Catching up with longtime Channel 4 sportscaster Bob Lobel
Lobel’s 'Why can’t we get players like that’ being used a lot lately
Oh, yes, Bob Lobel knows what you’ve been saying, watching Mookie Betts spark the Dodgers to a World Series championship, watching Tom Brady lead the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to rare relevance, watching scattered other former Boston athletes thrive in new locales.
He’s caught himself saying it too, that casual yet cutting catchphrase from his heyday as perhaps the region’s most popular — and certainly wryest — sportscaster at Ch. 4.
And many of you, he says, have been saying it to him, especially on social media.
Why can’t we get players like that?
“I’ve been hammered with it myself all over the place,” said Lobel during a telephone conversation Thursday. “It’s really been an at all-time peak. To think it was just an offhand, wiseass remark at the time. It didn’t take a whole lot of planning to think that one up.”
Lobel said the line came to him one night on the newscast in the seasons after Red Sox general manager Lou Gorman had acquired relief pitcher Larry Andersen late in the 1990 season from the Astros for Double A third baseman Jeff Bagwell.
If you have a fundamental knowledge of Red Sox lore, you know how that deal worked out. Andersen pitched 22 regular-season innings for a Red Sox team that was swept by the A’s in the American League Championship Series. Bagwell moved to first base, hit 449 home runs, all with the Astros, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2017.
“I remember joking with Lou Gorman later on about that line, and he said, ‘Bob, why do you have to use that?’ I said, ‘Sorry, Lou, it’s just too good not to use.’ ’’
Lobel acknowledged that he thinks the line “is kind of overdone now.”
“If it’s ever going to be overused, it might be now. It’s all over the place,” he said. “But I get it. Mookie and Brady are causing a lot of regrets right now, [Rob Gronkowski] looks good in Tampa, and Jimmy Garoppolo just came in and routed the Patriots.
“But that line came from a stretch when Boston wasn’t winning anything,” added Lobel, citing the championship drought for the four major sports teams from the Celtics’ 1986 NBA title to the 2001 Patriots Super Bowl victory.
“That first Patriots Super Bowl win changed everything,” he said. “Twelve Boston championships in less than 20 years is almost unfathomable.
“That line was just one of those offhand, sarcastic, lowest-form-of-humor type of lines. If that’s my contribution to the world, well, so be it.”
Lobel, who turns 77 on Christmas Eve, has dealt with significant health problems in recent years. In March, he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder caused by inflammation or swelling across both sides of one level or segment of the spinal cord. It left him paralyzed from the waist down.
When we talked Thursday morning, he had just come back from physical therapy. He had another appointment later in the afternoon.
“It’s a challenge,” he said. “I’m trying to work at it, get some stuff back, it’s coming back slowly.
“Health problems change you. Your whole outlook on life changes. It’s not always for the best, but it’s not always for the worst, either.
“You look at things differently, and if you don’t accept them, then you’re in trouble. Because what choice do you have? It’s realistic. You have to adapt. That doesn’t mean you can be accepting all the time, because you’re constantly fighting what-ifs.”
Lobel, to the surprise of no one who knows him, still plays golf regularly.
“I used to be a high-single-digit handicap,” he said. “I shot 113 two weeks ago and it was my season’s best, so I was pretty happy with it.”
Lobel, who was with Ch. 4 from 1979 until his contract was bought out in a staff reduction in 2008, finds other ways to keep busy away from the links. A longtime advocate of medical marijuana, he hosts a podcast on cannabis, titled “Bob Lobel’s New England PotCast.” He has another regular podcast with his good friends, former Ch. 5 anchor Mike Lynch and radio personality Hank Morse.
“If you’re going to get into any business these days, you might as well get into cannabis or gambling,” Lobel said with his familiar deadpan.
He said he feels fortunate to have had the career he had in the era he did.
“I’m really glad we had a chance to do it back then,” Lobel said. “I think today it would have been a real, real challenge to try and stand out and be unique. I think that would have been the tough part about it, no matter how creative you got.
“The biggest gift we had was a national highlight package from the networks that we would get every night with plays from around the country. We could pick and choose, and nobody had seen that stuff yet. Now it’s so easy to get that stuff right after it has happened. Different world. You didn’t have the phone in your hand to get that information.
“So many things have changed in covering sports. The way ESPN deals with everything, what people are writing and reading and how they get their information.
“But as that old line tells you, sarcastic and cheap one-liners are always in.”
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