STEADY EDDIE: COOL, CALM AND COLLECTED

Eddie Murray was not available to address the media yesterday when he was elected to the Hall of Fame. He was attending the funeral of his sister Tanja, 38, who died last Thursday after a long battle with kidney disease. He did released a statement that read in part, “The elation I feel by being recognized for my achievements on the field is overshadowed by the anguish of losing someone so dear to me.”

There is little doubt that Murray is a deserving Hall of Famer, regardless of his cold relationship with the press throughout the years. That much was proven yesterday. But it is ironic that Murray was unable to bask in the glow of his own success, because of the emotional welfare of his family. Murray always put family and team first, and himself a distant second.

Tom Boswell contributed a column on Murray today in The Washington Post, aptly titled, “A Silence that Speaks Volumes.” Here is what Boswell wrote about Murray in an 1983 article on the Orioles Championship season, “Bred to a Harder Thing Than Triumph” (from the collection, “Why Time Begins On Opening Day”,1984):

Murray regards notoriety as poison and ducks the limelight as religiously as Reggie Jackson courts it. Murray firmly believes what old Lee May told him as a rookie: if you have talent, fame can’t help you, but it’s an even bet to ruin you. To hawk his personality like some public commodity is, he suspects, a perfect way to be robbed of his sense of self. Murray’s weakness is that, like Hank Aaron, he’s a leader only by example; little fire, only efficiency. He lacks the charisma of the last Oriole leader, Frank Robinson. The Birds accept Murray for what he is. Just your run-of-the-mill future Hall of Famer.

David Falkner caught up with Murray in spring training of 1985, and wrote an revealing profile on the slugger in his book, “The Short Season.” (1986):

What is harder to figure out than Murray’s statistical steadiness is why the powerful and almost mystical hold he has on his teammates has not carried over to the general public—and the media Over the years, Murray has shied away from the press, to the point where he may have seen him as intimidating, uncooperative, and downright hostile. He was, in reality, done little to change anyone’s opinion.

Murray does look angry—and intimidating. He is a large, barrel-chested man whose modified Afro, mutton-chop whiskers, and glowering looks lend to the coal blackness of his face an appearance of such menace that it comes as a shock to hear a voice escape from his body that is benignly soft and evenly modulated. This too is misleading. Murray’s outward manner masks a personality that is original, commanding, and complex. In the end, he is exactly what you see on the field. His game happens to be who he is. The surprise is that the public facade he maintains is generated neither by meanness nor deviousness. It is a covering for a largeness of spirit…

Murray had the “team” concept instilled in him from an early age. He was one of 12 brothers and sisters.

“I wouldn’t have traded it for the world,” said Murray. “It was great. Maybe that’s where a lot of the ‘us’ comes into it. You sit there and it was never ‘me’ or ‘I’…I tell you this, it got to the point where you really didn’t need any other friends–oh, I had ’em all right—but it was just all of us together could take care of our own needs. Even baseball. The girls played baseball too, and believe me, we had a few of them who were good.

“None of us ever had to worry about school,” Murray said. “We all did our work and there was no such thing as bring home Cs. When we came home, we had to clean the yard, empty the trash, do the dishes–and then do the homework. All of it. And it had to be done right. If you rushed through it just to get it to school in time to get your grades back, you’d be in double trouble. So it got to be a thing to do it right before we were allowed to go out and play. And that was everything. Because we loved to go out and play with each other.”

Murray also gives large credit to his mother for his distinctive playing style, a style marked by this dual quality of full intensity coupled with thoughtful restraint, which he calls “low-keying.” Even when he was a rookie, taking the field before a full crowd at Memorial Stadium on his very first day, this ability to “low-key” gave him an advantage far beyond his years.

“I just wasn’t that excited,” Murray said recalling the day. “I think it took so long for my mother to train me that way it had become second nature of something. It’s definitely been to my advantage that she finally succeeded, because the payoff has been there in so many ways, like that first day. I went out there and I looked around and I looked up…and there was Memorial Stadium, packed. Sure it was special, but it was like it wasn’t.”

Murray’s older brother Charles signed with the Astros organization, and after his rookie year formed a pickup team of professionals during the off-season—including Dock Ellis, Bobby Tolan and Bob Watson. Murray was the batboy.

“So many of these guys were in the major leagues, and I was rubbing shoulders with them every day,” Murray said, “I just didn’t pay attention to that part of it. It seemed natural. I learned from watching them. All of them seemed to be very cool about playing the game of baseball—and it was like I just patterned myself after them. I figured that there had to be something to it. All of these guys were good, and none of them overreacted to anything out there on the field. I was an eight-, nine-year-old kid, and I had a font-row view of just watching those guys play, and so I grew up wanting to play that way myself.”

[Murray] had a sense of himself as a 9-year-old that many professional players never have. With all his dreams of one day playing in the major leagues, he never saw himself apart from his team. “At the time,” he said, “I didn’t think I was all that great because I figured our whole team was that good. And playing with my younger and older brothers growing up, I just never considered myself that much better than anybody. It was just that that was something I loved and happened to pick out in life that I wanted to do…Of course, I had pride in what I did even when I was eight. I’ve always had it. We lost ballgames, and I knew how to lose—I mean, I knew the world wasn’t going to end. It was tough as kids because as kids we didn’t know very much. But it was a winning something…out there. Sometimes it might have come from breaking up a double play, sometimes it took getting hit by a pitch or pitching that last inning when your arm was hurting. It was something like…you just didn’t want to put things on anyone else’s shoulders.”

“We all loved the Dodgers as kids,” Murray remembered, “even though we couldn’t go to see them much. We really didn’t want to, because we were out there playing…and you know there were days when my parents…just took care of everywhere we wanted to go…I mean they just took care of us. They saw this was something we were interested in, so they really took part in it. We could see that in them. It was never having to take the boys to play, it was always their going to watch a good ballgame…We used to draw a lot of people to see us, to see the three boys—they never knew our names—but they found out we were brothers and they came out to see us. And one of us would wing up pitching while the other one was catching…it was something.”

For the longest time, Murray has been sobered by the thought that he, not any of his brothers, became an established major-league ballplayers. This was, Murray remains convinced, not a question of talent so much as opportunity. He was in the right place at the right time, but his brothers were not. His brother Rich…had, at one time, been touted as Willie McCovey’s successor. But a serious injury aborted his major-league career before it ever really began. And Charles, Eddie said, was probably better than any of them. “There are people today, especially who grew up around the L.A. area, who knew all five of us, who still tell me that Charles definitely was the best. They’ll say, ‘Listen, you know you weren’t the best.’ And I’ll say I know that. The way I look at it, I really got a break.”

Murray’s childhood experiences brought a strong sense of humility to his talent. Tom Boswell continued:

Murray finds it natural to live by the motto on his necklace: “Just Regular.” Three of his older brothers played pro ball; none made the majors. Murray grew up hearing hard-boiled stories about the realities of big-time sport.

“We had a lot of downfalls,” says Eddie’s brother Leon. “Eddie avoided them.”

“Some people just got to get hurt. You can see it. They either run into walls on the field, or they run into ’em off it,” says Murray as his brother listens. “The easy way is the only way. Avoid problems. I might be the weakest of the five brothers, but I didn’t run into the problems they did. You gotta push things away in the game that bother you and upset you and keep you from your goal. It almost happened to me, I think. I got mad the year I wasn’t sent up to triple A when I thought I should. It was hard to swallow, ’cause it’s your pride. But sometimes you got to swallow. Otherwise you’ll get on the club’s bad foot. And that’s the beginning of the end.”

In Kevin Kerrane’s book on scouting, “Dollar Sign on the Muscle”, an Oriole official explained how the team landed Eddie Murray:

“All the scouting reports I’d seen on Murray stereotyped him as a big, lazy power hitter. I think most scouts, when they judge makeup, tend to value kids who remind them of themselves when they were players—and that’s why you run into problems when white scouts look at black prospects. Here was Eddie Murray, younger than most of his classmates, and extremely composed, cool—to the point where scouts called him ‘lackadaisical.’ But when I read his motivational profile, which said his drive was well above professional average and his emotional control was off the charts. And it hit me that the emotional control was masking the drive.”

Murray played for Cal Ripken Sr. in the Orioles minor league system, was mentored by Lee May when he reached the big club, taught himself to become a switch-hitter, and later became a role model for the younger players like Cal Ripken Jr. He told David Falkner:

“What I try to tell the younger players,” Murray said, “is that I’m jumping on you because I’m trying to make you better and by making you better I’m making us better. That’s just the way it is. I know definitely I can’t win a pennant by myself…

“Baseball is something where you can’t go out with a half-step. When you’re out there, you’ve got to have everything together, I think. If you go out there and you’re lackadaisical, there’s a good chance you’ll wind up injuring yourself—and I do try to avoid that…[somewhere Tom Boswell is chuckling] I talk to myself. You have to talk to yourself about knowing what you want to do out there.”

Cal Ripken, Jr. said, “Eddie is what I suppose you’d call a team player. Except that that is a clichZ. Everyone is a team player, or says he is. But then there are players, very few of them, that other players try to emulate. For me, that player has always been Eddie Murray.”

Murray’s single-season numbers are not as spectacular as several players who aren’t in the Hall of Fame, notably Jim Rice, Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly. But he plugged away, steadily, surely, and ended up with the magic milestones of 3,000 hits and 500 homers. The popular perception of Murray is that of an aloof, surly superstar. But on second look, he was one of the more valuable clubhouse superstars of his era. Just don’t expect him to waste too much time boasting about it. Unlike Gary Carter, a media darling of sorts, Murray was content let his actions do all the talking, regardless of what was written about him. That alone makes him exceptional, even in the rarified air of Cooperstown.