Jerry Remy delivers in his new book
Jerry Remy’s stories all should be familiar by now.
After all, he’s been associated with the Red Sox since 1978, when the Somerset native came home, having been acquired from the California Angels to be the second baseman for his favorite boyhood team.
He has been a color analyst on Red Sox television broadcasts since 1988, one who is incisive, sharp-witted, and beloved by many, though his tenure has not come without sadness and tragedy.
One might think Remy, never one to shy from candor, would have spilled all of his best stories during some of the slower innings and longer ballgames in his 32 seasons in the broadcast booth.
But that’s the pleasant revelation from his new book, “If These Walls Could Talk: Scenes From the Boston Red Sox Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box,’’ co-authored with Nick Cafardo, the longtime Globe baseball writer who died suddenly in February just as they had wrapped up the book.
Remy doesn’t just have plenty of good stories to tell. He finally tells his own in full.
A few thoughts and takeaways on a recommended read for any Red Sox fan:
■ The book is essentially an autobiography, but it is not structured that way, and there are bittersweet paragraphs — especially in the specific chapters about the Red Sox’ four World Series titles this century — when Cafardo’s longtime readers will recognize his writing voice. It’s nice and sad at once to read his words again. Often, the book reads like a casual conversation between Remy and Cafardo that we are lucky to be privy to. When Remy, who is no back-in-my-day grump when it comes to the modern game, says he has no problems with the concept of defensive shifts — something Cafardo loathed — you’ll wish you could have eavesdropped on their entire conversation on the subject.
It is organized as if the authors had one fundamental question in mind: What would a fan ask Remy if he or she had the chance? There are single chapters on his unusual route to pro ball and the majors (when he made $16,500 as a rookie in 1975), the ill-fated ’78 Red Sox, his favorite players, his broadcast partners, how he ended up in broadcasting (“I never thought I’d be good at it and never had any desire to do it’’), the appeal of Fenway, among other baseball topics.
■ Perhaps it’s because these are topics he has rarely elaborated upon during his broadcasting career, but some of the most interesting anecdotes are about his time rising through the Angels’ farm system after being certain he’d be released after his first season in pro ball. “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here,’’ he says he thought after arriving at his first minor league spring training. Given his circuitous route to pro ball, the details of which I won’t spoil here, it’s a wonder he ever got a shot in the first place.
I’d read an entire book about his recollections playing with the Angels from 1975-78, especially the ’75 team that had Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana at the front of the rotation but managed just 55 home runs as a team all season.
■ The other especially revealing chapter is about Remy’s one season as a coach with the Double A New Britain Red Sox in 1986. Ellis Burks comes off very well, which is great to read, because every Red Sox fan should properly appreciate Burks. But John Marzano, a former first-round pick whose sporadic effort required an amusing lesson involving a stopwatch? Not so much.
Remy acknowledges that he was in over his head in his early days as a broadcaster, and was fortunate to have elegant play-by-play voice Ned Martin as a mentor. “I didn’t think it would be that difficult, and then all of a sudden we’re live and I’m like, ‘Holy [expletive], I don’t know what I’m doing,’ ’’ recalls Remy. But he never second-guesses his decision to give up coaching after a year to become a broadcaster. “If I’d gone on to coach or manage, I’d have been fired nine times by now,’’ he says.
■ Remy and Cafardo saved the darker topics for the final chapters. Remy discusses at length his battles with depression (which began with a panic attack in 1997, he says) and lung cancer (“There’s no question in my mind the cancer is due to smoking. No doubt about that whatsoever.’’). He also writes bluntly about the horror of 2013, when his son Jared murdered his fiancée Jennifer Martel, the mother of their young daughter. Remy discussed this aspect of the book with colleague Dan Shaughnessy in a July column.
■ There are some scattered redundancies within “If These Walls Could Talk,’’ some overlap with topics in a book Remy wrote with Corey Sandler in 2008. There are similar passages within this book on the Fred Lynn/Jim Rice relationship, and Pedro Martinez not being quite the same after his spectacular performance in the 1999 All-Star Game.
But those are small things overshadowed by the unfamiliar and candid stories Remy shares. I didn’t know, for instance, that Remy understood why Grady Little left Martinez in during the eighth inning of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, an ill-fated decision easy to second-guess in the moment.
“From a baseball standpoint, I wasn’t that against leaving him in,’’ says Remy. “The only problem I had was I think Pedro thought he was coming out. Once Pedro or a pitcher thinks that he’s coming out of the game, there’s a whole different mind-set after that.’’
It’s the kind of honest insight we’ve come to expect from Remy as a broadcaster for more than three decades.
He delivers in the book just as he does on the air.
