Ron Santo was of that rare ilk that you had to acknowledge his shortcomings in order to recognize his greatness. Most great athletes are self-evident—Jordan, Gretzky. Not Santo, certainly not in his later career as a baseball announcer, which is how most fans knew him when he died Thursday at the age of 70.
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As a baseball analyst on the Cubs’ radio broadcasts, Santo offered little analysis. He lost track of outs, misread pitches, and generally echoed the points made by play-by-play man Pat Hughes. Santo would have more accurately been described as a color man, and the color was always Cubbie blue. He was an unabashed rooter for his longtime team, but because of that he served as an evocative on-air barometer. Tune in the Cubs, and within moments you knew how they were doing by Santo’s demeanor. His cries of “Yes!” and “All right!” were infectious, his moans of disgust and disappointment full of pathos. In this, he served the same role Dick Butkus served in the Bears’ old three-man radio booth. Santo’s “Oh no!” when Brant Brown dropped a fly ball in a key late-September game in Milwaukee in 1998 remains as much a part of Chicago’s sports history as Butkus’s “He’s open!” when William “Refrigerator” Perry slipped out of the backfield for a pass during the Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl campaign. Just as the Bears’ Wayne Larrivee and Hub Arkush covered the “normal” call in their play-by-play, allowing Butkus to provide emotional texture, Hughes carried the water, and more, in the Cubs’ broadcasts. Not only did he provide the play-by-play, verbal pictures, and occasional analysis, he also played the George Burns straight man to set up Santo’s ditsy non sequiturs, making Santo seem funny even when he wasn’t trying to be.
“There was nothing subtle about Ron Santo,” the Cubs’ TV announcer Len Kasper quoted a friend in mourning Santo on the radio on Friday. But Kasper and his friend are wrong. Santo’s skills as a player were so subtle it took decades—and a new sort of statistical analysis that came to be known as Sabermetrics—to decipher them. Although power, defense, and the ability to draw walks have been valued throughout baseball history, Santo’s offensive stats were diminished because he played in an era of great pitchers—Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, and Juan Marichal, to name just a few in the NL—and in stadiums such as the big, dead-air Astrodome and Dodger Stadium, as well as the Mets’ Shea Stadium, with its notoriously poor lighting. His 342 lifetime homers were especially impressive given the era.
Santo will no doubt be chosen for the Hall of Fame at the next opportunity, now that the Veterans Committee— which has been restrictive rather than inclusive since Bill Mazeroski was elected—can’t take pleasure in the schadenfreude of his pitiful moaning on not being inducted, but somehow that will make Santo even more of a Cub, a loser who insisted he deserved better and probably did, but who was a great player regardless. His death leaves everyone—the lovers and the haters—to recognize that for the fact it is.
