back.” This was very successful for about three years. There was a variety of merchandise. It was addictive. The only regret I have looking back is it felt a little unprofessional to be promoting it during the broadcasts the way I did. For example, I would say, “Go to TheRemyReport.com.” On Friday nights I used to have this thing where I’d give away 10 free T-shirts. Well, that would draw hundreds of thousands of hits on the website. And they’d go on and see if they won a free T-shirt, and if they didn’t, they’d buy some other stuff anyway.
It started out where it was myself; my wife, Phoebe; my business partner, John; and his wife, Kathy, doing all the packing. We couldn’t keep up with it, so we eventually had to hire some help. We’d be in the basement of the O’Rourkes’ condo filling orders. We had tons and tons of these miniature Wally dolls that I had to sign and we shipped them everywhere. The same thing with the scorecards. People would request scorecards from a particular game, as well as a personalized message, anything from “My first game at Fenway,” to “How about this home run,” or “Best wishes to my girlfriend.” It became like a full-time job. It was pretty remarkable. Sean McDonough was great. He’d go along with it. He’d pump it up and he’d make fun of it. It was all in good fun.
Then when the Red Sox won in 2004, the business went absolutely insane. I was signing all the scorecards of the complete series from the playoffs through the Yankees series through the World Series. We were selling packages of the whole playoffs.
I never got any complaints from the Red Sox or NESN, but it just got to a point where I thought it had become too much. I said to myself, “Shut up, Jerry. If they want something, they know where to go.” I just couldn’t keep promoting it on the air. I’m sure there were many people who said, “Will you shut up about this website?”
I have Sean McDonough to thank for my nickname. We often called the 2003 team “Dirt Dogs” because those guys played the game hard, guys like Trot Nixon who played hard and got their uniforms dirty. For me, Trot was a throwback to my generation, where we had guys like Butch Hobson and Rick Burleson and Carlton Fisk, guys who were tough. Sean just came out one day and called me “RemDawg” on the air. It just took off. All of a sudden, I’m the RemDawg and everyone was calling me that. I didn’t know my name was Jerry Remy anymore. I thought I was just the RemDawg.
Now when I go to sign things, people want me to sign it “Jerry Remy ‘RemDawg.’” So, it’s stuck with me and it’s kind of cool to have a nickname like that. But the big thing is that the fans during the 2003-05 era were beside themselves with this club, because for the first time in 100 years, they had a chance to do something, and they did it. And I benefitted. John and I were stunned. Of course, we knew it wasn’t going to last forever. But I knew I had to tone it back. I just felt like it became too much. At times I felt like a salesman instead of an analyst, and I felt that was wrong.
We still have the Remy Report site and we still get plenty of hits on it. We still get some sales of different things, but not nearly what it was like at that particular hot time. But it’s been good. We’ve added Facebook and Instagram since then. Twitter is huge for us, a great tool for me to get information out to my fans.
The Jerry Remy restaurants really started at Fenway, not far from where the NESN pregame show is outside Gate D. They put a hot dog stand out there and called it RemDawg’s. The Red Sox called us about it and we made a deal. It was pretty exciting for me to walk outside and there’s people buying my hot dogs. We had a lot of activity out there.
That went strong for a couple of years, and then we decided to go into the restaurant business, which today I think was a mistake. The restaurant business is a very, very tough business. Our first location was at Terminal C at Logan Airport, and it’s the only restaurant I’m still involved with. We opened one near Fenway, which was magical through the summer but it was dead through the winter. It was hard. You had to make all your money through one stretch of the season, and then make that last for 12 months out of the year. We eventually got out of that. We opened a few others, but we just got out of all of them except for the airport location.
I’ve got to tell you, it was kind of a rush to walk into your own restaurant before a game or after a game and see tons of people in there drinking and eating and having a good time. But now I only focus on being the best analyst I can be in the booth.
14. The Changes in Baseball
Let me preface my comments by saying that I’m not one of those guys who feels like the era you played in is the best era. But there’s no question there have been major changes in the game of baseball since the time I was playing.
One of the things that is most evident is the information that these players have at their disposal today that we didn’t have. They call it analytics and it’s become a big part of the game. I would have died to have just a fraction of what’s available to the players today, through the analytics, through the video, through everything they have at their disposal. And the key to any of that is taking what’s available to you and taking what is important to you and putting it into practice. I think you can get overloaded at times with stuff, but the fact is the more information you can gather, obviously the better it is. I think that’s one of the biggest changes I’ve seen.
When I was a player, we’d go over the advanced scouting report in the meetings and it was kind of a joke. It was stuff like, this guy will go the opposite field, or this guy will pull the ball on this count. They were very, very bare-boned meetings. And then when you’d ask about the pitchers we’d be facing, they’d say they hadn’t seen them. The ability today to go on video and watch everything that a guy has ever done in his life and what he’s done to you has to be an enormous help. Any time a relief pitcher comes in the game, immediately the player goes over and can look over a report on them, and they’re able to even look at videos on them. For us, it was remembering what somebody had done to you. If it was a guy you had never seen, you had no clue about him. Now there’s video on everyone, even a young minor league kid. It’s remarkable.
The same is true on defense. The positioning of players, the shifts, everything is down to such to a science. We basically had to go on our own memory of how we played a particular player in the past. Very rarely would we ever shift on anybody. I think the first shift that I saw was when we were playing the Kansas City Royals, and Jim Rice was having this monster year in 1978. Whitey Herzog actually put Freddie Patek, their shortstop, out in the outfield. So, they had four outfielders. We were like, what’s going on? We couldn’t believe there were four outfielders. I remember when Carlton Fisk went over to the White Sox, we’d shift on him. And as a second baseman, I felt like a fish out of water being on the other side of the infield. Now it’s just common. They practice shifts, and I’m all for them.
There’s a lot of talk about eliminating shifts or modifying shifts. I don’t see why they have to do that. I honestly believe that if you’re in fair territory, it’s open game. They’re leaving you some part of the field to deal with, so learn how to deal with it. So, I’m not against the shifts at all. It’s so commonplace now that, to me, it’s interesting to watch how they shift on different players and how they shift even between pitches on where they locate players.
For example, if they shifted the right side against a left-handed hitter, they want their best defensive player in a position where he hits the ball the most. So that’s why you’ll see, with a couple of strikes, a guy shifted to a different position. I find it intriguing. I know the hitters hate it, but the fact is it’s proven effective. I don’t think it’s bad for baseball. I think it’s up to the players to adjust to what’s happening to them.
Another difference between generations is I think the game was a little bit more intimidating from a pitcher’s point of view. I’m not saying I totally agree with this, but if there were back-to-back home runs, you could pretty much guarantee the next guy was going down. There were a lot more knockdown pitches and brushback pitches than there are in today’s game. A guy like myself, who bunted a lot, if I bunted against a pitcher who was pretty upset with me, well, the next time, they’d shoot for my legs because they knew that was my game. So, there was a lot more intimidation from pitchers. If you had a 4-for-4 night going, you knew that fifth time you were going down, either then or the next day.
I remember playing against the Red Sox when I was with the Angels. Dick Williams was our manager and he always loved to rub it into the Red Sox as much as he could after they fired him in 1969. We didn’t have a team that was capable of beating up on the Red Sox, but we had a 6–0 lead late in the game, and he put a squeeze play on with me. A squeeze play with a 6–0 lead? That’s against the unwritten rules. The next day, Roger Moret was pitching for the Red Sox, and the first pitch was up over my head. The second pitch was up over my head. The third pitch was behind me. Finally, I’m saying to myself, just hit me and get this over with. And finally, he walked me. He couldn’t hit me. He just walked me. And when I got back to the dugout, Williams said, “Well, I guess I got you thrown at.”
So, there was more of that kind of stuff going on.
We also have new rules now protecting second basemen, which we call the Chase Utley Rule after Utley wiped out Ruben Tejada in Game 2 of the 2016 National League division series between the Mets and Dodgers. In the seventh inning of that game, Utley slid late and past the bag into Tejada in a clear attempt to break up a double play. Tejeda suffered a broken leg and the rule was changed to try and prevent that from happening again.
That type of wipeout slide was commonplace when I played. Now, middle infielders can be very comfortable in that situation. Guys used to be able to come in and do whatever they wanted to do. I’ve got snapshots of guys like Hal McRae just taking me out to lunch at second base, where today those would be called double plays. I wish we had that rule when I played. It would have been so much more comfortable playing second base.
The other big change is the use of the starting pitchers. I think that the idea of complete games is pretty much history in baseball. If he gives you five or six innings, you start going to the bullpen right away. The bullpens are much, much stronger and sophisticated than they were when I played.
When I was playing, you kind of hoped that you didn’t see the same pitcher four times, because that meant he was beating you. On the other hand, sometimes you felt more comfortable seeing him for the fourth time rather than seeing a pitcher only twice and then here come different guys out of the bullpen. I think it’s a little bit harder to get a comfort level today against pitching than it was in the past because the hitter sees so many different pitchers. But they have the information to back it up, so it’s kind of a two-way street.
The whole idea of playing for one run doesn’t exist now unless it’s like the eighth or ninth inning in a ballgame. I remember when managing the Twins, Gene Mauch, and even when Dick Williams was managing the Angels, we would bunt in the first inning to try to get a man on second base with one out to try to take the early lead in the game. You don’t see that anymore.
It’s lift and launch now. It’s trying to put two runs on the board instead of one, or multiple runs on the board. I’m not going to say whether the change is for the best or not. Like I said, I’m not a guy who thinks my era was the best. I just think they’re all good.
One change that does bother me is all of the strikeouts. And it comes from this new lift-and-launch approach to hitting and trying to put multiple runs on the board at once. There’s no such thing as cutting down your swing with two strikes. I mean, that used to be a major part of our game plan. If you had two strikes on you, you’d try to avoid the strikeout because nothing good comes out of a strikeout. If you can put the ball in play, something good can happen. You could get on by a base hit, you could get on by an error. There are ways to get on base. We were always taught to shorten up and try to make contact and move the ball the other way, and just to battle not to strike out. But now, you basically see no change in a two-strike swing versus a 2-0 swing.
Things go in cycles, and I don’t know how long this cycle will last. I really don’t. Baseball continues to change all the time. But we’re in a cycle now where it seems like it’s home run or strikeout, and it’s very rare to see a guy with two strikes on him shorten up on his swing and try to just hook a ball the other way for a base hit. It’s almost like they’d rather take a strikeout and still go for the home run. So that’s a big change in the game today.
And hit-and-runs, well, you don’t see nearly as many of those. It was guaranteed, if you were facing a sinker-ball pitcher, that you were going to play hit-and-run almost all game because sinker-ball pitchers induced a lot of ground balls and you wanted to stay away from double plays. You’d see a lot more movement on the bases than you see today. But I don’t think there are as many sinker-ball pitchers as there were when I played. Most guys have power arms, as they call them, and there are more strikeout guys than when I was playing.
I don’t mind the changes as much as some of the players of my era, maybe because I’ve always stayed around the game. I went from player to broadcaster, so I’ve lived the changes. I’ve grown with them. When players of my generation look at the game today, they don’t think it’s as good as when we played.
Another huge change is the length of games. I’m all for a pitch clock. If you look at video from that ’78 playoff game, you see Ron Guidry getting the ball and throwing it. And the hitters didn’t leave the box. If they left the box, it was generally one foot out of the box and you’d take a practice swing or something or pick up some dirt, then step right back in there.
As a matter of fact, in those days, there were certain pitchers who, if you didn’t get in the box, they’d walk up to you and say, “Get in the goddamn box.” Same thing if you were digging a hole. For example, remember the old story about Bob Gibson, where some player got in there and was digging his comfort level with his back foot, and Gibson walked up to him and said something like, “You better dig that
hole, because I’m going to bury you in it the next pitch.”
The pitchers didn’t like when hitters took a long time. There were very few hitters who took a long time in the box. Fisk was certainly one of them and Mike Hargrove was like a human rain delay, but most guys, they’d just get in the box. So, the reason games are longer is a combination of the tempo of a pitcher and also the tempo of a hitter.
Somehow, they’ve got to get those things to work together, and that’s why I think there should be a pitch clock in the game. We time guys sometimes who take 40 seconds between pitches. Ridiculous.
I think Major League Baseball has improved things by limiting visits to the mound, because that was getting way out of hand. And quite frankly, pitchers, the ones I’ve talked to, don’t like visits to the mound. They want to focus on the game. I’ve known pitchers when I played who never wanted the pitching coach or the manager coming out to the mound.
Sometimes TV has a part in it. There’s no question about that. You’ve got the TV timeouts that are extended and pretty long, especially in the national games but even in the local games.
It’s coming to a point where, when you go to a ballpark and you have a 7:05 pm start, and if you get out of there at 10:00 or 10:05, a three-hour game, you think you’ve had a fast game. Our games, I think, if you looked back on them, they were around 2:20 or 2:30. It makes a big difference, I think, to the fans and the players. I think players prefer a faster-paced game. I’m certain fans do.
I feel for kids now because when we were kids, there so many day games. We’d listen to them in school, we’d go home and listen to the rest of it or watch it if it was on TV, and there was interest.
Now, in nationally televised games, first pitch is like 8:37 at night. Well, I mean, the best part of the game is coming at 11:30, midnight. What kids are going to be able to watch that? They worry about young people losing interest in the game? Well, I’m tired of watching a game starting at 8:37 at night. It’s ridiculous. I get it’s all about TV ratings and advertising, and I understand that. But if you’re looking to keep kids interested in the game, pick up the pace of the game and start them a bit earlier.
