The accidental purist

Jon Miller, baseball sage and onetime voice of the Red Sox, is no stick-in-the-mud. But he does like loyal players, Fenway Park, and a good old-fashioned pennant race.

interview by Tom Scocca

It would be understandable if former Red Sox broadcaster Jon Miller were shy about speaking his mind on baseball. Two years ago, after his 14th season as the radio voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Miller -- widely regarded as one of the game's top announcers -- was cut loose by Orioles owner Peter Angelos, who accused him of being too hard on the team. But Miller remains unabashed. Now the lead announcer for the San Francisco Giants, as well as play-by-play man for ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, Miller offers his opinions about baseball owners -- along with league realignment, Reggie Jackson, and the art of broadcasting -- in his book Confessions of a Baseball Purist: What's Right -- and Wrong -- with Baseball, as Seen from the Best Seat in the House, cowritten with Mark Hyman (Simon and Schuster).

Even over the phone, Miller's rich baritone is a bit awe-inspiring. On the air, it verges on the holy. Miller calls games with grace and clarity; he's also a quick and erudite wit and a gifted mimic. His impersonations of other broadcasters, which he first unveiled while vamping during a rain delay on Boston radio, have evolved into works of baroque genius: an impression, say, of a Japanese baseball announcer mimicking the style of the Dodgers' Vin Scully, in Japanese. He tosses funny voices into conversation, too, it turns out.

A hidebound classicist he's not. The word purist in the title, he explains, comes from a conversation with Bud Selig, acting commissioner of baseball, in which Selig used the term dismissively to lump him in with all the opponents of interleague play. The purity of the game, Miller emphasizes, is a matter of opinion.

Q: In the book, you talk about how you believe that the quality of the game is better now than ever, which is not an opinion that's usually associated with baseball purists.

A: What I say is that I think this is really a golden age -- not the golden age, but a golden age in baseball history. There's Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Mark McGwire. These are special talents; they're doing things that haven't been done since the days of Ruth and Gehrig and Hornsby.

The kind of numbers that were put up in the '20s and '30s have never been put up since. Not only did Ruth hit 60 home runs in a year, but the same year he hit .356. Hack Wilson drove in 190 runs in a season, with 56 homers. Rogers Hornsby hit 42 homers and batted over .400 at the same time.

And now all of a sudden you've got guys like Tony Gwynn who regularly win batting titles hitting .370 or .380 or better. Guys like Frank Thomas who regularly hit .350 with 40-plus homers. There's a certain faction out there that looks at these big numbers and says: There's proof that the game today is screwed up. And I'm astonished at that. When Ruth and Gehrig were putting up those numbers, and Hack Wilson, were people walking around saying, "This proves that the game is screwed up"? No -- they were saying, "Man, those guys are incredible!"

Q: As you mention in the book, people are always talking about the economic limits on management. Does the size of a team's market really limit its ambitions?

A: If every team had the same amount of money to spend on players, we'd still have just as many teams in last place and out of pennant races as we do now. These guys who are constantly whining about [economics] are doing it to defend themselves in public from the talk shows or the columnists, who are critical of them for not spending the money. It's sort of saying: "Hey, don't blame me. It's the system."

It's a great game. Promote and market this game and nurture this game, and have the guts to quit whining about all this stuff all the time. It's not helping you. Go into your board meetings with your bankers and whine to them. People enjoy the game. It's a respite from real life. All this moaning is not serving anybody.

Q: How important do you think it is for the Sox to sign Mo Vaughn?

A: Ideally, I'd like to see Mo stay, because I think Mo is an important player and an important man in the community. But somewhere along the line, I like to see a player also say that [staying] means something to him. Kirby Puckett did it in Minnesota. Cost him at least $5 million that we know of, and maybe as much as $10 million. Cal Ripken -- how much did it cost him to stay with Baltimore? It's happened with some players. I'd like to see from Mo more than just paying lip service to how badly he wants to stay.

Q: You mention how important it is for a broadcaster to try to build a career with a single city. Do you think that the same thing applies to players?

A: Definitely. Look at Carl Yastrzemski and all the things he went through. First he replaces Ted Williams, and the Sox are a bad team, and he's not Ted Williams. Then he wins a Triple Crown, and for the one year he's an all-time great. The bigger the games got, the better he got. Then he had a couple of years that weren't up to par. He hit 40 home runs one year but only hit .255. He wasn't winning Triple Crowns.

So he went through ups and downs in Boston. But he stayed in Boston and became synonymous with the Red Sox. And that can happen for Mo Vaughn. It could have happened for Roger Clemens, too. At some point, the players have to say the point is not that they get the absolute top dollar the market will bear, but that they're willing to sacrifice something to stay in that market. If they're willing to do that, and the team doesn't sign them -- okay, the team should be blamed for that. It wasn't the primary goal of Roger Clemens, obviously, or he'd be in Boston today. And if Mo doesn't stay, assuming the Red Sox make him some kind of decent offer, then I would have no sympathy for Mo Vaughn, either. Don't be crying about going somewhere else, because you could have stayed. I mean, all the money we're talking about is big money, no matter what they get.

Q: Announcing for the Sox and then the Orioles, you got to see a revered old ballpark up close, and then a revered new one. Can Fenway Park survive in the same world as Oriole Park, do you think?

A: Well, I'm not privy to all the figures that the accountants and John Harrington would be privy to, so it's difficult to say. But in the National League, you've got a similar situation with Wrigley Field and the Cubs, and the Cubs are saying -- or perhaps acknowledging as a fact of life -- that Wrigley Field has a great deal to do with the love that their fans have for the team. The Red Sox are not acknowledging that.

Maybe they have research that proves otherwise, that Fenway doesn't mean that much. But I have a feeling that the identity of the Red Sox is closely aligned with Fenway Park. [Red Sox management] could really be playing with the very foundation of what the franchise means to the fans if they moved out of Fenway Park. And I think that's the real danger, beyond the dollars and cents. Are they still the Red Sox if they're not at Fenway Park? [The Red Sox and the Cubs] obviously have a similar situation, similar constraints on the level of income they can develop, because of the size of their ballparks. But the Cubs feel that Wrigley Field is part and parcel of Cubs baseball.

Q: What do you think of the way the three-division wild-card system has played out?

A: Well, last year, we had what could have been a heavyweight pennant race in September between the Orioles and the Yankees, and they blew off the whole month. Both teams were already in. The Orioles popped the champagne corks the last week of the season, when they clinched a tie for first place.

I think that is bad for baseball. The best possible world for a baseball fan is a great pennant race between two heavyweight teams, and you can't have that if they're both going to make the playoffs anyway. In '96, the Dodgers and Padres were tied for first on the last day of the season. They were both already in, and they both blew off the game. Fifty-five thousand fans at Dodger Stadium, and Ramon Martinez pitched the first inning as a tune-up and left the game. The Padres guy pitched three innings or something -- no, he was just set aside to pitch the opening game of the playoffs.

Q: Versus the Braves-Giants pennant race, in 1993 . . .

A: Winner take all. Two of the greatest heavyweights who ever went in a pennant race. Braves won 104 games, Giants won 103, the Giants stayed home. I mean, that's drama.

That's why the '78 [Red Sox-Yankees] pennant race was dramatic. Two teams with great records, but only one's going on [to the playoffs]. Every game was huge. And we would have played the whole last month of '78 the way they played it last year: "Hey, we're both in! Relax!"

Q: What has you most excited about the coming season?

A: I think in every division there could be some great races. The American League East is a powerhouse. The Yankees and Baltimore could lay claim with Atlanta to being the best teams in the game. Then you've got the Red Sox adding maybe the best pitcher in the major leagues from last year, and the Blue Jays have made some big changes. Some real heavyweights are going to be duking it out.

Q: What does radio have to offer in the age of television?

A: I think that baseball is still a radio sport, more than any other sport. Baseball being a summer game, when people like to be out and about -- the radio goes with you. You go to Cape Cod, you go up to Lake Winnipesaukee, you go up to the mountains, and the radio goes with you, wherever. Television takes a commitment, staying indoors and sitting in front of the set for three hours or so.

Baseball on the radio is the experience similar to reading a novel, versus baseball on television and seeing the novel turned into the movie -- you see what the director wants you to see. Radio, you have a personal relationship with that broadcaster creating the image for you, and you uniquely translate that image into a mental picture, the way you would do it reading the novel.

It's my contention that many fans listen to a game on the radio and make a mental image from the perspective of where they sit when they go to Fenway Park. So a fan who sits under the overhang on the first-base side, when he's envisioning the game, that's the angle that he's seeing it from. Another guy might be seeing it from one of the skyboxes on the roof. Another guy might be seeing it from the bleachers. And that's what's fun about it.

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.