News
Rice enjoys memories during Hall tour
Red Sox slugger to be inducted to Cooperstown in July
By Mark Newman / MLB.com
05/15/09 3:47 PM ET
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- After all that time, Jim Rice was right at home."He always envisioned making it here," his wife Corine said Friday in the chilly archives vault in the basement of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Her husband was marveling over a partly milled hunk of lumber Rabbit Maranville once swung in the Majors.
"We met in high school. We've known each other our whole life. He wanted to be a football player back then. His father wanted him to play baseball, because it was a longer life for an athlete. So he played baseball and always felt he'd be in the Majors, and then he always felt he'd be here. He never said 'If I make it.' He said 'When I make it.'"
Jim, wearing a green Tommy Bahama top, tan slacks, Italian loafers and white gloves, put down the bat he was gripping and started making his way back through the hallowed room, over to a jersey Babe Ruth wore while leaving a supposed curse that engulfed Jim's entire playing career with Boston. Jim looked around at everything the Hall had to offer on this day, walking basically the same orientation tour that Rickey Henderson had been given one week earlier. They are the two players who will be inducted on July 26, along with Joe Gordon.
Depending on which of the Rices you ask, it was either a very emotional moment when the announcement finally was made last January, or the ultimate example of even-keel cool.
"It was the last three years or so that the frustration came in," Corine said during the tour. "Last year, I really saw the frustration. He may say it didn't hurt, but that was his façade.
"How'd he handle it? He'd watch 'The Young and Restless.' He even asked them to Tivo it today while he's here. Somebody (in 2008) said, 'You didn't make it,' and he just watched 'Young and Restless.' That was his soothing.
"When he called me this time to tell me he was elected, my cell phone was off. I saved the voicemail on my cell phone, because it was so good. It was through tears. He was overwhelmed, and honored."
Corine teaches pre-schoolers these days. At the end of this tour, when it was time to find out if she was right about that steely public exterior, this is what he said:
"My wife was in school teaching. I called my daughter, who was in class. I'm a soap opera buff, I was gonna watch 'Young and Restless.' [Hall president] Jeff Idelson called. I went back to watching the soap opera. I didn't get too high or too low."
Yeah, right. Corine said she did not want to reveal exactly what Jim had told her on that message he left her after he found out. It was the Jim Rice she knows.
This meant a lot to him, and to her. He could almost reach through the exhibit glass and put his hands on that Ty Cobb jersey and feel how the Georgia Peach must have felt when he wore it for hit after hit way back when.
"Look how he cut those sleeves off," Rice said. The Boston slugger was just like you and me during this tour -- a kid in a candy store.
In fact, there were kids in the candy store on this day. As Rice walked into the "Pride & Passion" exhibit rooms that showcase the Negro Leagues and African-American pioneers in baseball, there was a ring of second-grade Albany-area students sitting on the floor, listening to their teacher, Mrs. Greene, talking about Jackie Robinson. The Rices come from Anderson, S.C., and it was still a segregated South when Jim was in school there. He posed for a group picture with all of them. One girl said, as he was leaving, "I touched him!"
That's what happens when you finally get voted into the Hall of Fame.
Welcome to Cooperstown, Mr. Rice. They've been waiting for you.
"I think it's just fantastic and long overdue," said Dan Reihing, 61, of Springfield, Ohio, watching in The Gallery room as Rice was being shown where the plaques will be hung for him, Henderson and Gordon. "I think of his power. I'd root against him, because I was a Tigers fan back then. I admired his talent. I always felt bad because Boston never won. It broke my heart. But you have to say this: He was brutal with that bat."
That bat. It was right there waiting for him in the basement. The same bat he used at Fenway Park on Sept. 9, 1984, when he hit his 301st career home run.
"Feels light. This is 35-35 ½," he said, awash in memory of power and RBIs, choking that bat tight like a vise the way he used to do at the plate. "I usually used 36-36.
"That was a good bat."
It was like he was talking to it, saying hi to an old friend.
Rice also was able to check out his old uniform from the 1970s featuring the bicentennial patch on the left sleeve, just about the black armband patch they wore as a tribute for late Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Now, Rice's plaque will be in the same room as that of Yawkey's.
What seemed to excited Rice more than anything throughout the tour were the bats. He is a student of the bat. He saw an exhibit with Carl Yastrzemski's bat, featuring the "R206" model number above the familiar Louisville Slugger barrel logo, and he noted that the "R" stood for "Rice," because he said Yaz was using his bats on the way toward hit No. 3,000.
Rice saw a Pete Rose bat, and he said, "Pete was the first one who really brought the Mizuno bats in. You didn't see them before." Then Rice saw a Rod Carew bat with a C203 model number on the barrel ("C" for Carew), and enjoyed talking about the unprecedented thinness of that 1991 Hall of Fame inductee's old bat handle.
"I took that handle and I added a longer barrel," Rice said.
He passed the all-time strikeout list, and Corine took a glance and walked back to it.
"Shouldn't he be on there?" she said of her husband. "He struck out a lot."
She meant that in the nicest way. What she was saying is what Jim talked about later:
"I don't know his name, and not pointing anyone out, but this one man said he'd never vote for me because my on-base percentage was down. How's it going to be up? You want me to walk, batting (No.) 3 or (No.) 4? Who's going to run? Yaz couldn't run. Fred [Lynn] couldn't run.
"I wasn't paid to walk. I was paid to do some damage."
That quote should be right there with his new Hall of Fame display that the curators are in the process of setting up.
Rice hit 382 home runs, drove in 1,451 runs and batted .298. He had 373 doubles. He was the AL MVP in 1978, and he was selected to eight All-Star Games.
Being here brought it all back. He was waiting for a chance to see that old glove again. It was in the basement, too. Rice said players used to go down to the store and buy "work gloves" and wear them on cold days at the start of the season. On this day, he was wearing that white glove (required by the Hall) inside the old, well-broken-in mitt that he put on his left hand.
Jim Rice's mind drifted back to the 1970s and '80s, to a time of greatness, when your best friend was a giant green wall right behind you and Lynn was next to you in center. Those were the days, win or lose. Man, that glove went through it all with you. You took fly balls from Johnny Pesky every day in practice forever. You stood out there on hot nights across AL cities everywhere, and you took it to those All-Star Games.
The familiar round "W" logo on the back base of the glove was gone, because you ripped it out after Wilson failed to renew your contract. It had an "S" in that circle instead, because you wrote that in magic marker so you could keep the mitt, now that you had just signed with Spalding instead. No way you were leaving this glove behind.
This was the life you led. Now it is May, and the speech is coming soon. All those living Hall of Famers will be there. Corine and your kids will be there. Family and friends.
Life is good. You are about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. You're working as an NESN Red Sox analyst now. You can share lessons about what you have learned. And, oh, do you have a lot to share. Where to begin? There are still weeks to think about it.
You hope players today will appreciate the team game the way you did.
"It was more of a team then. It's individual now," Rice said. "It's more stats of an agent: 'What my guy has accomplished. My guy had a good year.'"
You hope they will work on fundamentals the way your peers did.
"There are no fundamentals at all in the game of baseball," Rice said. "Look at Minnesota. Tampa Bay. They are the few examples of teams that will have those guys go out and execute. We [the Red Sox] are one of the worst teams as far as executing, moving runners. I was taught, 'Jimmy, you have to be able to hit breaking balls.' ... No one hits breaking balls anymore."
There was a lot you learned. There is a lot to remember. It is all here, waiting for you in the little hamlet of Cooperstown, next to a Glimmerglass lake, and "The Moment" is happening right before your eyes. You are here now. Corine knows what it means to you. Maybe you will try not to get emotional during that speech, but she knows you inside better than anyone else, maybe better than yourself, and it has all the makings of a tear-jerker.
Mark Newman is enterprise editor of MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
