Dodd: Twenty-five years later, those who were there remember Hal McRae's famous rant

KANSAS CITY — In one version of the story, it was a tape recorder. In another, a sharp piece of office supplies. For years, nobody could say for sure. They watched the famous video tape, and they listened to the F-bombs. They replayed it slowly, frame by frame, like a managerial Zapruder film. The sports writers still weren’t sure, even Alan Eskew, the baseball beat man who took the foreign object to the face.

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This much, we know: The flying object left a bloody, 1 1/2-inch gash on Eskew’s right cheek. It required a trip to the trainer’s room and a tetanus shot. It is, a quarter-century later, the most famous media injury in the history of the Royals, the bloody symbol of a wild managerial tirade. And 25 years later, Eskew is almost certain: It was probably an ashtray.

“Which they don’t have anymore,” he said. “I guess I should have ducked.”

He didn’t duck, of course, because he never saw it coming. Nobody did. Not the scribes. Not the effin’ players. Not the radio host who lit the fuse on a powder keg.

On the night of April 26, 1993, Eskew and a group of reporters shuffled into the office of Royals manager Hal McRae. It was just minutes after a 5-3 loss to the Detroit Tigers. The Royals were in the midst of another sluggish April, stumbling to a 7-12 start.

What happened next is franchise lore, a beautiful maelstrom of flying telephones and tape recorders, of bleeps and bloodied reporters, of awkward silence and an opened vodka bottle.

The meltdown came to underscore the managerial career of McRae, the former designated hitter known for his takedown slides, toughness and take-no-shit persona. It would live on in the world of YouTube and social media. Yet 25 years later, the men inside the room say this is only half the story.

“Hal was one of my favorite players,” Eskew said.

“He managed just like he played,” former Royals pitcher Mark Gubicza said.

“He was great to cover,” said Rick Plumlee, a former beat writer for the Wichita Eagle.

On that night 25 years ago, the reporters laid their tape recorders down and crowded around the manager’s desk. They had a deadline to meet and a loss to document. And moments later, a radio host named John Doolittle spoke up with a simple question:

“Did you consider Brett for Miller with the bases loaded in the seventh?”

If you’re a Royals fan of a certain age, you’ve probably read a story written by Alan Eskew. Even if you don’t know it. He arrived on the Royals beat in the summer of 1979, five years after he started as a cub reporter at the Topeka Capital-Journal. He covered the team for close to two decades, riding the tiger in the golden days of newspapers, when every local paper sent a beat writer on the road.

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He flew on the team charter. He cranked out copy and met deadlines. He was so diligent about each little germane detail that he eventually earned a simple nickname: “Scoop.”

It might have come from Clint Hurdle, or maybe it was manager Dick Howser. He can’t say for sure. But “Scoop” it was. He loved the life, loved everything about it, the travel, the deadlines, the playoff runs, the fulfillment of a childhood dream while growing up in Dallas.

“I wanted to be a sports writer since I was in the eighth grade,” he said.

These days, “Scoop” still covers most Royals home games for The Associated Press. It’s not glamorous work, of course. He chases injury updates. He scours for little nuggets that go out over the wire. Not many fans are waiting for his tweets or consuming his coverage in real time. It’s old-school ball writing. He loves it.

In the world of sports writing, Eskew is a familiar character — grizzled, kind, diligent, a part of the Royals in the same way as an old, weathered bat bag. Most people in the organization can’t remember when he wasn’t around; when he wasn’t asking about an injury in a soft, stilted twang. Look hard enough, though, and just about every beat has a Scoop.

“He’s a classic,” said Gubicza, who pitched for the Royals from 1984 to 1996.

And in the early days, Eskew found himself dropped into the midst of a fascinating story. The Royals were a perennial American League power, lording over the AL West in the late 1970s and early 80s. In his first summer, George Brett had just turned 26; second baseman Frank White was 28. The club made the World Series the next season, dethroning the Yankees in a tense American League Championship Series. Brett battled hemorrhoids during the World Series. There was always something to write about.

In the clubhouse, the writers navigated an established roster. It wasn’t easy for a young reporter. But there was one veteran who always offered insight, who loved to talk hitting, who delivered frank and honest assessments. His name was Hal McRae, designated hitter.

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“He taught me more about hitting than anybody,” Eskew said.

McRae was 33 years old that first summer. He had played in two of this three All-Star Games. He had wiped out Willie Randoph in the 1977 ALCS, a brutal body-block that stopped a double play and, in time, necessitated a prohibition on takeout slides. They called it “the Hal McRae rule.”

He was blue-collar to his core, a proud, self-made man who demanded the same level of intensity from anyone in his orbit. When he was hired to manage the Royals midway through the 1991 sesason, he brought the same ethos to the clubhouse.

“Hal didn’t take shit from anybody,” said Jeff Montgomery, the former Royals closer.

By the night of April 26, 1993, Scoop was in his 15th season covering the Royals. McRae was slogging through another turbulent opening month. The year before, the club started 1-16, a historically bad stretch that torpedoed the season. In 1993, they had started 2-9 before winning five of seven. And then came a Monday night game against the Tigers, the Royals trailing 5-1, the team loading the bases for designated hitter Keith Miller with two outs in the seventh.

“Did you consider Brett for Miller with the bases loaded in the seventh?”

Twenty-five years later, the videotape is grainy and edited and less than a minute and a half long. It only exists because a reporter from a local television station in Lawrence just happened to be holding the only camera in the room. All the Kansas City stations had gone home.

It is still the best record of what happened. It has more than a million views on YouTube. The story goes that six months after the tirade, legendary golfer Tom Watson was visiting KCTV-5, a local CBS affiliate, and had one request:

“Show me the tape,” he said. “Show me the raw.”

The copies of the raw are now sprinkled all over town, VHS tapes sitting on dusty shelves at radio and television stations. Todd Leabo, a vice president at the radio station 810 WHB, needed two minutes to locate the tape in his office last week. “Here it is,” he said, pulling it off a shelf. Moments later, he popped it into a Zenith VCR in an editing studio. The sound began just after Doolittle finished asking two questions:

The first concerned whether McRae should have asked his son, Brian, the Royals’ center fielder, to bunt earlier in the game. The second was simple: Did McRae consider pinch-hitting George Brett, who was sitting that night, for designated hitter Keith Miller, a utility man in his seventh season?

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“No, no,” McRae said, sitting at his desk. “Don’t ask me all these stupid-ass fucking questions. No.”

On the tape, there is a slight pause, and then McRae stands up, dressed in a blue turtleneck and sliding shorts, throwing his hands into the air. Moments later, the objects start flying.

“I’m tired of all these stupid-ass questions every fucking night,” he said, his voice rising. “Why in the fuck would I hit Brett for fucking Miller?

“Miller started the fucking game. He’s playing against left-handed fucking pitchers. Brett is not playing against left-handed pitchers. Why in the fuck would I bat for Miller? Do you think I’m a goddamn fool?”

At this point, McRae slaps a full drink off his desk before grabbing a black rotary phone and spin-throwing it across the room. A second later, his right hand disappears from view, obscured by another reporter. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that this is where he grabs a mysterious object and wings it across the room, to where Eskew was standing.

Smack. 

“Scoop!” McRae said, raising his hands again. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

Eskew barely remembers what came next. The reporters slunk into the hallway, sheepishly looking around. Dean Vogelaar, the club’s director of PR and the one man in a tie, fiddled with a toothpick and looked at the ground. The blood started to drip down Eskew’s cheek. For a moment, he passed by the camera a second time, like the victim in a horror movie.

“It stung,” Eskew said. “But I didn’t know I was hit until it was like, ‘Oh, I’m bleeding.’ ”

Jeffrey Flanagan, then a beat writer for The Kansas City Star, put it like this: “It was like a car wreck. It takes a while to process what happened.”

McRae was not done. His office trashed, the press corps scattered, he grabbed a handle of vodka in his hand and returned back to the hallway, looking out toward his players in the clubhouse.

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“I’m sick and tired — I’m fed up with every fucking thing!” he shouted. “No shit from you guys, no shit from you players.

“And they can do any motherfucking thing they wanna do. I’m sick and tired of all this bullshit! Now,” he said, turning back toward his office door, “put that in your fucking pipe and smoke it.”

In the moments after the tirade, after the videotape ends, Eskew returned to the clubhouse, his face still bloody. He wanted to interview Gubicza, the losing pitcher. He still had a story to write.

All around the room, reporters scrambled about. Flanagan found a phone and begged his editors to give the meltdown big play in the next morning’s newspaper. McRae retreated to his office to talk to Lee May, his good friend and one of the team’s coaches. Eskew kept interviewing players until somebody convinced him to go back to the trainer’s room.

“I missed deadline by 20 minutes,” he said.

In 1993, the news cycle moved at a slower pace than today. There were no cell phones, no social media. Players read about their teams in the morning paper. Back in the clubhouse kitchen, some players hardly knew the scene had taken place.

“Things didn’t go viral then like they do now,” Montgomery said. “It wasn’t like we saw it immediately. But we knew something was going on.”

That night, the news of the incident began to spread, first in the clubhouse, then cascading around the city. By the morning, news directors at every television station in the city were on the hunt for video. There was talk that one camera had been in the room, an unexpected one from Sunflower Cable in Lawrence.

“It got to a point where when we called them that next morning to get it, they didn’t realize what they had,” said Al Wallace, a long-time reporter at WDAF-TV, the local Fox affiliate. “So they just gave it out to everybody. They didn’t even put their logo on it. Then by the middle of the afternoon, they were like, ‘Shit.’”

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The footage would go national, finding its way to ESPN. The same morning, Eskew’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. A radio station wanted to interview him. So did a writer from The Associated Press. People wondered if he might press charges. Eskew just wanted to lay low before hopping on the team charter later that day. He said nothing, save for a column for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He stayed away from the ballpark. He had already talked to McRae.

The night before, after filing his story, Eskew took an elevator down to the Royals’ clubhouse. McRae was still sitting with May. He welcomed him back to the office and Eskew sat down. “What the hell happened?” May said.

McRae offered a short apology, and Scoop accepted, delivering just one request: Crab cakes during the next trip to Baltimore.

Twenty-five years later, Hal McRae is a 72-year-old with failed kidneys and grandkids that he loves to spoil. He lives in Bradenton, Fla., with his wife Jo. He suffers through dialysis three times per week.

He doesn’t have a lot of thoughts about his famous moment. It was all so long ago. Yet for a few minutes earlier this week, he thought back on that night in 1993 and let out his trademark cackle.

“They were stupid questions,” McRae said, laughing.

He regrets that it happened, of course. But if people developed any perception of him based on one tirade, if it colored his reputation, he didn’t much care.

“I just never gave it a lot of concern to listen to what other people said,” he said.

Even 25 years later, he doesn’t see much humor in the incident. He remembers the questions clearly, though. There was one about bunting his son, Brian. Why would he sac-bunt when the Tigers would have just walked No. 3 hitter Wally Joyner? There was the one about Miller and Brett. “Keith was a good ballplayer,” he said. In truth, though, the tirade had nothing to do with one night, or one question.

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“It was just a build-up,” he said. “It wasn’t one night or one question. It was an accumulation of frustration.”

Something strange happened after the meltdown, though. The video spread around the country. He apologized. The Royals stopped holding postgame press conferences in the manager’s office. The sound from that night has lived on for 25 years. But as McRae sat in his office that night, he felt a weight off his shoulders.

“I actually felt better,” he said.

In the months after the tirade, the Royals found a spark, finishing 84-78. If not for the strike in 1994, the club might have made the playoffs for the first time in nine years. McRae might have managed in Kansas City for another two to three seasons.

Instead, the changing economics of the game spurred a rebuild in Kansas City. McRae was a casualty of the moment, departing before the 1995 season. When he thinks back on that era, he uses two words: “Unfinished business.”

A quarter-century later, McRae is at home, the Royals are rebuilding again, and Miller is an agent whose clients sometimes see the video and ask questions.

“I get teased about it all the time,” Miller said. “People would say: ‘Gee, you really caused a lot of problems when you were over there.’”

But for every time it appears on television, for every radio drop or YouTube view, the writers that were there still have one regret: It didn’t capture what it was like to cover McRae.

“The image he had around the rest of the country then was he was this maniac,” said Flanagan, who now covers the team for MLB.com. “And he wasn’t. He was just a cool, cool manager. He was funny. His cackle was the best cackle I’ve ever heard. He’d rather laugh than do anything.”

In those years, McRae would take Flanagan for afternoons at the dog track. He never bothered with the odds. He just picked the numbers he liked. It was a different era, of course, but the writers came to appreciate his style. If you asked a question, you got an answer. (Well, usually).

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“There was no BS,” said Plumlee, another former writer.

McRae would receive just one more chance to manage, a hopeless situation in Tampa Bay in 2001 and 2002. But one day in 2001, he returned to Kauffman Stadium for a road series. In the hours before the first game, McRae sat at his office desk for a pregame media session. One reporter appeared in the back, wearing a catcher’s mask. It was Scoop.

“Alan was one of the good guys,” McRae said, laughing again. “If I was going to hit someone, I wouldn’t hit him.”

One morning in March, Alan Eskew stood inside the Royals’ clubhouse at spring training.  A notebook clutched in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he gazed toward one side of the room. He was searching for Burch Smith, a Rule 5 pick. He had questions.

In his 40th season of covering baseball in Kansas City, Eskew’s hair is a little grayer, his waistline a little wider. Some of the players could be his grandkids. He is still here, though, a staple on a professional baseball beat, stalking the premises with a tape recorder and an inquisitive mind, known to everyone by the same nickname.

“Scoop!” yelled former Royals outfielder Amos Otis, entering the back doorway of the clubhouse. Otis, 70 and a Royals Hall of Famer, was decked out in full uniform, palling around camp with former teammate Freddie Patek. They sauntered past

“You remember this guy?” Otis asked Patek, pointing his thumb at Eskew.

“Oh, yeah,” the former shortstop said.

“OK,” Otis said. “I didn’t know if you’d recognize him without that blood running down his face.”

Everybody laughed. Otis and Patek kept walking through the clubhouse.

Eskew spotted his interview subject and went back to work.

(Top photo of McRae: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)