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July 10, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:09
July 10, 2013, Wednesday, Hour #3
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And once again, greetings to you.
Music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain.
Rush Limbaugh here, 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking about the NFL somewhat today, so we've had a bit of a sports motif.
And this is, we're coming up on the 30th anniversary.
July 24th will actually be the date.
The 30th anniversary of the Pine Tar game.
George Brett and the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees.
It was a Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Goose Gossage, Yankees up 4-3, top of the ninth, Brett up, bam, two-run home run, Royals up.
And you know what happened?
The Royals or the Yankees had been waiting to accuse Brett of using a bat, the Pine Tar too high on the bat, a supposed violation of Major League Baseball rules.
This story is actually somewhat, I was working for the Royals when this happened.
I was not on the trip.
I was not there like everybody back in Kansas City watching it on TV.
But there's a lot more to this story than people know.
The Bat Boys for the visiting team are supplied by the home team.
In this case, the Bat Boy for the Yankees, for the Royals, was a Yankees fan.
And he was a 17-year-old kid.
And the job of a Bat Boy, among many other things, is at the crack of the bat.
He runs out and grabs the bat, takes it back to the while play is taking place.
You run out.
You get the bat out of the way.
And in this case, the short version of the story is that Brett had a good relationship with this Bat Boy, called him Spalding.
was his nickname because he looked like a character in Caddyshack and the kid the bat boy a Yankees fan did not Gaylord Perry in the Royals was urging the bat boy to hide the bat put it with all the other bats so it couldn't be found The Bat Boy didn't.
The bat was produced.
It was taken out there.
And Tim McClellan, the plate umpire, and every of the Yankees and Billy Martin's out there and Greg Nettles are looking at it.
And finally, McClellan points at the Royals dugout and points at Brett and says, you're out.
Bat's illegal.
And just mayhem ensued.
Brett stormed out of there and lost him.
So he was shouting and screaming, gets thrown out of the game.
Dick Hauser, the late Dick Hauser, the manager, got thrown out of the game.
But it turned out there's a great thing that happened because of this.
Because three years earlier in the 1980 World Series, George Brett, I don't even know if I should mention this, because the Pine Tar bat has become one of the great things that he's known for, the bats in the Hall of Fame.
When he got back and people asked for autographs, he started autographing bats and he would draw a line around it and write Pine Tar line on it and then sign it.
They became collector's items.
I mean, just the week after that, when the Royals got back to town, Brett's laughing about it and everybody having a good time.
But I mean, it was a, if you remember seeing it or videotape of it, I mean, it was brutal out there at home plate.
I mean, Brett had to be restrained.
Something like this had never happened before.
And it was eventually overturned.
The Royals appealed.
Home run was not allowed.
They lost the game.
They appealed it.
And Lee McPhail, the president of the American League, ruled in the Royals' favor.
He said, go back in and finish about an inning and a half or half inning and a half of the game to make it official, which the Royals ended up winning.
And it all ended well, but in the 1980 World Series, when the Royals played the Phillies, Brett had to come out of a game because of hemorrhoids.
And it was one of those unfortunate medicinal things, and everybody knew it.
It showed up in the media that Brett had hemorrhoids and, you know, hemorrhoids.
It's unfortunate people laugh about them.
And I think it was game two of sliding into second base, trying to break out a double play.
Bam.
I mean, you could hear, I was in Philadelphia, and everybody knew that Brett had the hemorrhoids and slid into second base, and you could hear the hush.
People knew how painful that had to be.
So I had been kicked out of the press box as a non-legitimate working press person.
I was up there with the Royals contingent, but somebody, some sports writer complained that I wasn't a real journalist.
So I got kicked out and there were no tickets.
I had to go down to the Royals clubhouse to watch the game on TV in there.
And I was there when George came in, and I then was given a responsibility to go find something, which I did, and everything was cool.
But that Pine Tar thing ended up overshadowing all of that.
And it's become a folklore incident in baseball.
And the Royals are in New York this week.
And George had a press conference yesterday at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon at the new Yankee Stadium to talk about it.
He's now the hitting instructor for the Royals, just took that job a few weeks ago.
But this Pine Tar bat incident was an incredible thing.
And it's one of the things now that obviously George is known for in addition to being a Hall of Famer at third base.
Five hits short.
This is incredible.
In 1980, I've never seen, and I'm sure it's happened, I have never seen an athlete own a city like George Brett owned Kansas City in 1980.
It was the first year for the World Series for the Royals of Philadelphia, but George Brett was flirting with hitting 400.
The first player to do that since Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox.
And he came within five hits.
I think his average at the end of the year was 390.
And the Pine Tar incident was three years later.
But nevertheless, it's become one of those folklore things.
They had the press conference yesterday in New York to talk about it.
We had just a little soundbite from it.
The 30th anniversary of the ⁇ I can't believe it was 30 years ago.
It's one of those things that seems like it all was just yesterday.
But here's just a little bit of it.
We have just like a 20-second soundbite from it.
You know, that's what I'm known for.
And it could be worse.
I'm known for something positive, or Bill Buckner is known for something negative.
Now I'm the Pintar guy, so it's really the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
Thank you, Billy Martin.
Thank you, Greg Nettles.
Still got a sore neck from Joe Brinkman's headlock, but it's getting better.
So that was Brett talking about the Pine Tar incident yesterday in New York.
And again, we all have experiences in life, and I bombed out at the Royals.
I learned there I wasn't cut out for work in a corporate structure because I was not comfortable being so conformed and contained.
But those five years, I wouldn't trade for anything.
They were my first five years out of radio since I was 16.
My first job actually outside of radio.
I met people I would have otherwise never met.
And I actually got to, oh, you may not understand this.
I got to see how people used, consumers used or listened to radio.
My experience with radio prior to going to work in a radio station was as a listener like everybody else.
But then from age 15 all the way up to age, what would have been 33, my experience with radio was in a room, small room, enclosed in glass.
You ever wonder why so many radio people are absolute wacko?
Let me explain it to you.
And most of them are.
You sit in a room all by yourself and you have to tell yourself that thousands are listening to you, that thousands are just poised to hear every word you're saying.
You have to psychologically tell yourself that.
Then you leave that little room when your work is done and you go out and you find nobody cares.
And most people don't even know who you are and nobody cares.
And then the next day, you've got to put that out of your mind to go in and lie to yourself and tell you everybody does care and everybody does hinge on every word you're saying.
Then you leave the next day and you find out nobody cares and nobody knows and you become a wacko.
You need help.
Some more than others.
Well, for me, getting out of that little room, that glass-enclaimed room, encased room for five years and being part of what I call the real world and being exposed to consumer product marketing, a number of other things.
I mean, I didn't have a college degree.
I really had no business getting this job, but I did and I got it.
And those five years, even though I learned I wasn't cut out for it, didn't make any money, and the last two years I wasn't all that particularly happy, but I wouldn't trade them.
It may be the most, in a certain way, the most valuable five years of my early formative life because of the experiences I had and the perspective that I was able to gain and the people that I was able to meet.
I mean, I was surrounded by the people that were the best at what they did.
And I was surrounded by people who just had, compared to me, tons of money.
And whenever it was, hey, hey, Rush, we're heading out to Aspen.
I'm sorry, I can't make it.
I'm really tied up.
I couldn't afford it.
I couldn't go.
But I couldn't say that.
It was valuable and worthwhile, and I can't tell you how many ways.
And 83, the pine tar year for Brett, was my last year.
And it was just, it takes me back to some of the memories that I had there.
But the whole incident was just tremendous.
And it's great that George is known for it and the way he handled it then and has handled it now.
But I just, I'll never forget 1980, that year we almost hit 400.
And the whole town of Kansas City was totally absorbed in George Brett's quest.
And the thing about George, it never affected him.
I mean, in terms of conceit or arrogance, if you met him then or if you met him now, he would be exactly the kind of guy that you would hope that he would be.
Oh, Snerdley is asking me if all these guys in baseball were, they still are shocked.
Stergly was asking if they were surprised when, I mean, they knew me as the front office grunt that came down and bugged them for autographs for sponsors.
And I was the joke.
I was the guy that I had to escort Marilyn May one day when she could barely walk out to second base to sing the national anthem during a playoff game.
And I'm walking off the field with her on my arm.
And the fans in the front row are making fun of me.
They're jeering me.
And, you know, I've told you the incident where every baseball in the dugout was thrown out at me when I forgot a baseball for the first pitch one night.
So, yeah, I was a lovable doofus.
And so when the radio career started, they didn't believe it.
Nobody did.
The only thing they knew was that I liked to read newspapers and stuff outside the sports page.
But they thought that was weird.
I mean, even in the morning in the office, if somebody in management walked by, I'd have to fake reading the sports page.
Well, this is a baseball team.
We don't care what happened in Israel today.
Take your pick, Libby.
That wasn't quite that bad.
But no, it's safe to say that they were all shocked, and many still are.
Don't believe it.
It's not just those guys.
It's people, my family, still some of them can't believe it either.
At any rate, folks, let's say a brief time out.
We've got to be just an obscene profit break here.
We'll take it, come back, and continue after this.
Don't go away.
Here's Laurie in Pittsburgh.
Laurie, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
You started earlier in the show talking about Michelle Obama's food school lunch.
And I had a whole year of seeing the Rush Limbaugh Theory, the Limblaught Theory in action because of the school lunch.
My school had it.
And when my children would come home, your school had the Michelle Obama lunch program?
Yes, they had the menu.
The menu, okay.
Yes, yes.
And I, when the menu came out in the first week of school, I'm like, they used to get on Mondays, that was my son's favorite day, they would get a national brand of pizza day, and then it changed over.
Now they're getting whole wheat pizza.
Well, now the story, Laurie, the story that I had today was that the kids that are being subjected to Muchello Obama menu are coming home, that they're hungry.
Absolutely.
And let me get to that.
When my sons come home, where it used to be, I could give them a little snack and they'd be okay.
Now they want their food when they come home.
And they're eating twice as much because they're not getting enough food at school.
An athlete that I know, kids who are athletes at school who have their athletics right after school, are having to buy two and three lunches.
Wait a minute.
Where are they getting the money?
If they're not getting enough to eat from the Michelle menu at lunch and they're eating after school, who's buying that for them?
Where are they going to get it?
No, no, no.
No, no, I'm saying at lunchtime, the student athletes will buy two and three lunches to be able to sustain themselves during their after-school activities.
I see.
I know that for a fact.
Well, are your kids don't mean to be personal?
Are your kids overweight?
You know what?
Yes, they are, but it's okay.
They're right now, they're 12.
They're going through a growth sport.
However, couldn't they supposed to be hungry?
I mean, isn't that the point?
If the children are obese and you're trying to get them to lose weight, I'm sorry being hungry is part of losing weight.
It's actually why the diets don't work is because you are never really able to psychologically sate your appetite.
That's why, I mean, all diets work and then they don't.
Every diet in the world works and then they don't.
But being hungry is part of it.
Folks, don't forget either, if I remember the details, we had a story out of North Carolina within the past year where a parent gave, I have this right, gave the kid and the school disapproved it.
That's right.
Yeah, the school official took away the food that mom had provided.
That's what it was.
Because the point was, honestly, the point was, it was in North Carolina, the point was for kids to believe that the school and the government cared more about the way they eat than their moms did.
They said, your mom's giving you junk.
You can't eat this.
They took it away from them.
That's what it was.
I'll never forget that.
My friends, I just got an email during the break.
And, you know, it's this could be a teachable moment if I do this right.
The email, it's kind of long.
I'm not going to read the whole thing to you, but it's basically somebody who says that they watched the Pine Tar game between the Royals and the Yankees and that they were embarrassed.
And that George Brett looked like he was insane and a madman.
It was horrible, I'm summarizing, horrible behavior for a role model for kids argue with umpires like that and to get thrown out of the game and to get in the umpire's face.
It was nothing cool about that rush, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I've got a different take on that.
I understand the role model business, but let me give you the other side of this, because there is one.
And I think it's a teachable model.
I actually think it's applicable to a lot.
Now, a lot of people, there's no way people would know this, but George Brett worked really hard.
Now, he had natural talent, obviously.
George Brett was the first guy at the ballpark every afternoon for a night game.
He showed up at 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock for a 7 o'clock start, and he's out batting practice, working on his hitting and everything.
I don't care.
It could be 110 degrees in the field, and he was out there doing it.
He worked extremely hard throughout his whole career.
He put a lot in.
He valued what he did.
The Yankees were at that time the hated rivals of the Kansas City Royals.
The Yankees had deprived the Royals of the playoffs for three consecutive years, deprived them of the championship in the playoffs, 76, 77, 78.
And every all those three years, the Royals came into one game of going to the World Series.
Then you add to it, Goose Gossage, who was the pitcher during the Pine Tar incident.
Goose Gossage at the time had the most feared fastball in Major League Baseball among relievers.
And George had pretty good success with Gossage.
In fact, Gossage has a restaurant in Colorado somewhere, and Brett made up a replica of the Pine Tar bat.
And it's on display in Gossage's restaurant.
Now, the way I look at this is, yeah, went out there and got in the umpire's face and protested, but George Brett put a lot of work into that home run, and that home run won the game.
And that home run, that hit, was the result of a huge amount of work.
And it was an achievement and an accomplishment against one of the absolute best pitchers of the time.
That was an achievement and an accomplishment that somebody who really values their work just couldn't stand having it taken away on an arbitrary enforcement of a rule that is never enforced on anyone else.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
And in a way, you could see if more people valued their work, if more people put in all kinds of effort and valued the outcome of their work, they'd be a little bit more upset when people start taking things away from them or when people start putting obstacles in front of them.
And they wouldn't sit there and put up with it.
Now, on the other side of this, I know you've got the rules and you've got the authority figures, the umpires, and it's like Stan Musiel.
My father always used to tell me that Stan Musiel's son, he never argued with the umpires.
That was a big deal to my dad.
That was tantamount to being the epitome of dignified and respectful.
My dad was a lawyer.
The judge was always right, and you couldn't argue with the judge.
And when the judge ruled, that was it.
You had to eat it if it didn't go in your favor.
So as a lawyer, authority figures were part and parcel of the gig.
The umpires to him were the same thing.
And my dad, I'll never forget this.
It might have been Stan Musiel's last game, or it was one of his last games.
And we're listening on the radio.
We're not there.
We're listening to it on the radio.
And it was reported that on a call strike, Musiel argued with the umpire, and it just devastated my dad because it was the first time he had ever heard that about Musiel in his 20-plus-year career.
And in fact, I wasn't listening to it.
My dad was.
I came in and he told me about it.
And I can't tell how disappointed my dad was telling me that Musiel argued with the Empire.
It's like he'd lost a little appreciation for it.
I've never forgotten that.
And it was totally my dad, an integrity thing.
And I remember saying, Dad, he just had to do it once in his career for, you know, there's no big deal.
But so I understand if you're talking in the role model thing, but I don't think that applies here at all.
I think that that incident, the Pintar incident was, if you view it from the standpoint that here's a guy who had, he worked harder than anybody ever knew, other than his teammates.
And Gossage was as tough an opponent as ever.
And here's a game that is, this is July.
It's dog days of the season.
You're not out of it yet.
And that wins the game.
And they have it.
They hated Yankees.
And Billy Martin, I mean, this is to have to take you up.
Billy Martin running out there and whining and moaning to the umpires and the umpires.
And then the bad boy supplied by the Yankees, who you like.
Brett loved this little bad boy, but he worked with the Yankees to make sure the bat was produced and so forth.
I can totally understand because he valued that home run.
I'll tell you something else about Brett, and he won't remember this.
It's probably going to embarrass the heck out of him.
And I don't intend to do that.
But there was a time, I don't even, I worked there for five years, and I never made more than, I think, $16,000 a year there.
And I literally never really had any money because I owned a house I had no business owning, and it ate up.
The payment just ate up what is now called cash flow.
I called it money.
I didn't have any for at least two weeks of the month.
They said more than that because the payment was more than one of the paychecks.
Anyway, there was something that came up that to me was important, and it wasn't a lot of money.
It was like $400 or $500.
And I sheepishly asked George if he would loan it to me.
And without thinking, he said, sure.
That was it.
But that's not the story.
The story is that some years later, years later, when I was able to, I paid him back.
And the story, he let me.
I mean, he accepted it rather than saying, no, keep it.
I don't need it.
It wasn't anything.
He took it.
And that squared it.
That eliminated any kind of a potential pressure point.
It was only $400, which was big money to me, but he took it.
And you could make the argument like liberals do, he didn't need it.
Why did he?
I agreed to pay it back.
He took it.
And it was, you know, I'm forever glad that he did.
Because it, you know, that, you know, loans and friends and this kind of thing.
And it would have never become that anyway, but it was just something I thought it was big of him to do.
Both sides.
Tom Dung Heap Harkin, not happy with the employer mandate being delayed by the regime.
Senator from Iowa, Dung Heap Harkin, we call him that because he used the term himself on something.
He told the New York Times, this was the law.
The employer mandate is the law.
How can they change the law?
So they asked his spokeskid, Jay Carney, about it today at the White House press briefing.
And because Harkin said, this is illegal.
You can't just do this.
The presidents can't do this.
And Carney said, well, people who view such a delay as unusual, they're just willfully ignorant.
So the president's spokesperson today called Senator Harkin willfully ignorant.
Because Harkin thinks it's not illegal to just arbitrarily say, you know what?
I am Obama and I am delaying the mandate.
Here's Eric in Draper, Utah.
Hi, Eric.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
You bet.
I can't believe I'm talking to you after 23 years of listening to you.
So I've got a quick question.
What would the DOJ have in stake to where they would want to get involved with the George Zimmerman case?
Did I lose you?
No, no.
You're asking why would they get involved?
Yeah, if you think about this, you know, we've got the Black Panthers that were intimidating people at the polls.
They wanted to promote racial strife.
What else could it be?
Exactly.
But why are they so intent on creating so much racial strife?
I can't help but to think about Obama's martial law decree where he can enact martial law.
No, it's not about that.
I don't think I don't think it's about that at all.
I think the stoking the racial stuff is the way Obama was raised.
He was raised to believe this country was founded unjustly and immorally.
And slavery this and slavery that.
And he thinks this country has got a chip on his shoulder about it.
And he's here to square the deal.
And hold her, too.
I think all of these guys have an anger about them, about the country and its past.
And as far as they're concerned, there's nothing that's ever going to happen to erase slavery.
It may as well still be going on by God.
And so all of this is being done so the rest of us can get a taste of it.
Find out what it's what the OJ jury was doing.
Okay.
Fine.
How does it feel?
Not guilty.
We know he did it.
How many times do you railroad us?
I think that's what's going on here.
Pure and simple.
I don't think it's hard to understand at all.
In addition to that, there's also the specter of gun control.
They wanted to use the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Obama's, could have been my son, pushing gun control.
And they didn't like Florida's stand-your-ground law.
They didn't like that.
They had a bunch of things they could push here.
This martial law business, I don't even want to go there.
I don't think you have to to find an answer for why they're trying to foment racial division.
It's the same premise of affirmative action.
Affirmative action is so that you get a taste of what it was like.
Get even with them, is them.
If you look up the community relations service at the DOJ on their website, it says that they are a peacemaking outreach organization.
This is the exact opposite of what they did in the Zimmerman case down in Sanford, Florida.
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