Bob Casey

You have to admire a guy who does something for as many years as Bob Casey did something, and to its credit (and occasionally to its detriment) the Twins’ organization has always rewarded loyalty. Casey was treated like a local treasure, and his career was allowed to run its course on his own timetable.

The man was the only public address announcer the team ever had, which is truly astonishing considering his by-now legendary and well-documented difficulties pronouncing his way through the dramatis personae (a phrase he would surely have butchered until it sounded like a passable approximation of a Dominican shortstop’s name) of a Major League lineup card. He was also a curmudgeon and a company man through and through.

Loyalty breeds loyalty, I guess, but this last quality was always the most frustrating from a purely personal standpoint. I chatted with Casey behind the batting cage on dozens –perhaps hundreds– of occasions over the years, and he was a master of gruff small talk. He was always happy to talk about his kids and his grandchildren, but grew wary whenever the subject turned to him and his career. It wasn’t about him, he’d say, and that was always the end of that discussion.

The year the Twins inducted Casey into their Hall of Fame, I stalked the poor man for weeks, trying to get him to agree to a profile, but he would have none of it. That remains my one big frustration from the years I’ve spent around the team. I’ve always been attracted to what I think of as baseball’s lifers, the folks like Casey who’ve spent so much of their lives wrapped up in the routines of the ballpark.

A guy surely builds up a pretty impressive trove of stories over more than forty years in any job, but Casey had a truly unique job, and he was clearly a unique character. I also knew from my small talk with him that he’d had another life as well, before he settled in behind the PA microphone for the Twins. Some of those details have come to light in the various obituaries and tributes of the last couple days –Casey’s World War II service, his PA stints with the Lakers and Millers– but I always wanted to know more. I was curious about the guy, and determined to break down his cranky reserve.

Casey, though, wasn’t going to get hooked into telling any tales out of school –those were his words– and he also wasn’t about to leave school until he was forced out kicking and screaming or carried out in a box. He pretty much got his way in the end, and good for him.

All the same, I still wish I’d gotten those stories out of him. And there’s no doubt it won’t ever be quite the same without him duck-walking around the Dome and serving up his regular assortment of head-scratchers and belly laughs.