A Toast (Hear! Hear!) To Baseball

Posted Jan 21, 2012 by The Tampa Tribune

Updated Jan 21, 2012 at 01:47 AM

In honor of Derek Jeter’s 9th Annual Celebrity Golf Tournament for 2012 at the Avila Golf andCountry Club in Tampa, he received the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award in recognition of his charitable work with youngsters, given at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel Wednesday. Jeter recently became the first Yankee to reach 3,000 career hits and resides in Tampa in the offseason and says he loves it.

Here’s a hilarious 2009 piece by Tom about one of the annual Governor’s Luncheons and its history honoring baseball and the Spring Training Season held in Tampa Bay. - Linda

Charlie Crist continues his revived Governor’s Baseball Dinner at St. Pete’s Tropicana Field tonight, designed to salute the sport that has meant so much to Florida throughout all of the springs with teams readying for the season ahead, such as our Tampa Bay Rays.

This has been an off and on affair since it all started a couple of years before World War II with baseball people and sportswriters and radiocasters in an organized drinking and jawing party at the old Tampa Terrace hotel in Downtown Tampa under the supervision of the bartenders at the Terrace Bar. The writers of the 40s, 50s and 60s favored the Terrace for key reasons. They could be helped to their rooms, the bar was open until all had left, thrown out or passed out, and Western Union was around the corner to press rate their stories north, east and west. Plus Howard Wright was an understanding bartender/manager, and early on their was a late afternoon flight to New York to carry film there.

So, all those years ago, Terrace managers and/or bartenders Frank Winchell, George Mason and Wright decided to have a little wing-ding for the writing and radio crowd at the Terrace, and they did, and they doing it. Eventually Tampa realized it was a good idea, and did it for years with Ralph Chapman of the Chamber, then got tired of it and gave it up to St. Petersburg and promoter/booster Bill Bunker. Then Orlando had it, then Lakeland, when Crist, a sport and married man now, revived it and hometown St. Pete wanted to do it again. So it was held, with Nick Gandy in charge for the state, sold nearly 1,000 tickets at $100, rubbed shoulders with those big names who made it. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he’d make it.

The Baseball Dinner has waxed dandy, OK and a bummer. The smaller, intimate ones were well-attended by writers, casters, owners, execs and players. Joe Garagiola emceed one, Ralph Kiner one, Red Mitchum one, Lindsey Nelson one, and perhaps Gabe Paul of the Cincinnati Reds.

Governors have come much of the time. Claude Kirk was a regular, Bob Graham was there often, as well as Lawton Chiles and LeRoy Collins. At one, Howard Collee’s introduction of Gov. Fuller Warren went on so long, Frank Grayson of the old NEA weekly network yelled, “shut up and let the man speak for himself!” It worked.

Once, a musical group performing was so poor, half the crowd got up and walked out.

Formerly the program included big-deal door prizes, including boats and motors. The prizes were on display before the dinner in the Terrace lobby. One year, resourceful thieves arrived in coveralls and told the desk guys they were there to get the prizes. They did, loaded them on their truck and left. No one ever saw the prizes again.

Not long ago, I came across an invitation list Winchell once gave me. Here are some of those sports newsmen attending the Dinner:

Oscar Fraley, Arthur Daly, Red Smith, Lou Smith, Tom Siler, Frank Grayson, Tom Swope, Si Burick, Frank Eck, Harry Grayson, Pete Norton, Bobby Hicks, Red Newton, Wilbur Kinley, Leo Peterson, Jack Hand, Gayle Talbot, Joe Reichler, John Carmichel, Leo Ward, Lyall Smith, Roy Stockton, Dan Daniel, Joe Trimble, Ben Epstein, Milt Gross, Frank Graham, Hy Goldberg and Heywood Broun.
Not a bad staff, eh?

In the papers Winchell willed to me was a letter dated Feb. 26, 1946 from Frank Winchell, long gone now, but until his last days a promoter, to C. C. Vega in which he said he planned to start the Baseball Dinner. He did. He got it done.

Oh, it sputtered, stopped and starated, or was jump-started again by Gabe Paul, by Chapman, by Earl Hastead, who published Baseball Bluebook with Bill Bunker for a time, so many who have thought enough of it, and its history to keep it alive at least through last night, the latest mover being Gov. Crist.

Howard Wright and Frank Winchell must also be hailed as founders, as well as the cornerstone, the Tampa Terrace bar, where the originating newsmen started it and continued it with repeated toasts, even an attempted one that did not work.Wright told me long ago of the writer who came into the bar one morning before heading to a baseball spring camp and ordered a shot of whiskey.

But, as he lifted the glass near his lips, he suffered a heart attack and fell over dead.Wright said he was certain if he could have gotten the drink down, he’d have lived.

The man on the next stool toasted the fallen writer and drank the shot himself. He said he knew the downed scribe well enough to know he would not have wanted it wasted.