{"id":1658,"date":"2007-08-15T07:36:16","date_gmt":"2007-08-15T07:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/15\/fiero-francis-rizzuto-rip\/"},"modified":"2007-08-15T07:36:16","modified_gmt":"2007-08-15T07:36:16","slug":"fiero-francis-rizzuto-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/15\/fiero-francis-rizzuto-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiero Francis Rizzuto, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Legendary Yankee shortstop <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yesnetwork.com\/news\/article.jsp?ymd=20070814&#038;content_id=1429480&#038;vkey=2\">Phil &#8220;Scooter&#8221; Rizzuto<\/a> died Tuesday at 89. I&#8217;ve never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto&#8217;s playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood.<\/p>\n<p>(Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people&#8217;s deaths come in threes, who completes the set with Alpher and Rizzuto?)<\/p>\n<p>Rizzuto&#8217;s best days as an announcer were probably also behind him when I used to hear him doing Yankee games&#8211; by the 80&#8217;s, he was mostly just charmingly addled, offering rambling anecdotes that he sometimes lost track of&#8211; but he was an absolute institution. It&#8217;s still weird to flip past a Yankee game and not hear his nasally voice telling complicated stories about Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra.<\/p>\n<p>These days, of course, he&#8217;s probably best known as the &#8220;Holy cow, I think he&#8217;s gonna make it!&#8221; guy from &#8220;Paradise by the Dashboard Light.&#8221; Charles Kuffner <a href=\"http:\/\/www.offthekuff.com\/mt\/archives\/010022.html\">has the story about the recording<\/a>, which is pretty entertaining.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, as the really lengthy obituary linked above makes clear, he was an interesting guy who led a pretty amazing life. He&#8217;ll be missed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Legendary Yankee shortstop Phil &#8220;Scooter&#8221; Rizzuto died Tuesday at 89. I&#8217;ve never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto&#8217;s playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood. (Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people&#8217;s deaths come in threes, who completes the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/15\/fiero-francis-rizzuto-rip\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fiero Francis Rizzuto, RIP<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}