Tales From the Newsroom: Horse trading
Or how I swapped a scoreboard for an Aztecs team ballcap
By at least the 1980s, Major League Baseball was making a nice sum of money by selling fans identical copies of the fitted caps the players on their favorite team wore. Roman Pro and Sports Specialties were two of the apparel manufacturers at the time, then New Era gained some contracts and, thanks to clever marketing, getting a “New Era” of your favorite team was the sign of a serious fan.
(Today, of course, many MLB teams have both an “away” and a “home” cap, a green St. Patrick’s Day spring training camp, a camouflaged or olive drab military appreciation cap, and a highly stylized “City Connect” cap — meaning many teams have multiple opportunities to sell fans more than one official team replica hat.)
Even today, many — perhaps most — college and university baseball teams provide a specially designed cap for their players and coaches, one not available for sale to the student or general populations.
When I attended San Diego State in the early to mid-1980s, while you could certainly purchase an SDSU baseball cap from the campus bookstore, it was not the same as the ones the varsity baseball team wore — not even close.
Jim Dietz was the longtime coach of the SDSU baseball team, and there were stories of players claiming to have lost their cap — only to have it appear on a friend’s head, and that if Dietz ever saw a non-member of his team wearing a cap he would personally remove it from your head.
During my, shall we say “extended” sophomore and junior years at State, I was on staff of the student newspaper, and I had noticed that whichever sportswriter had the Aztecs baseball beat would noticeably be wearing an official Aztecs team cap at the end of the season — bestowed, as I learned, as a gift from Dietz himself.
My senior year, as has been written in this space before, I found some unused remote broadcast gear at the student radio station where I hosted a weekly jazz show, and found out we could cover any SDSU team that didn’t have a broadcast contract with a local radio station. Which meant we could cover any team other than football and men’s basketball.
So that fall I covered women’s volleyball home games, and then that winter began covering home baseball games.
When I was younger, I suffered from crippling shyness — which for any of you who know me in person is hard to believe, but I probably had social anxiety. For a budding newspaper reporter and radio broadcaster, it was a most difficult thing to deal with. (Eventually, I realized that if I convinced myself I was play acting — that it wasn’t me calling a professor or musician to interview them, but it was instead, “Jim Trageser, ace reporter” — then I could function a lot better. I’m not sure I don’t still do that subconsciously.)
Anyway, I dealt with this my last year of college by never interviewing Coach Dietz or any of the players before or after a game. For all I know, Dietz never even knew his home games were being broadcast over the radio.
At the same time all this was happening, the SDSU Associated Students — which had historically covered KCR’s modest expenses (a transmission fee paid to KPBS to allow our signal to use their cable connection and antenna, and rental of two classrooms from the university) out of student fees as an investment in student career training — scheduled a vote to cut off our funding. (As I recall, when we weren’t using the recently unearthed remote and portable gear for sports, our news team was covering AS meetings, and not always in a flattering light.)
The KCR team pulled together, managed to get all four local TV stations and three radio news teams to show up for the AS meeting. The experience of trying to shield their eyes from blinding klieg lights while reporters jammed a mic in their face and asked, “Why are you trying to censor student radio on campus?” turned out to be a bit more than the AS representatives had bargained for, and a compromise was quickly reached whereby an ad hoc committee was established to explore options for the future governance of KCR.
And, somehow, I ended up being appointed chair of said committee.
A few months after that happened, the president of the Associated Students, Bill, came up to me after one of our committee meetings and asked if I had a color commentator for the upcoming exhibition game against the Major League Padres. (Each spring, the Padres would play the Aztecs in an exhibition game — the parking fees going to the Aztecs program, while the Padres got a chance to make sure the concessions operations were ready for Opening Day.)
I’d never had a color commentator on my radio broadcasts, which I suspect Bill knew from listening to them.
I told him no, although it probably sounded more like a question.
He then asked what would it take to get him on that broadcast to handle color for me?
I thought of my Daily Aztec colleagues who covered the baseball beat getting an official Aztecs cap at the end of the season, and quickly said, “A team cap.”
Bill smiled and said, “Let me get back to you.”
A week or so before the Padres game, Bill swung by the Daily Aztec offices and handed me a brand new SDSU varsity team baseball cap — red crown with a black brim, and a white “SD” embroidered on the front of the crown.
I just stared at it in disbelief, and then noticed that Bill was wearing one too! And I mean, Jim Dietz did not give these up lightly.
“How ...”
Bill laughed.
“It turns out Coach Dietz has a deal for Pepsi to build him a new leftfield scoreboard, but since Coke has an exclusive sponsorship on campus through the Associated Students and Aztec Shops, he needed a signature of approval from the AS president as well as the Aztec Shops general manager. I told him the price of my signature was two hats.”
I laughed, made arrangements to meet him before the Padres exhibition against our Aztecs, and went back to work on whatever article I was writing.
An hour or so later, the sportswriter who covered the baseball team that year came in, saw me wearing the hat, and just went ballistic. He said it was BS, that I had no right, and threatened to personally remove it from my head and return it to Coach Dietz.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen without fisticuffs, but he was still pretty hot.
I gathered later that he called over to the Athletics Department and found out that, yes, my having the hat was the legitimate result of some serious horse trading.
Coach Dietz got his fancy scoreboard, and it stood there at Smith Field until Padres owner John Moores paid for a complete overhaul of the facility into what is now Tony Gwynn Stadium, a gorgeous ballpark that sits in the same spot. Coach retired in 2002 (to be replaced by Tony Gwynn, our school’s most illustrious baseball alumnus), and passed away just over a year ago. I greatly wish I’d screwed up the courage to interview him that year I did play by play.
Bill, the A.S. president, got to join me in the booth at Jack Murphy Stadium, and we called the SDSU-Padres game together. A decade or so later, he became a sideline reporter for Aztecs football games — a pretty good one, too — and, not surprisingly, became a successful attorney as well.
And I got my cap. But so afraid was I of Coach Dietz that I never did wear that hat on campus again. I did wear it to the SDSU-BYU football game later that year, where the Aztecs beat the Cougars to advance to their only Holiday Bowl appearance — and when we defeated BYU, I slapped that hat so hard on the railing in front of my seat that the little black button on top flew off into the night.
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Shy? You?