First of three parts
Good Morning!
Generations of baseball fans remember the moment the game took them by the scruff. Steve McKelvey was nine years old and at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia, watching Curt Flood shag fly balls and catch them behind his back during Cardinals batting practice
“The irony is I got to know Curt Flood pretty well,” McKelvey said from his Greenfield home. “Fast-forward 20 years and I was working for Major League Baseball covering the Equitable Old Timer’s series. Curt played in a lot of those games and I got to be pretty friendly with him.”
His father, G. Richard (Dick) McKelvey, was an Episcopal minister in Germantown, Pennsylvania. A large, soft-spoken man, he was asked after a softball game if he’d ever thought about teaching. The off-handed question became a calling, and the family moved to Main Street, Old Deerfield, into a brown shingle house overlooking the North Meadows.
McKelvey climbed the Deerfield Academy hierarchy to be chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department, coach the varsity baseball and basketball teams, and be a dean of students.
An avid baseball fan, he wrote several baseball books and his notes and correspondence are kept in the archives at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
After he died his extensive autographed baseball collection was auctioned by Heritage of Dallas for $275,000. “We kept two special baseballs,” said McKelvey, pulling them gently from their cardboard boxes.
The first was signed by Babe Ruth and Home Run Baker— “The only baseball known to have been autographed by both and subsequently signed by Roger Maris, Hank Aaron, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Aaron Judge.
“The other was signed by every player who’d hit 50 home runs in a season while my dad was alive. He liked themes.”
Like father, like son
Being the dutiful first son in a family of four boys and a girl — Kathy was a 1,000-point scorer for Vi Goodnow at Frontier — Steve caught and captained Deerfield’s baseball team and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class in 1977.
He majored in American Studies at Amherst College, graduating cum laude and achieved similar high honors at Seton Hall Law School.
He could get into finance, be a patent attorney or have his smiling face on an interstate billboard promising million dollar judgments, but stayed true to himself.
“I was a baseball guy through and through and wanted to be a sportswriter,” he said. “I wound up at the Westfield Evening News writing for Jim Degnim in a two-person department. A month later he left and I was the last man standing. Westfield’s a great sports town. I loved it.”
His sportswriting fix quenched, he began looking for a baseball job and reached out to his contacts. “Dan Duquette, Tom Shea and Harry Dalton all pointed me to Pat McKernan, president of the Eastern League,” said McKelvey who was referring to the future Red Sox GM, Springfield Newspapers columnist and Baltimore Orioles executive from West Springfield.
“I got a job doing PR for the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple A farm team. They’d had a run but the run was over when I got there. They were the worst team in the league. Every day the wind blew dust all over the place and I was wearing contacts. I got tired of it in a hurry.”
Welcome to the Big Apple
McKelvey returned to his roots and enrolled in the UMass sport management masters program, then applied for a job with Major League Baseball. Seeing his academic pedigree he was hired to work in the 48-story Time & Life Building on the Avenue of the Americas. “Kissinger had an office there,” he said.
Despite the prestigious location he’d never be stashing his pressed white shirts in an office drawer like Don Draper of Mad Men. “I lived in every borough but Staten Island. Most of the time I lived in Jersey City.”
He served under three commissioners, Peter Ueberroth, Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent. “It was a time when they had a lot of needs and they dropped me into a national corporate sponsorship program. The Dodgers and Yankees were afraid we were going to cannibalize their deals.
Arby’s was one of the first national sponsors when CEO Frank Belatti came up with the “Arby’s RBI Award” and signed all-time RBI leader Hank Aaron (2,297) to launch the campaign.
McKelvey was Aaron’s chaperone touring the country watching Jose Canseco, Dave Parker, Don Mattingly and Jim Rice bash pitchers’ offerings until Toronto’s Joe Carter and Philadelphia’s Mike Schmidt finally prevailed with 121 and 119 RBIs, respectively.
Arby’s donated $1,000 for every one of them to Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
“Aaron was incredibly humble,” said McKelvey. “It took a while to get to know him. Nice guy. Very defensive for valid reasons — at an airport waiting for luggage he sensed people, ‘Aren’t you somebody?’ they’d ask. “He was pleasant but you could tell he was agitated.”
McKelvey’s job included preparing the stage for various sponsored award presentations. “I was in the Angels clubhouse when Donnie Moore came in and whipped his glove across the locker room,” he said, referring to the Angels closer whose ninth inning home run pitch to Dave Henderson led to the Angels’ demise in the 1986 ALCS.
He presumed wrong again two weeks later when he was setting up a World Series trophy presentation in the visitors clubhouse at Shea Stadium before the Mets scored three runs with two out and nobody on base in the bottom of the 10th inning to beat the Red Sox, 6-5.
Two years later he was 15 rows up at Dodgers Stadium when Kirk Gibson limped to home plate to pinch hit with two outs in the ninth inning and hit a slider from Cy Young runner-up Dennis Eckersley into the bleachers to beat the Athletics. “I don’t believe what I just saw!” bellowed CBS Radio’s Jack Buck.
“Neither did I,” said McKelvey.
“Seeing the game from a business side can sap your fandom,” he said. “I was rooting for good stories, a winning streak or losing streak.”
Ueberroth’s term ended in 1989 and he was succeeded by Giamatti, the National League president who’d attended South Hadley High School and been president at Yale University.
“Giamatti smoked like a hound,” said McKelvey. “I was at the press conference where he made his decision to ban [Pete] Rose for life. That was kind of surreal.”
Eight days later Giamatti was dead of a heart attack and deputy commissioner Fay Vincent became the third baseball commissioner in less than a year. He was, said McKelvey, “The last commissioner to represent the sport, not the owners.”
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for decades in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached at chipjet715@gmail.com.