Shepherd loved baseball and referred to it in many contexts over the years on the radio, on television in a “Jean’ Shepherd’s America” episode, and in a filmed documentary devoted to the Chicago White Sox.
Radio humorist, author, and multi-faceted creative force, Jean Shepherd, loved baseball above all other sports, and seeing it as a metaphor for life as we know it, loved it for what it signified for him and all of us. His belief that life requires good offensive as well as defensive maneuvering is illustrated in the movie A Christmas Story (which he created and narrated throughout), as every idea and action ends in disaster or its near equivalent–just a few examples include the kid who gets his BB gun for Christmas and nearly shoots his eye out, the longed-for secret decoder only decodes a “crummy commercial,” and dogs run off with the family’s Christmas dinner. Shepherd’s view is that life needs to be regarded with wry suspicion every step of the way, and the movie provides examples of his favorite rule for dealing with it, a metaphor taken especially from baseball: “keep your knees loose.”
Throughout his radio career he’d repeat the saying, meaning by it that life will frequently slap fast ground balls toward you across the uneven, rocky infield of your existence, and you’d better not be rigid, but be loose-kneed and ready to quickly dodge, or better, lunge to your right to glove the incoming missiles—or they will probably take bad bounces and give you a fat lip. He had a great joy in his life, but he knew that the Management Upstairs would eventually choose not to pick up his option, and that the price of conditional joy was eternal vigilance and loose knees.
Despite his world-view that argued that he’d never win a batting title, Shepherd’s involvement with baseball was much more widespread and successful than most of his well-informed enthusiasts were aware of. He even claimed to have been a professional ballplayer in his early days, but that tale is unlikely to be substantiated. The closest we’ve come is to learn that his kid brother, Randy, had played at a high level in the Cincinnati Reds organization, and Shepherd is said to have sometimes latched onto and honed his brother’s stories of sporting exploits for his own storytelling purposes. But even so, Shepherd had the skill in managing his life and his creative efforts to metaphorically bunt for a base hit, inside-out a swing that punched the ball to the opposite field, and even sometimes loft one over the fence.
Shepherd’s stories, anecdotes, and commentary on the radio usually illustrated his view of life, starting with supposed incidents from his childhood, frequently told to make a point and often straying far enough from the truth to be considered bald-faced lies. That the local team, the Chicago White Sox, were perpetual losers at the time, gave veracity to his symbolic stories and attitude toward human woe. Using his father, known as “the old man,” as a foil and frequent subject of subtle derision, Shepherd had at least three versions of one such family legend. In one, Shep and the old man were watching a Chicago White Sox vs. Yankees game from the left field stands, his father mercilessly heckling Yankee pitcher Marius Russo to the extent that Russo, usually a very weak hitter, blasted a home run in retaliation that not only won the game but “almost decapitated the old man!” marius russo
A similar story, this one in what looks to be the strictly historical portion of a 1987 White Sox video documentary, has Shepherd telling of Babe Ruth hitting the first home run in All Star Game history, the ball, naturally, just missing his father, who went lunging for it and fell empty-handed into a woman’s lap. The third story, this one also the result of his father’s heckling, has Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig aiming a home run ball and just missing him. This version of the tale was well known enough—and believed—for a radio interviewer to ask Shepherd to tell about his father and Lou Gehrig, to which Shepherd responded, “Don’t forget, I’m a storyteller, not a historian.” All media is used under Section 107 of the Fair Usage USA Copyright Act, as well as the Compilation and News Reports sections of the USA Copyright Act. All videos are for the enjoyment of the viewer. No Copyright Infringement Intended.
