The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, August 16th. It is the fifth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Lying on Your Back and Looking at the Sky
I’ve been listening to Pat & Ron a lot these last few weeks. First, because it was Opening Day, surreal as it may have been. Then, because the rapidity of outbreaks around baseball made this season’s fleeting nature demonstrably clear. And now, because it’s a nice way to end the day—pulling up the ballgame as the shadows finally start to lengthen and the Texas sun gives way to the Texas sunset, while the air outside holds the heat the way sand holds water on its way back to the sea.
Pat Hughes may not be the reason I am a Cubs fan, but he was the lever that brought me there. After a decade of childhood in which I pledged myself first and foremost to the Red Sox, a 1999-2009 consequence of Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball in Hardball 5 and the elation contained in saying the name “Nomar Garciaparra” as a young boy, I looked up, realized I’d be going to college in a few years, and further realized the Red Sox had become too good for non-Bostonians to publicly love them on as thin a basis as “Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball in Hardball 5.” (To be fair, Nomar wore the number 5 and I turned five years old in 1999 and I wasn’t too keen on newly designating six as my favorite number the next year the way I had when I’d turned three and four and five.) I’d been raised on Pat & Ron, in a sense—I could hear them on Dad’s workbench in the garage the day Gary Gaetti came in to pitch, and they walked me through the middle innings of the 2003 NLCS while I was in the bath (I was into baths in fourth grade, in case you were curious), and This Old Cub may have been the only movie our family saw in a theatre in 2004. So, it made sense to come home to the Cubs, even if I’d outgrown the Sammy Sosa t-shirt jersey I’d hopped down the first base line in so many times in the backyard back in 1998, and it was especially easy to slide in during years when guys like Travis Wood and Darwin Barney were the most productive men on the roster, statistically.
Ron Santo was the favorite Cub. He was an icon—a treasure—and I wonder, looking back on it, whether he shaped Pat Hughes into what he now is, or if Pat just came out of the seventies at his intersection of humor and grace and caught Ron perfectly through some trick of predestination. Whatever the cause, Ron was the Cubs, and without Pat, he couldn’t have been the Cubs, because that radio broadcast booth would not have been able to functionally communicate a baseball game to listeners if there was not someone with Pat’s tact at the tiller. As someone at the dinner table put it once, back then, “If only everyone was as good at their jobs as Pat Hughes is at his.” Which is why I suppose Pat Hughes was that lever—without him, Ron Santo might’ve still been the favorite, but he wouldn’t have been quite the same, and I might’ve just rolled on with the Red Sox, without rhyme or reason or radio.
It’s a different Ron now, for those uninitiated. We lost Santo ten years ago. For three seasons afterwards, it was Pat & Keith. But the universe would not have that. Pat needed a Ron, and Ron Coomer filled that void.
But while the Ron’s changed, and the experience changed with them (and with Moreland in between), and while I don’t listen now through Dad’s radio—listening instead through a collection of apps and speakers—Pat Hughes is still there. Some years, nearly 200 times.
Pat Hughes—again, for those uninitiated—is a lot like baseball. He’s gentle. He takes his time. He rises to the moment. He fills the moments in between. Day in and day out, year in and year out, he’s the same. Ageless. Constant. His memory is encyclopedic—yesterday, for instance, a clip from 2015 of Kris Bryant’s first career home run reminded him of a Jacob deGrom pitch Anthony Rizzo homered on a week later; and when asked the last time he’d called a seven-inning doubleheader, he responded within moments to say it was in the Pacific Coast League in 1978. His lexicon is vaguely British—he uses “charming,” and “trousers,” and there’s a wine ad right now in which he begins, “I confess. I’m frugal!” He and Ron don’t get as off the rails as he and the old Ron did (rather than dealing with a color commentator saying “They oughta shoot ‘em” about a noisy fan, Pat now deals with Ron giving him two nights of crap for using the word “bespectacled” to describe Eric Sogard), but they have their fun, and some unidentified male voice cackles in the background every time they do.
I didn’t get to listen to much Pat & Ron during college, but in the fall of 2015, that changed. I started living off campus, and as the darkness stretched over South Bend, it brought AM radio waves from the other direction, crackling through the Taurus’s stereo as I drove home at the end of the day. I think I’ll always have the vivid memory of sitting outside a liquor store—the one by Angela and Route 23—that next April, listening to Cub after Cub work a deep count and reach base in the early innings, destroying some poor Cincinnati starting pitcher and filling the Pat & Ron show with glee at the possibilities the year held. I know I’ll always have a vivid memory of that next fall, the one in which I lived back at home, getting too aggravated listening to Joe Buck and turning the radio on for the ninth and, eventually, the tenth inning of Game Seven. When I heard Pat make the final call, and when I saw Kris Bryant throw to first fifteen seconds later, I knew I wasn’t allowed to have it mean as much as it did for a lot of folks—I’d spent almost half my life with the Cubs as only “my National League team”—but thinking of Santo when Ben Zobrist clicked his heels did get me in the throat for a minute. And when I left home, and eventually left the Midwest, Pat & Ron came along through the internet, filling afternoons and late nights in the office, and now filling them in the car, the kitchen, the living room.
This season is a strange one, of course, as could be said with any sense of the word “season” these days, and one of its odd little wrinkles is that radio crews aren’t traveling with teams as they usually do. This, on its own, makes sense—we must protect Pat & Ron, at all costs. What makes less sense on first impression is that the radio crews are still calling road games, and what makes even less sense is that they’re doing it from their home ballparks. Every time the Cubs are on the road, Pat, Ron, Zach Zaidman, and whoever makes up the production crew files into their plexiglassed-off seats and calls a game a few hundred miles away, using nothing but the feed from TV.
One night this week—I think it was Tuesday—the Cubs had built a comfortable lead in Cleveland, and Pat, as he is an expert at doing, was filling time. But this was not a casual riff. There was some urgency to this topic, it seemed. It was important to him to roll out this particular extended anecdote at some point during the two-game set with Cleveland. His chance had come, and he seized it.
The anecdote in question was the broad topic of Lou Boudreau: Illinoisan (Chicagoan, really), world champion player-manager with Cleveland in the 40’s, and voice of the Cubs himself for a few decades—another member in the fraternity that includes not just Hughes and Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse, but even Ronald Reagan. Evidently, he was still around the club a good deal when Pat came along, and in addition to wanting to educate everyone about the hall of famer’s biography (the guy coached basketball at Illinois during the winters early in his professional baseball career), and wanting everyone to hear the story of how a young Ron Coomer ran Lou Boudreau down for an autograph from the hot dog line at Wrigley in the 70’s, Pat wanted everyone to know that when he—Pat Hughes—arrived in Chicago, Boudreau went out of his way to be good to him. I’m paraphrasing, but Pat said something the likes of, “You never forget a thing like that—when someone really makes an effort to be kind.”
I don’t know whether it was the last wisps of sunset here in Austin while Pat said this, or the image in my mind of Pat and Ron and Zach and the gang alone in a dark-but-for-their-TV-screens Wrigley Field, or the desire our DNA compels during hectic times for some solemn piece of strength and comfort, but there it was: the secret to Pat Hughes. It’s been kindness all along.
You see, I’ve come back to that “If only everyone was good at their jobs as Pat Hughes” line a lot of times in life. If I were asked to name who, in the world, is the best at what they do, I would name Pat Hughes. I know hardly anything about him personally—I haven’t the slightest clue how he spends four or five months of the year—and yet he is, in practice, one of my best friends. I would likely pass him by in the produce aisle without a second thought—I know his face, but it’s not one that would stop me in my tracks—and yet I can see and feel and hear his beam on bone-chilling nights in April and burning afternoons in July. He, as much as anything else back in Illinois, or in the Midwest, is home, and every spring he comes back, joyful and easy and—as he has recently confessed—frugal.
When someone is really excellent at something, we start to ask what it is that makes them so good. I’ve heard this phenomenon explained by saying that when we see a person achieving true excellence, we get a glimpse of the divine. For Pat Hughes, I’m sure the answer to unlocking this divinity involves technique and preparation and practice and strategy. But I also know that there’s kindness. And to those of us who listen to him work, that’s the part that comes through the loudest and clearest of it all.
It’s the supporting kindness that translates to this man, who knows baseball as well as anyone, never criticizing a Cub. It’s the generous kindness that, if memory serves me right, led him to smile for my mom’s camera from two sections away at Spring Training as she took a picture of him and Santo in the booth. It’s the humble kindness that leads most laughs during games, these days, to come at Pat’s expense. And of course, for so long, it was the loving kindness of serving as the conversational caddie for the greatest Cub fan there ever was—one who just happened to make the Hall of Fame as a Cub himself.
I won’t try to make some broad claim that kindness is the secret to all of us being as good at our jobs as Pat Hughes is at his. I’m sure that’s false, and again, I’m sure there are hours and hours to Pat Hughes’s perfection that we do not, by design, witness, and I recognize the possibility that kindness only coincidentally intersects with greatness on the airwaves of 670 the Score. But whether it would help an accountant or a cook or a plumber or not, kindness sure seems to help call a baseball game. And you never forget a thing like that.
Next week’s essay: On Notre Dame, the Coronavirus, and Stewardship
