Think before you speak, even in baseball, and even when something seems, well, unthinkable. Think before you speak, especially when you speak to hundreds of thousands of people for a living.
Jim Rooker can tell you a fun story about that.
It's a lesson he learned on June 8, 1989 — the day the former Pirates broadcaster made a seemingly innocent (and safe) statement after the Buccos scored 10 runs in the top of the first against the Phillies in Philadelphia.
"If we lose this game, I'll walk back to Pittsburgh," Rooker told partner John Sanders — and everyone listening on the radio.
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Well, despite Rooker's 13 years as a big league pitcher, plus another nine years as a broadcaster to that point, he apparently forgot that baseball has a weird, sick sense of humor. Especially when a team has lost six straight.
Pirates players remembered, though.
"I looked at the umpires and I said, 'Yeah, we finally got a lead,'" the Pirates' Bobby Bonilla recalled later that season. "They said, 'You finally got a lead in one game.' And I said, 'Yeah, but, you know, it's not over yet.'"
Enter baseball's twisted sense of humor.
After the Pirates dropped 10 in the top of the first, the Phillies outscored them 15-1 the rest of the game. If you want more evidence of baseball's sense of humor, the normally light-hitting Steve Jeltz, who didn't even start the game and had two career homers at that point, belted two dingers that night — which ended up accounting for half his homers on the season.
Jeltz's first homer, a two-run shot, made it a 10-6 game. After Jeltz barreled that homer, the game itself seemed to be barreling toward an inevitable conclusion.
"I could've told you then that there was a good chance we were going to lose that game," then-Pirates manager Jim Leyland said later. "When you're a manager, your gut usually tells you that something's not right. It's a freaky thing. You can usually feel it."
Well, Leyland's gut was on point. From there, Jeltz hit his second homer, there were more hits, there was a run-scoring wild pitch and yada, yada, yada, the Phillies took the lead and eventually won 15-11. It was the Pirates' seventh straight loss.
Rather than brushing off his pledge to walk back to Pittsburgh as merely a throwaway line played for laughs, Rooker, 46 at the time, stayed true to his word, even making some public good out of it by turning the trek into a walk for charity.
The event was dubbed "Rook's Unintentional Walk," with a sporting goods company donating hiking gear and four corporate sponsors underwriting the trip. Rooker and a friend took their first steps from Philadelphia on Oct. 5 and walked through the center field gate at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh at 12:52 p.m. on Oct. 17 — a walk of 327 miles. The pair averaged more than 24 miles a day, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
"I'm OK from the ankles up, but from the ankles down I feel like I've been stabbed with ice picks," he told Sporting News after the walk.
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There was good news, though: Rooker's many steps ultimately raised around $100,000 for charity by some estimates, with money going to Children's Hospitals of Pittsburgh and Bob Prince Charities. Still, it was an ordeal.
"It's something I would never do again," he told SN later, "but the response of the people was absolutely tremendous."
Here's a vintage MLB feature detailing the whole, silly affair.
Years later, Rooker explained the thinking behind his "I'll walk back to Pittsburgh proclamation."
"In all the years I've been in baseball, I've never been on a team that's been ahead by 10 runs and lost, or been behind by 10 runs and come back and win a game," he told "Monday Night Sports Talk," a Connecticut cable show, in 2013. "I didn't say it thinking that it was going to be a challenge of any kind. I just thought it was a normal thing to say."
Not that he'd ever forget those nearly two weeks of walking, but he apparently took home a permanent souvenir.
"I still have a left ankle that bothers me today because of that," he told "Sports Talk."
That lesson again: Always think before you speak.
