Projo Sports Blog

By Sam Mellinger
The Kansas City Star

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A clubby came up to George Brett. This was spring training, before a Yankees-Royals game, maybe a decade or so ago - and you should know that George Brett and Goose Gossage never talked to each other when they played.

Never. Not a word. One was a Royal, the other a Yankee, and back then that meant they were rivals, enemies, so it caught Brett by surprise when the clubby said Gossage wanted a bat to display in a restaurant he was opening.

The clubby mentioned that the two had never been too friendly, Brett thought they should leave that in the past, so he approached Gossage with a smile.

"Goose," he chuckled, "Not only am I going to give you a bat, but I'm gonna tar that son of a (gun) up like you've never seen!"

It was 25 years ago today that Brett used his overly pine-tarred bat to hit a home run in the ninth inning off Gossage. You know the rest of the story. The Yankees pointed out that Brett's bat had too much pine tar on it, the umpires agreed, nullified the home run and set off one of the all-time ticked-off reactions in the history of sport.

Brett's sons occasionally ask to see the videotape. They don't care about the game or the homer. They just want to see their old man go nuts - a YouTube moment before there was such a thing.

Children have been conceived, born, graduated college, had promotions and kids of their own since that game at Yankee Stadium on a Sunday afternoon 25 years ago, but the memory still feels fresh.

Maybe it's still a topic after all these years because of the men involved. Brett thinks it's because it happened in New York, where everything's bigger; Gossage thinks it's the uniqueness of the whole situation.

Most likely, it's the classic video of the reaction.

"I'm so surprised," Brett says. "You play 20 years in the major leagues and accomplish some things, and that's the one at-bat you're remembered for, and it's an at-bat in July."

Says Gossage: "I've always been proud of all the home runs I've given up. That's my proudest, I guess. We've had some fun with it."

Brett and Gossage are both Hall of Famers, of course, but neither man is sick of talking about that moment. Brett got a championship ring, more than 3,000 hits, and a first-ballot induction at Cooperstown. Gossage had nine All-Star appearances, 310 saves, and got a ring of his own; he will be inducted into the Hall this weekend.

Yet both, in some ways, are largely remembered for a mid-summer game when Gossage gave up a homer and Brett went Mike Tyson crazy on the field - a vision as vivid as Kirk Gibson's pinch-hit homer, or Bill Buckner and his E-3.

The memories always come with laughs now, perhaps because the moment served as the ice-breaker to what both men consider a dear friendship.

Gossage giggles about how the Yankees knew for weeks that Brett had been using an illegal bat, but waited until he had a big hit to say anything.

Brett roars about his teammate Gaylord Perry wrestling the bat away from an umpire during the confusion and then handing it to a teammate ... who handed it to another teammate ... who was running back to the clubhouse with it before being stopped by the police.

But mostly, Brett laughs at the permanent image of that incident, the absolute, out-of-body rage caught on the grainy tape he still watches - most recently at a workout on Tuesday.

As the umpires measured the bat, Brett told a teammate that if he was called out for pine tar he'd "run out there and kill one of the sons of (guns)." An instant later, umpire Tim McClellan called him out, and Brett sure tried to keep his word.

"When I was running out of the dugout I had no idea I looked like that," Brett says. "When I first saw (the video), I said, 'You gotta be (kidding) me. I really did that in public?'"

Of course, the postscript to the incident is that American League President Lee MacPhail said that while Brett's bat was technically illegal, calling him out for it was not in the spirit of the rule.

So the game was replayed on Aug. 18 from the point of Brett's home run, but without Brett - "For some reason, they kicked me out," he jokes.

Brett watched the completion with a friend at a restaurant in New Jersey as Yankees manager Billy Martin put Don Mattingly at second base and Ron Guidry in center field, among other protests.

When asked about it, Brett says he's proud of his reaction. It's often been cited by fans of his as the best example of how Brett played - all passion, all emotion, all intensity.
There's another reason Brett doesn't mind the pine tar memory. He sat out in game two of the 1980 World Series because of hemorrhoids, and from that point on, heard every dirty and nasty comment from fans you could imagine.

But in the last 25 years, he hasn't heard a single thing about any swelling that a proctologist would treat. It's been all about pine tar and a home run he hit off a Hall of Fame closer at Yankee Stadium.

"Which would you rather be remembered for?" he says. "It's a no-brainer."

 Tags  anniversaries George Brett Kansas City Royals New York Yankees Pine Tar Incident

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