Reggie Jackson turns 80!
"The magnitude of me" guy hits his eighth decade
It has never been particularly challenging to get Reginald Martinez Jackson to talk. Sometimes, it would be about himself - “I’m the straw that stirs the drink.” Other times, it would be about himself. “It’s hard to conceive the magnitude of me.” Or something like that.
If he didn’t say those exact words in that order, well, give him time.
Unlike most of you loyal and kind Substack readers out there, you haven’t had a chance to speak - to be spoken to - by Reginald Martinez Jackson. I have.
And the very first time it occurred, I had eyewitnesses. Several hundred of them, in fact. Which, it seemed to me, only served to fuel the always able tongue of Reginald Martinez Jackson even more.
I was seated in the far distant seats of Fenway Park’s right field, the spot they used to call “Williamsburg” back in the day when another voluble and often profane outfielder earned acclaim for striking baseballs that landed out there. It was the next-to-last or as Howard Cosell would have put it, “the penultimate game” on the Baltimore Orioles’ regular-season schedule.
Reginald Martinez Jackson had been sent to the American League purgatory known as Baltimore in that season, prior to his off-season meeting/squiring session with New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, which ultimately secured him a pinstriped uniform, a number of photo ops and post-game interview opportunities and the occasional room-clearing meeting with the rat-like, often-fired-but-never-often-enough manager Billy Martin.
But he had to wind down his regular (there was ever anything “regular” about Reggie) season in Baltimore and the schedule took them to Fenway Park in late September.
The Red Sox were starting pitcher Rick Wise, who was a decent pitcher but perhaps more remembered for the Jacksonian-like feat of hitting two home runs in a single game. The catch was, Wise was also throwing a no-hitter that day.
In his first at bat against Wise, Reggie whiffed. In his second, he lofted a underwhelming fly ball to center in the third and fanned again in the fifth. While his between-innings movement from dugout couldn’t exactly be called walking, neither could it be called running. In fact, it was about as far from a home run as that little worm-killer. As I recall on the fly ball, he peeled off once he got first base in his sights, in the manner of one of Columbus’s men hollering “Land ho!”
Though the Red Sox and Orioles were, at the time, far from the class of the American League, there are certain standards that a Fenway Park fan must maintain. And this desultory performance on the basepaths, in my view, was unacceptable.
America being the land of the free, at least it was then, when Jackson trotted - sort of a slow graze - out to his position, I felt a civic duty to inform him that his lack-of-effort was not going to tolerated. Not silently, anyway.
Though I am not a particularly loud person normally, something about that Fenway crowd, seeing Reggie performing by underperforming, I had to say something. So I started booing and amazingly, like in “The Naked Gun” or something, Reggie walked towards me.
“What’s your problem? Why are you on my ass?” he said, loud enough for me and the entire section to hear it.
“I came to see Reggie Jackson, great player, not some choke artist who can’t even hustle,” I hollered back, sounding as dignified as one can, screaming from the right field stands.
Reggie laughed. “So what do you want?”
Again, my decorum, I believe, was letter-perfect.
“What do you think we want?” "I hollered, gesturing. “We want to see Reggie Jackson hit a home run. Whattya think?”
Our repartee had engaged the fans around us joined in. Here we were, in an end-of-the-season, playing out the string game with one of the game’s greatest players, who was surely going to go elsewhere next year for big bucks. And he was humoring us. Or so it appeared.
“OK,” Jackson said, a skeptical tone in his voice. “OK. I hit a home run and you’re going to stand up just like you are now, in Boston, and cheer.”
After all this, I was not going to let Reginald Martinez Jackson impugn my character. (Bet he couldn’t spell that one!).
“Hell, yeah. We’ll stand and cheer,” I said as those around me clapped in encouragement and apparent agreement.
With one out in the seventh, Jackson came to bat again, facing Wise. He swung, there was a mighty “thwack” that echoed through the late-inning air and there it was, soaring way over the bullpen, way up into the right field stands.
Jackson always had that sort of a jaunty, side-to-side home run trot but here, as he approached first base, he was looking down into the right field stands, right where those leather New Hampshire lungs were. He wanted to see if we - like him - kept their part of the bargain.
We kept standing and cheering for the enemy player as he ran – not shuffled - out to his position at the end of the inning. He looked over at us and tipped his cap. The home run had given the Orioles the lead.
As a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, it is against the law to root for the New York Yankees and I would never commit such a sin to the living soul of Carl Yastrzemski. But when Reggie swatted three home runs on three swings in a World Series contest, all I could think to myself was, “Hell, I made him do that, too.”
Author John Nogowski, who once threw a single pitch to win a game, is the author of two baseball books, “Diamond Duels,” a book recounting the game’s greatest matchups and “Last Time Out,” a collection of stories of the final MLB games of baseball’s greatest players, both available on Amazon. He’s also written "Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” and the forthcoming Neil Young volume with the same heading, “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” about his experiences teaching Twain’s classic at a minority school in Florida. He regularly contributes to the Hartford Courant and is at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen. And yes, he still hates the Yankees.