Autographs
George Brett delights fans, collectors with tales of infamous pine tar incident, Hall of Fame career
It was an exciting day for baseball fans in Kentucky Nov. 13 as the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory laid out the welcome mat for Baseball Hall of Famer and former Kansas City Royals great George Brett, who was on hand to receive the prestigious Louisville Slugger Living Legend Award.
Brett became the 17th winner of the award, joining a sterling list of previous winners, all whom are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, including Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Mike Schmidt, Derek Jeter, and Rickey Henderson. The annual Living Legend Award ceremony is the kickoff to Louisville Slugger’s biggest weekend of the year, which culminated in an auction of spectacular baseball rarities by Hunt Auctions.
The event is an invitation-only affair, although purchase of a special Louisville Slugger bat made to commemorate the event entitles the purchaser to two tickets. Given Brett’s popularity, it is hardly surprising that the 100 Living Legend commemorative bats signed by Brett sold out quickly.
Attendees were able to view about 50 sports memorabilia items that were up for bid and hundreds of baseball rarities, including the iconic Louisville Slugger used by Brett in the famous “pine tar bat” game on loan from the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Related Content:
Deana Lockman, executive director of the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, saluted Brett’s 21-year major league career with the Royals and praised Brett for exemplifying the criteria of the Living Legend Award: “a person whose career in baseball, and life outside the game, have taken on legendary qualities. … Beyond statistics, recipients of this award have demonstrated an exceptional impact, shaping baseball and American culture as we know it today.”
Hunt Auctions President Dave Hunt elicited a laugh by telling Brett that he was about to see a video of “your old friends rushing out of the dugout” to congratulate him. The video featured a rapid succession of Hall of Famers, many of them previous Living Legend Award recipients, offering best wishes and congratulations.
Pitcher Randy Johnson explained that when the Seattle Mariners discussed how to pitch Brett, they had to pitch him away, because when they pitched him inside he hit .490.
Paul Molitor, a member of the 3,000 hit club, recalled standing next to Brett after he’d doubled late in the season and the scoreboard posted Brett’s batting average as .407. Close friend Robin Yount, whom Brett named one of his kids after, said he always admired Brett for the intensity with which he played.
Wade Boggs, who copped five American League batting titles, kidded Brett, asking, “How many batting titles did you win? Only three?”
Reggie Jackson added: “I love you like a brother … I’m proud to know you.”
Similarly, Mike Schmidt, who faced Brett in the 1980 World Series, said: “You’ll always be one of my best friends.”
And Goose Gossage, who surrendered Brett’s biggest home runs, drew the biggest laughs, saying, “I put you in the Hall of Fame. That was Moi.” Goose said he actually “flinched” at the sound of the home run Brett hit off him into the upper deck at Yankee Stadium to beat the Yankees in the 1980 ALCS and finally get the Royals to the World Series.
Gossage added: “I don’t like you. Lesley [Brett’s wife], I don’t know what you see in him. … But I love you, man.”
Kent Taylor, the sports anchor of local WLKY TV, said that Frank Thomas, winner of the 2017 Living Legend Award, told him, “I’m hearing that you’re doing the event with George Brett … wear a cup!”
Taylor summed up Brett’s career by pointing out the significance of his 3,154 hits, 317 home runs, and .305 batting average. Brett is one of only five players in baseball history with 3,000-plus hits, more than 300 home runs and a batting average over .300 for his career, along with Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, and Miguel Cabrera.
THE HITS KEEP COMING
When Brett finally took the stage, he was surprised by the beautiful ring that represents the Living Legend Award.
“I didn’t know I was getting a ring,” he said. “My wife said, ‘Aren’t you going to wear your 1985 World Series ring?’ I wore it, but now I’m taking it off.”
Wearing off-white slacks and a sports coat (no tie), Brett was recognizable to anyone who watched him play or collects his baseball cards. With a head full of hair and that same chiseled jaw line, he looked fit and still capable of playing a good third base.
He immediately launched into a facetious harangue that illustrated his sense of humor and personality, provoking laughter from the crowd.
“All that talking you just heard … they’re talking as if I’m dead. I’m not dead!” Brett said. “… I hated all those guys in that video. I hated them because they were on the other team. It was crazy to hear those things that they said.”
Brett had no prepared speech but had plenty to say and many pleasant memories. Asked about his initial signing with Louisville Slugger, he recalled, “July 6, 1971. I just saw the contract. It was for $100 or a set of golf clubs. … I took the hundred bucks. I wasn’t making much money playing in Billings, Montana, and back then that was pretty good money, a hundred dollars.”
Brett recognized John A. “Jack” Hillerich, the grandson of Louisville Slugger founder Bud Hillerich, and joked about the contract and said he eventually got a set of golf clubs made by Louisville Slugger. He reminded Hillerich of the many times that “Jack” had invited him to visit the family fish camp near Binghamton, N.Y. and to events such as the Kentucky Derby. Those invitations, he said, developed into “a special friendship.”
“Twenty-one years in one town,” he said, “and I used his bat the whole time. I had faith in his bat, and he had faith in me. Louisville Slugger and the Kansas City Royals … if either of them asked anything of me, I’d do it at the drop of a hat. I haven’t played baseball since 1993, and his company is honoring me? Crazy.”
Taylor brought up Brett’s 3,154 hits, prompting Brett to say, “You know what that means? It means I made over 7,000 [f---ing] outs! You gotta be doing something right if they let you fail 7,000 times.”
PINE TAR TALE
While downplaying the significance of his achievements, Brett focused on the most infamous moment of his storied career.
“It was the top of the ninth inning and we were losing 4-3,” Brett recalled. “I hit the home run [a two-run shot] and that made it 5-4. Then I see that little munchkin manager [Yankee skipper Billy Martin talking to the umpire]. I never liked him, and he didn’t like me. There was a rule about pine tar not being more than 18 inches, and mine was about an inch before the label. I didn’t know about the rule at the time. I’d been using the same bat, but they were ‘OK, now we’re gonna protest.’
“Tim McClellan points at me and calls me out. … I calmly walked out … . ‘Is there are problem? What did I do?’”
This obviously droll reconstruction of the moment was hilarious and brought a roar of laughter. But the funniest part of Brett’s account was still to come. After relating the aftermath, which resulted in a denial of his protest, the reinstitution of the home run and a replay of the game from the point of the protest, Brett said, “People ask me if that was the worst thing that happened in my career. No, it wasn’t. Three years before when I almost hit .400, I had hemorrhoids so bad I couldn’t move. Everybody knew about it, so for the rest of my career I’d be in the on-deck circle and fans would say stuff like, ‘Hey, hemorrhoid guy … .’ Or ‘Hey, Brett, how are your hemorrhoids doing?’
“Now, after that game, I’m the pine tar guy: ‘Don’t put too much pine tar on your bat.’ It was the greatest thing to ever happen to me! … Now I have to remind them, ‘Hey, I’m the hemorrhoid guy, remember?’”
After the laughter died down, Brett disclosed some interesting information about the famous bat displayed in the room in its own case. Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry had recently joined the Royals and Brett related how conscious Perry was of the value of baseball memorabilia, especially historically significant items such as the pine tar bat. Perry insisted that Brett never use the bat again but store it away and save it for posterity and/or a potentially highly profitable sale.
Brett went on to explain that he did indeed sell the bat, for $25,000 to super collector Barry Halper, but almost immediately regretted it. He called Halper and told him he’d changed his mind. He returned Halper’s money and gave him instead the bat he’d used to hit three home runs off Catfish Hunter.
The Baseball Hall of Fame has custody of the pine tar bat, but according to Brett, “The bat belongs to me. It’s destined to be in Cooperstown because that’s where it belongs, not in some collector’s house.”
PRIDE OF KC
Brett touched on various aspects of his life and career, almost invariably with humor. When asked about his birthplace, he said, “The records say I was born in West Virginia but I have no idea. All my brothers were born in Brooklyn, and I grew up in California, not West Virginia. I’m not saying West Virginia is a bad place; I’d just rather be on the beaches of California.”
He said he was always compared to his older brothers by his dad and coaches and how such comparisons kept pushing him to “work harder, harder, harder to prove myself.” He had no plans to go to college nor did he have a scholarship, but lo and behold, he was “the 29th player taken in the draft, go figure.”
He pretended to gloat over the fact that Schmidt was the 30th player taken (“Now we are really good friends,” he parenthetically added), and pointed out that the Red Sox passed over him for someone else.
“How stupid were they!” he exclaimed. “They took Jim Rice,” he deadpanned.
“The same with the Angels … Stupid! They took Frank Tanana, who turned out to be the best left-handed pitcher in the game until he hurt his arm and even after that he was a good pitcher,” he said. “Bunch of idiots! For them to pass over a 155-pound left-handed hitting shortstop. Unbelievable. I played 20 years for Kansas City and I still live there.”
Amazingly, Brett said he never hit .300 in the minor leagues, advanced rapidly through the Royals’ farm system because it wasn’t loaded with talent, and was almost shocked when he got called up to the big leagues from Omaha. He was told he wouldn’t play that day—“Just get there”—but found himself in the starting lineup when he arrived at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
“I’d never been so scared in my life,” he admitted.
He remembered lining out in his first at-bat but then singling in his second. In retrospect, it was a great day but nothing compared to what players today get for their debut.
“Now they fly the whole family in and give them a suite. Not back then,” he said.
Not surprisingly, Brett discussed bats and revealed that when a new shipment came in, he would cherry-pick the lot, putting aside the ones that felt balanced and exhibited tight grains in the barrel. He said he didn’t break many bats, maybe one or two per month, because he stood in the back of the batter’s box and had more time to pull in his hands and get the fat part of the bat into the strike zone.
Brett got off to a slow start in the big leagues, but fortunately the Royals had a batting coach named Charley Lau.
“Charley had a lot of faith in me, and I put my career in his hands,” he said. “Charley told ’em, ‘He’ll be fine; let me work with him.’”
In his second year with the team, Brett was hitting .200 at the All-Star break. He and Lau set a goal of getting George’s average up to .250. When that happened, Brett said to Lau, “We made it!” Lau said, “We made what?”
Lau had bigger expectations for his star pupil, and Brett obviously met and surpassed them, despite Lau being inexplicably fired before Brett fulfilled his promise.
When Taylor asked which pitchers he loved and hated to face, Brett offered insight into the mind of one of baseball’s best hitters. Brett said in the beginning he used to listen to the radio on the way to the ball park and worry about who the starting pitcher would be. But after he gained confidence, he changed his thinking altogether. Even if he was facing tough left-handers like Ron Guidry or a flame thrower like Goose Gossage, he began to tell himself, “This guy does not want to face me. He wants no part of me.” He would take a deep breath, relax, and focus on just hitting the ball hard, and it worked like a charm.
“It’s easier to hit when you’re relaxed,” he said.
Brett mentioned Nolan Ryan as a great pitcher and even played a recorded message from Ryan on his phone. (Ryan, in his unmistakable country twang, thanked Brett for being part of a documentary on the great pitcher’s life).
He reminisced about his brother Ken—“the best athlete to come out of the state of California”— and reminded locals that Ken had played for the Louisville Colonels as a Red Sox minor leaguer. He boasted that Ken remains the youngest player to pitch in a World Series.
He also told several Bo Jackson stories, about how far Bo would hit balls in batting practice and the Spider Man-like, wall-climbing catch he made in Baltimore. Jackson, Brett said, could have been a Hall of Fame baseball player, but he got bored in the winter and wanted to play professional football. Brett revealed that he was there, on the sidelines, when Jackson suffered the hip injury that ended his sports career.
As the conversation wound down, Brett returned to the beginning, telling us that he thought he’d probably work for one of his older brothers in the construction business as a house framer. Clearly, life and baseball had bigger plans for him. He concluded his remarks by once again referring to his lengthy association with the only major league team he played for.
He expressed pride in having been employed by the Kansas City Royals since 1971, a tenure surpassed by only one person, radio announcer Denny Mathews.
“I’m second only to him,” Brett said.
After sharing an unforgettable evening with him, the folks at Louisville Slugger and the fans in attendance regard Mr. Royal as second to none.
LOUISVILLE SLUGGER LIVING LEGEND AWARD WINNERS
2007 Ken Griffey, Jr.
2008 Frank Robinson
2009 Hank Aaron
2010 Ernie Banks
2011 Johnny Bench
2012 Tony Gywnn
2013 Cal Ripken, Jr.
2014 Ozzie Smith
2015 Andre Dawson
2016 Dave Winfield
2017 Frank Thomas
2018 No award
2019 Mike Schmidt
2020 No award
2021 Derek Jeter
2022 Jim Thome
2023 Rickey Henderson
2024 Ryne Sandberg
2025 George Brett
