74 CARDINALS MAGAZINE @CardsMagazine
with sports came along, a news magazine,
the Olympics. And so it never really made
sense logistically for me to be one of the
Cardinals’ announcers.
If you had asked me when I was 15 what
was my fondest wish, it would have been to
be the radio announcer for a major league
team, preferably one like the Cardinals
that had a rich history. But you can’t do
everything, and things turned out so well at
NBC that the best I could do was try to be
an ambassador for St. Louis. I think people
could tell, when the Cardinals were on the
Game of the Week, that I had more of a feel
for the Cardinals than I did for other teams.
And if you asked me what the happiest
time of my baseball life was, it was probably
during the ’80s when the Game of the Week
was a staple on NBC and Whitey Herzog’s
Cardinals were such an exciting team. It
wasn’t just that they were good. The way
they played was so distinctive, so much fun
to watch. If you appreciated the game and
its nuances, they were a rewarding team to
watch.
You had a chance to be around some pretty
good Cardinals managers over the years.
COSTAS: I really owe a debt to
St. Louis. I’ll probably mention this in my
Hall of Fame speech, but Whitey Herzog was
so great to me. I could walk into his office
anytime. I could sit in the dugout, I could
hang around the batting cage, be in the
clubhouse. It didn’t make any difference if
I was doing the NBC game that week. I was
living in St. Louis, and I probably went to
30 to 35 Cardinals games a year that I wasn’t
doing, just to hang around the ballpark.
After Herzog came Joe Torre. He was the
same way, and that friendship continued
well into his years with the Yankees. When
Tony La Russa, whom I had known since
he managed the White Sox, became the
manager of the Cardinals, I had that same
kind of access. I learned a lot of baseball
just by osmosis, by absorbing it from being
around those guys. That St. Louis feeling
for baseball, really – it wasn’t just a fun
experience, it was a learning experience.
Here’s a hypothetical question. Suppose
somebody buys a major league team and
recognizes the relationship the Cardinals
have with their fan base and calls you in as
a consultant and says, “Bob, how can we
bottle this to bring it to the team that I’ve just
bought?”
COSTAS: I’d tell him, “You can’t
do it.” I’d tell him, “You want, as far as
possible, to emulate the kind of relationship
with the community that the Cardinals
have. But you can’t create history.” The
Cardinals go so far back, the Cardinals of
the 1920s who beat the Yankees in the 1926
World Series, the Gas House Gang, Musial’s
Cardinals, the Gibson/Lou Brock Cardinals
of the ’60s that went to three World Series,
the Herzog Cardinals, the Ozzie Smith
Cardinals. You just can’t recreate that.
There was a time when radio was
everything, and KMOX boomed out ona clear night to more than 40 states, and
St. Louis was the southernmost and the
westernmost of all the 16 teams. You can
appreciate and possibly emulate in your
own way some of what makes the Cardinals
special, but what really makes them special is
their history. You can’t turn the clock back
and recreate that history. “You just bought a
big-league team. You’re on your own.”You have a national platform across several
sports. How does baseball fit into the national
sports landscape today?
COSTAS: I still think baseball is
enormously popular. People make a
mistake when they compare everything else
to football. Football has a unique set of
circumstances. They play one game a week.
It televises extremely well. When you get
into the postseason, it’s a time of year when
people watch TV; it’s wintertime aroundCostas raised his broadcasting profile after joining NBC, where he signed on to call NFL
and college basketball games but quickly expanded his range to everything from baseball
to the NBA (above, waiting to interview the Bulls after their 1996 title) to the Olympics.NATIONAL VOICE, ADOPTED SON