It’s impossible to imagine the St. Louis Cardinals’ press box without ‘The Commish’

On the day of Mike Shannon’s last radio broadcast, the Cardinals renamed the radio booth at Busch Stadium in his honor. It was a kind gesture that guarantees generations of broadcasters to come, as well as fans in the stands and others watching from home, will remember the impact he had on the franchise well beyond his own life span.

Similarly, upon his receipt of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award in 2007, the Cardinals renamed the writing press box at the stadium, adding Rick Hummel’s name alongside that of Bob Broeg.

Then, Hummel went back to work, and covered the team full time from a press box already named after him for another 15 years.

It is impossible to imagine it without him.

Hummel, our dearly loved “Commish,” passed away early Saturday at the age of 77 following a short illness and more than five decades of service to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His death brings a close to a terrible period of St. Louis baseball history in which some of the most vital voices illuminating the team in print (Hummel), radio (Shannon) and television (Tim McCarver) have all been lost within the last quarter of a year.

So much of the action on a baseball field is characterized by the culture that springs up around it. Even the most cynical critic of ownership would have to concede that the Cardinals and St. Louis have a stronger and more vibrant baseball culture than most, and that is the result of narratives being shaped by giants with booming voices in various media who roped in all observers and made them feel like they were sharing an experience that was far more participatory than it perhaps ever was designed to be.

Hummel, as Post-Dispatch columnist Ben Frederickson wrote, was “a giant who never made others feel small.” More than that, he lifted you up, even as you knew you would never reach his level. It’s not that the path to becoming Commish has been wiped out over the years; it’s that the path never existed in the first place, save for when he cut it himself.

An ardent supporter of high school sports stretching back to his earliest days in Quincy, Illinois, Commish was a regular attendee at the annual Collinsville Holiday Classic basketball tournament. It was such a highlight of his schedule that through the summer and into the early fall, he would frequently hold forth on the strengths and weaknesses of teams throughout the metro-east; it was impossible to keep up, and so it was impossible to disagree with his assessments.

He was also, for a time, a resident of Belleville and Swansea, with his children attending High Mount School. When he asked about where in Belleville someone lived, he would close his eyes and then narrate his mental map through the west end and downtown, and he was never wrong.

Lessons learned from ‘Commish’

Of course, he also had occasion to refresh himself. Even as he moved further west as he approached retirement, he was quick to remind that his accountant and tax preparer was still in downtown Belleville. Given his management of multiple simultaneous NCAA tournament brackets every spring, it’s almost hard to understand why he might’ve needed the help.

The wisdom which underlined every word from him, in both print and voice, was hard earned. The baseball beat is tough on a family, and Commish did not shy away from the lessons learned (about himself) through three marriages. He did not drink at the end of his life; that was most certainly not always the case. One morning in Chicago, seeing a younger reporter who’d gone out with colleagues after a night game before day game, he simply smiled and shook his head. Some lessons given are learned hard.

And yet lessons from Commish were always, always kind. They were never patronizing. They were never expressed with frustration. So long as you were not a malfunctioning laptop — user error may have often been in play here — you never had to suffer the indignity of a raised voice.

He knew his authority and wielded it properly. One day, early in the 2018 season, he appraised a writer who’d worn shorts to the ballpark on an unseasonably warm day of his feelings of that level of casual comfort on the job. It was the last day that writer has — or will — worn shorts to a game during the season.

Asking the tough questions

There are too many interactions with players and coaches to count where it was clear only Commish could’ve gotten away with a line of inquiry. There were many nights when a tough question had to be asked about a botched moment in a game where the assembled masses waited for Commish to ask; his question would be better and the respect he carried guaranteed the answer would be more forthcoming. He made everything about the game better, every night, for more than 50 years.

If there is comfort in his passing it’s that he knew how widely loved and admired he was. He might’ve been bashful about it or quietly downplayed his own impact, but he knew. He thanked so many people who were in the process of thanking him that it was almost impossible to believe he’d be able to go back to work and hit a deadline afterwards.

But he always did, and everyone who loves the game will always be better for it.