Ron Santo

Good things are worth waiting for – Vince Lloyd attains the Silver Circle honors of TV Academy

By  on December 13, 2022

On a February night in 2002, I stood outside Vince Lloyd’s Green Valley, Ariz. retirement home with the host. We both looked to the countless stars in the desert sky.

Vince Lloyd, depicted at Comiskey Park, in 1964 (Image courtesy Tribune Content Agency).

Vince Lloyd, depicted at Comiskey Park, in 1964 (Image courtesy Tribune Content Agency).

The previous year, Lloyd’s old WGN comrades-in-arms-Lou Boudreau and Arne Harris had died. Back in 1998, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray passed away. Talking about Brickhouse, Vince said he had a telling feeling that Jack had died earlier that day, before he heard the news. That’s how connected the WGN boys were through what Brickhouse called “80-hour work weeks” and rotating poker games at the sports staff’s homes.

“They were my friends,” Lloyd said, looking up.

Nothing is forever except friendship and great memories. A year and a half later, the man born Vince Lloyd Skaff in South Dakota in 1917 also was consigned to fond remembrance, his stout heart, trademark baritone voice and old Marine Corps toughness unable to outlast cancer at 86. I cherished Vince’s good fellowship and support of my career in his later life, after he had served as a youthful soundtrack of summers as he did for several million Midwest listeners as a verbally animated Cubs radio voice.

I committed to the concept to garner honors and recognition for Vince, probably underrated during his prime since Brickhouse had the highest regional profile as Cubs TV play-by-play with the most games on video in the majors. But the Ford Frick Award, baseball’s  highest honor for an announcer, seemed beyond Lloyd’s reach posthumously.  Soon after his July 2003 death, I added Vince Lloyd at the last moment to my “Where Have All Our Cubs Gone?” book, published in 2005, as a means to remember him.

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Wry, sly and dry persona a core value for Frick Award winner Hughes

By  on December 8, 2022

Pat Hughes probably merited the Ford Frick Award simply for being on duty and keeping his composure as the only Chicago announcer ever to call a Cubs World Series clinching out.

Pat Hughes' Ford Frick Award truly celebrates a lifetime achievement of smooth-as-silk announcing.

Pat Hughes’ Ford Frick Award truly celebrates a lifetime achievement of smooth-as-silk announcing.

After all, radio was in the hands of hobbyists and experimenters – the Marconis of the world — in 1908, the last Cubs world’s championship. Commercial radio did not start ’til 1920 and the first baseball game was not aired ’til the next year, in Pittsburgh.

But even if the Cubs had blown Game 7 in 2016, Hughes surely deserved the top broadcaster’s honor given out by the Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement. Few can match Hughes’ smooth-as-silk baseball voice or his wry, dry and sly sense of humor around boothmates such as the two Rons, Santo and Coomer.

Hughes beat out former Cubs colleague Steve Stone and a host of other contemporary announcers for the 2023 Award on Wednesday, Dec. 7, hard on the heels of his induction into the Cubs Hall of Fame under the left-field bleachers. He is truly one of the golden voices of our time.

We go back to his first season in Chicago in 1996, when Hughes had to maintain interest as the Cubs, a marginal contender at mid-season, lost 14 of their final 16. An announcer had to keep it interesting until the last out on the final day. As Harry Caray advised the newcomer then, a Cubs voice does not just sign up for winning seasons, which were then at a premium at Wrigley Field.

Those memories and more flowed in a phone conversation, the day after receiving his Ford Frick honor, that was as much congratulatory as interrogatory.

“It’s as good as it gets,” said Hughes, who said his emotions ranged from “shock” to being “on Cloud Nine. You work hard, you really don’t think about the award while you’re (on the air). It’s such a lofty achievement.”

In July 2012, Hughes was in Cooperstown for Ron Santo’s posthumous induction into the Hall of Fame.

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Serious as a player, Glenn Beckert provoked smiles in his on- and off-the-field Cubs exploits

By George Castle, CBM Historian
April 13, 2020

Glenn Beckert in his prime.

Glenn Beckert in his prime.

Even when the news of Glenn Beckert’s passing at 79 came your way on a lazy, housebound Easter afternoon, the reaction was not sorrow, but a knowing smile.

An all-time Cubs second baseman, Beckert enjoyed the light side of life amid a serious career as a contact hitter and key member of the fabled 1969 Cubs.

The stories about Beckert, who was in declining health for years, evoke laughs. About his alleged thriftiness. About his night-time wanderings with roomie Ron Santo. About given a nickname after a wrassler. About his apparent nervousness fielding the final out of Ken Holtzman’s strikeout-free no-hitter in Wrigley Field in 1969.

Beckert, Billy Williams talk to Woody English, witness to Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot.”

Listen here…15:21 minutes; 14mb .mp3 audio

 

I didn’t meet Beckert during his playing days. But after he settled into his second career as a broker working the pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, I was fortunate to cross paths many times doing stories on his present and past timelines. The man who generated so much good feeling from his nine years as a Cub simply accumulated even more.

Such as the time I took Beckert to his first game in the bleachers on Sept. 4, 1983 to surprise friend Jerrle Miller Gericke on her 28th birthday. We walked up to the still-empty center-field section before meeting Gericke in the last row in right field. Glenn spread his arms to exclaim, “I can’t believe the view you get from here.” Yep, the views of his crouched batting stance and his No. 18 pivoting to combine with Don Kessinger for another double play are never purged from memory.

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Santo could have been lock-down Hall of Famer if not for Type 1 diabetes

By on June 1, 2018

Count me among the childhood critics of eventual Hall of Famer Ron Santo, getting upset when he hit into a double play with crucial ducks on the pond, or made an error with his frequent Gold Glove at third.

But like so many others five decades ago, I didn’t have all the information at hand. Santo was playing at a perennial All-Star level with Type 1 diabetes that he could not accurately monitor with medical instruments before or during games. He developed educated guesswork when diabetic symptoms began to come on, quaffing a candy bar and/or a can of Coke for an instant sugar fix. Sometimes, though, the symptoms arrived quickly. They may have affected his vision or his physical reactions temporarily and thus in turn cut down on his performance.

Ron Santo (left) already dealt with the effects of Type 1 diabetes on his career when he posed with Vince Lloyd and Ernie Banks in the early 1960s.

As Fergie Jenkins noted, Santo could not have grown speed in his legs — slowness being his only physical drawback.  But some of those double-play grounders may have been slashed through the infield without the diabetic impact on Santo’s reactions.

Imagine a Santo with a modern day medical monitors, being able to head off symptoms at the pass. Cubs closer Brandon Morrow, former Cubs outfielder Sam Fuld and ex-Bears quarterback Jay Cutler were not hampered in their careers through modern medical monitoring of their Type 1, called “juvenile diabetes” in Santo’s time.

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