Da Box Welcomes ... Rich Griffin
Monday, September 08 2003 @ 01:55 AM EDT
Contributed by: Mick Doherty
First in a 10-part series.
To suggest that denizens of The Batter's Box are -- oh, to choose a word at random -- "obsessed" with the work of Toronto Star columnist Richard Griffin might be a bit of an overstatement. Might be.
Of the first 950 threads posted in the short but active history of Da Box, the name "Griffin" appears in 269 of them, a healthy 28 percent. Oh sure, if we go back and check, some of those search results might refer to John-Ford Griffin, or maybe even Alfredo Griffin, but consider this for a moment ...
In those same 950 threads, a certain highly-regarded "new wave" GM is mentioned in 267. That's right -- at first glance, Griffin's OBP ("On Box Percentage") is higher than the venerable J.P. Ricciardi's.
So, there seems to be a fair amount of interest among Boxers -- Zombie-Like Cult (a moniker adopted from a Griffin turn of phrase) and otherwise -- in this Griffin character. To be honest, he's taken more than his fair share of heat in this space, although that comes with the territory of being a newspaper columnist.
Still, maybe it's time to get to know more about him than his OBP.
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Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the Pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there
-- "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne
Like anyone who's spent thousands of hours at ballparks listening to "Rock and Roll Part I" and "We Will Rock You" over and over, Rich Griffin knows exactly what theme music would blare from the stadium speakers as he stepped to the plate -- "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne.
And the veteran award-winning PR maven-turned-sportswriter can envision what kind of player he'd be, too -- the type who would "lead the league in runs scored and steals, as a slick fielding shortstop," he says. In Toronto terms, then, a bit of a Tony Fernandez type.
But the Pretender-like "hopes and dreams" of the 49-year-old Griffin didn't begin in Toronto, or even in Canada -- in fact, as a child, the Kingston, Jamaica native had to struggle to find access to the sport that would become his livelihood.
"Baseball was not a sport in Jamaica [when I was] growing up," recalls Griffin. "I became a baseball fan on the north shore of Jamaica in the early 1960's by listening to the World Series on radio."
Radio was the only option. "There was no TV in Jamaica until 1964," says Griffin. So he used his imagination -- presumably a future writer's strength -- to picture the Fall Classics of the era. "Since the Yankees were in the World Series most years," he says, "I became a Mickey Mantle fan, imagining what he looked like."
The radio was a constant source of education and entertainment to the Jamaican youth. "In the same radio-as-my-only-entertainment way," he remembers, "my favourite astronaut was John Glenn and my favourite dog was the one the Russians shot up on Sputnik."
The encapsuled canine Laika hurtled into space from the old USSR in 1957, a full seven years before television came to Jamaica, where Griffin's parents worked for Captain Morgan Rum for 16 years. And since there was no TV in Jamaica until '64, maybe the future media professional is fortunate that his family hightailed it towards Canada a year before that.
Mesmerized by Mantle ... and Les Expos
"We moved to Montreal in 1963," says Griffin. "During the summers, my family used to alternate between Winnipeg and Scarborough visiting relatives. When we came to [Toronto]. I actually got to watch Mantle on the 'Game of the Week.' I was mesmerized. That was my intro to baseball."
On the cusp of three decades later, Griffin reached the pinnacle of success and recognition in his profession, when in 1992 -- the year the Jays first won a World Series -- he received the Robert O. Fishel Award for Public Relations excellence for his work with the Expos. The Blue Jays' Howard Starkman won the award in 1996, just after Griffin had joined the Star.
The trophy is on permanent display in a little museum in upstate New York -- a long way from listening to Mantle rack up his record 18 World Series home runs on the radio in Jamaica.
Of course, it was a bit of a winding path from Kingston to Cooperstown.
Although his family beat the Expos to Montreal by more than half a decade, the litany of the young Rich's baseball heroes is tinged with le rouge, le blanc et le bleu -- and of course, Le Grande Orange -- of Les Expos.
"Rusty Staub. Ken Singleton. Andre Dawson. Larry Walker," recites Griffin, who finally departs the outfield -- and eventually, the Expos -- to add Tim Wallach, Bobby Murcer and Cal Ripken, Jr. to his personal pantheon of heroes.
Oh, and for good measure -- perhaps foreshadowing a future PR guy's nose for the quirky and quotable -- pitchers Oil Can Boyd and Pascual Perez also make Griffin's list of personal favorites.
The Road to Cooperstown
So, how does a Jamaican youth get his name permanently etched into display in the Baseball Hall of Fame?
Obviously, he goes to college to play basketball and major in accounting.
That's exactly the path Griffin took after graduating from Loyola High School in Montreal, heading to Concordia on a partial academic scholarship. Though his college hoops career ended at the junior varsity level, his career in sports was just getting started. In fact, he remembers the exact date.
"I started working for the Expos on April 8, 1973 and advanced to director of publicity in just five years, taking over in 1978," recalls Griffin.
In the quarter-century that ensued, he has put together the kind of professional resume that, short of actually playing the game, most baseball fans actually dream about.
In addition to the aforementioned award-winning PR work for the Expos, Griffin broadcast games on radio from 1985-1994 when Dave Van Horne did TV work. He hosted a radio post-game show in the ill-fated 1994 season when the Expos sported the game's best record but were thwarted by cancellation of the postseason. He worked for the commissioner's office as a PR volunteer at the World Series for more than 15 years. And of course, now there's his work with the Star.
Canadian Comfort
All that, and still, when Griffin -- who with his wife Debbie is parent to four children -- thinks about the cities where he's most comfortable, his transplanted Canadian roots show. "Toronto and Montreal are the most comfortable places for me to be," he says, while still admitting a fondness for "road cities" San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver and New York.
It's not just the cities that stand out for this veteran observer of the Great Game; he also easily identifies the players he most enjoys watching, the ones he would "pay to see."
For the most part, they're the ones even the most casual fans know by a single name or a nickname: A-Rod. Unit. Junior. Sammy. Barry. Ichiro. Nomar. Griffin's history with the Expos prompts him to add Vladimir Guerrero and Larry Walker -- the latter also part of the earlier "personal favorites" litany -- and to the chagrin of Jays fans, one Shawn Green.
Perhaps flashing back for a moment to the radio signals carrying the heroics of Mickey Mantle to the Jamaican shores of his youth, Griffin adds one final item to the list. "And the Yankees," he says.
Next: Da Box Welcomes ... Geoff Baker
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