Customer Service Place an Ad Become a Carrier Contact Us About Us Mobile Edition E-Mail Updates Report Cancellation Submit Milestone
| Subscribe Now Customer Service Place an Ad Become a Carrier Contact Us About Us Mobile Edition E-Mail Updates Report Cancellation Submit Milestone
|
 |
 |
|
Weather  Calendar Obituaries Classifieds Jobs Autos Homes Rentals Coupons Ad Center Gift Finder |
Bloomington-Normal, Illinois
|
Home News Sports
Free Time Life Money Nation/World Opinion Blogs/Columns Archives Site Map |
| SportsThursday, October 25, 2007 10:15 PM CDT |
 Comments (1) |  E-mail this page |  Print this page |  Enlarge type |  Reduce type |  Search archives |  RSS feeds |  Add to My Yahoo! |
Kindred: A baseball life, from trash can to Hall of Fame
Cliff Kachline’s father whet his son’s appetite with tales of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. As a 12-year-old, Kachline went a couple of blocks from his Quakerstown, Pa., home for a Sunday exhibition game featuring the Philadelphia Athletics. | Video Despite heavy rain the night before, the field was playable. However, A’s manager Connie Mack — perhaps you’ve heard of him — believed the game would be washed out and gave his players Sunday off. “We never got to see whether Jimmie Foxx could hit it over the cowshed in left field,” Kachline said. Not to worry. Kachline would catch up with Foxx … at the Baseball Hall of Fame. More on that later. First, Kachline’s love for baseball would have to find an outlet. He was on his high school team, but said, “I never got into a game.” So, Kachline hung numbers on the scoreboard at the local field … “15 cents a game,” he said proudly, and served as public address announcer on occasion. Yet, his calling — his path into the game — would turn up one day in the garbage. Specifically, in his neighbor’s garbage, where Kachline stumbled upon a copy of the Sporting News, the first he had ever seen. “Wow, eight pages, all baseball!” Kachline recalls thinking. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. In this case, a lifelong treasure for Kachline, now 86 and living with his daughter, Joyce Thomas, in Lexington. Kachline’s discovery led to 25 years on the editorial staff at the Sporting News, then nearly 14 as historian at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. It took him to 150 World Series games, and while Kachline has been retired since 1982, he’ll be glued to the television tonight when Colorado meets Boston in Game 1 of this year’s World Series. He has no attachment to the teams, though he called Colorado’s 21-1 run to the World Series “unbelievable.” All that matters is the game to a guy who says, “I had a great time, spending all of my life involved with baseball.” Kachline was a high school junior when he ran across the Sporting News, and in that first copy saw an ad promoting the approaching debut of the Baseball Register, a listing of year-by-year statistics for active professional players. The ad contained information on Frank McCormick, the 1939 National League MVP. Kachline noticed three errors, and wrote a letter to Sporting News publisher J.G. Taylor Spink. “He writes back, ‘Would you want to check these proofs (of the Baseball Register)?’ ” Kachline said. “I responded, and the next thing you know I get a package that would choke a horse, and he wants it back in a couple of days.” Kachline found numerous mistakes, mailed back the proofs and was paid $20, big money for a teenager in 1939. Kachline proofed the pages again the next year, and in 1943, at age 21, received a wire at his post as sports editor of The North Penn Reporter from Spink, summoning him to St. Louis for a job at the Sporting News. “We get in his office and he says, ‘The editor says you’re too young. You ignore him. I’m the boss here,’ ” Kachline said. He spent a quarter-century at the Sporting News, coordinating much of the Triple-A minor-league coverage and becoming a St. Louis Cardinals’ fan. In 1969, following a brief stint in public relations for a fledgling professional soccer league, Kachline was hired as historian at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Among the exhibits he found was one of the 1929-31 Philadelphia A’s, featuring artifacts from Jimmie Foxx. Kachline called the facility “very antiquated,” and was involved in its expansion and modernization. Among his many duties was writing the text for inductees’ Hall of Fame plaques. He dined annually with past and newly inducted Hall of Famers, and edited the World Series program from 1974-77, leading to a 1974 encounter with A’s owner Charlie Finley. “I said, ‘Charlie, what did you think of the World Series program?’ ” Kachline said. “He said, ‘It’s horse-blank, and if you had anything to do with it, you’re horse-blank, too.’ And away he goes. But that was Charlie Finley.” Kachline insists his memory is not what it once was. Yet, he can tell you he helped discover Philadelphia A’s left-hander Rube Waddell had 349 strikeouts in 1904, one more than the presumed American League record of 348 by Bob Feller in 1946. “That still grates a little bit with Bob Feller,” Kachline said. He also can tell you Chet Laabs hit two home runs for the St. Louis Browns in a pennant-clinching win in 1944, that Cobb had a .366 lifetime batting average, and that the 1945 World Series champion Detroit Tigers had a manager and one coach, unlike the army of coaches today. Kachline was among 16 founding members of the Society for American Baseball Research, and remains active in an organization which now numbers 7,000-plus. He lives and breathes the game as much as he did when he purchased a lifetime subscription to the Sporting News for $25 in 1941, two years before he began working there. It still comes once a week, and don’t bother looking in the trash. He saves every copy. Randy Kindred is a Pantagraph columnist. To leave him a voice mail, call 820-3402. By e-mail: rkin-dred@pantagraph.com. The Randy Kindred Blog is at www.pantagraph.com/blogs Get area high school sports scores and statistics at Varsity Sports. E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
Top of Page | Home | News | Sports | Free Time | Life | Money | Nation/World | Opinion | Blogs/Columns | Archives | Site Map | RSS
Customer Service | 301 W. Washington St., PO Box 2907, Bloomington, IL 61701-2907 | Ph. 309-829-9000 | 800-747-7323
Copyright © 2009, Pantagraph Publishing Co. and Lee Enterprises. All rights reserved. | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
|
Note: All views and opinions expressed in reader comments are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and not those of the Pantagraph or its staff.
Dan wrote on Oct 25, 2007 3:53 PM:
Please read the rules before posting comments.
You must be logged in to leave comments.
If you don't have a member ID, please register.