The Wit and Wisdom of John Kruk

John Kruk says dieting is like getting a fancy present and then "eating the box." When a friend told him light beer had less fat listed on its label, Kruk said, "I didn't know beer had a label." Of the time he was too drunk to find is girl friend's house, he says, "I got so lost, I ended up every where." He says that after he stopped drinking, "I was still an asshole. I am getting dumber every year. I just don't think I've reached stupidity yet."

John Kruk says a lot of funny things, but he is not a funny man. He rarely smiles or laughs. He always looks physically distressed, constipated–even more so after he says something funny. When asked to discuss his bout with testicular cancer, he said, "Who wants to talk about their nuts in public?" People laughed. Kruk looked pained. The first time he appeared on Late Show With David Letterman he had the audience convulsed with laughter. It confused him. "Letterman asked me questions," Kruk says. "I just answered them."

The world is full of people who are inadvertently humorous, but few are funnier than Kruk. What really sets him apart, though, is that he is smart enough–or lucky enough–to have turned it into a successful career, first as a panelist on Fox's Best Damn Sports Show Period and now in his current job as an analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight.

Kruk, 45, played major-league baseball from 1986 to 1995 and finished his career with a .300 batting average. After he left baseball he drank beer and played golf for a few years. Finally he decided he missed baseball, so he became a minor-league hitting instructor in 2001. He quit soon after because he didn't like filling out paperwork–"It took the fun out of the game"–and because his young players wouldn't listen to him. "I guess they didn't want advice from a career .300 hitter," he says. A producer saw Kruk on Letterman and brought him to Fox, where he stayed until 2003. On March 29, 2004 he joined Baseball Tonight alongside the show's host, Karl Ravech, and two other analysts, Harold Reynolds, a former major leaguer, and Peter Gammons, a sports-writer. "The Krukker is the star of the show," Ravech says. "Wherever I go, people ask me what he's really like. I tell them he's wild, outgoing and crazy in life, just as he is on TV."

Kruk was raised in a New Jersey suburb of New York City, where he grew up a Yankees fan. He rarely saw his father, who had to work 12 to 16 hours a day to support Kruk and his three brothers. When Kruk was 11, the family moved to Keyser, West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains. Kruk hated it at first because "it was too slow."

"Keyser was hillbilly country," he says. (In the major leagues Kruk's nickname was Hillbilly.) "People did the same things they did 20 years before: worked in the bottle factory; raised cows, chickens, whatever they needed for themselves. I grew to love it." His house was "in the middle of nowhere," but his family had a lot of acres, so his father built athletic fields. After school Kruk's friends would meet at his house to play sports. When Kruk joined organized teams, his parents would drive him and his brothers to all their different games. "Like a shuttle," he says. "I learned by my father's example. He wasn't the kind of guy to analyze things with us." Keyser influenced Kruk as well. "In New Jersey I learned to get excited about a game," he says. "In West Virginia I learned to calm down after a game was over."

Shortly after his 20th birthday, in 1981, Kruk was a good enough hitter to be drafted by the San Diego Padres organization. "Heck," he says, "I didn't think they even knew how to get to where I was." At the time, he was a lean left-handed line-drive hitter with exceptionally quick wrists. By the time he reached the Padres, in 1986, he had become a portly line-drive hitter. "I never lifted weights, but I always worked hard," he says. He was always the first one in the batting cage and the last to leave it. "But all they said was I was fat. I didn't conform to their standards of what an athlete should look like." One manager said, "Kruk's in good shape for the shape he's in." When a woman told him he was too fat to be an athlete, Kruk said, "I ain't an athlete, lady. I'm a baseball player." Kruk thinks you should be judged by what you do. What he could do was flat-out hit. He hit over .300 in three of his first four years in the majors, without anything as grandiose as a hitting philosophy; his analysis went no further than "They throw a good fastball, you're not going to hit it" and "Hitters live off pitchers' mistakes."

Kruk's Padres teammate Goose Gossage once said, "He has natural instincts that can't be taught, and he keeps it real simple. See ball, hit ball." Kruk also had one other attribute: He played the game hard because for him it was always fun.

When he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1989, Kruk felt he had gone to a "place where they sent everybody to die." He didn't mind that Phillies fans booed their team mercilessly–"I like that. It makes it easier to concentrate"–but he hated his new teammates' selfishness and complacency about losing. Finally Kruk said to himself, "The hell with it. I'll just have fun." And he did. Over the next three years he batted around or over .300, and the Phillies transformed from unsightly caterpillars into glorious (if imperfect) butterflies. Kruk was an All-Star in 1991, 1992 and 1993, and the Phillies went from being a last-place club in 1992 to the sixth game of the 1993 World Series. But more than that, the Phillies' image changed; the hapless losers (continued on page 110)John Kruk(continued from page 102) became lovable Bowery Boy urchins. They grew famous for their reckless abandon on the field and off. Players such as Kruk, Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams, Darren Daulton, Dave Hollins and Lenny Dykstra played the game hard and partied hard. "We went out to dinner together," Kruk says. "Six, seven of us. White, black, Latin. We were always a team."

A tough team. They slid into second base with their spikes high, ripped their uniforms and drew blood—their own and their opponents'. Williams called the team a bunch of "gypsies, tramps and thieves." The Phillies fans called them Macho Row. Kruk says, "When we were dead last we were assholes; when we were in first place we were trendsetters. The media created us."

Kruk and his Phillies were suited to Philadelphia fans, who like their heroes scruffy and with a few patches on them. With his disheveled long hair flowing from the back of his cap, his unkempt beard and his dirty, ripped uniform, Kruk filled the bill. He was their hero. For a meal he would wash down four hot dogs with beer. He listened to country music, drove a pickup truck, chewed tobacco and hated the new baseball world of cute, furry mascots. "No mascots on the field," he scowled. "Shoot anything that looks like it escaped from Sesame Street." Some people laughed but not Kruk.

"Phillies fans love overachievers with less talent," he says. "The fans knew I had to try harder to stay in the big leagues. A guy like [Hall of Fame Phillies third baseman] Mike Schmidt might have tried harder than anyone, but he was so gifted, he looked like he wasn't trying and didn't care."

•

I meet Kruk in the lobby of building two on the ESPN campus, a complex of 12 modern brick buildings spread out over 100 acres in Bristol, Connecticut and dominated by 27 huge satellite dishes. "I don't know why they call it a campus," he observes. "I ain't learned anything here yet." The wall behind the receptionist's desk is a collage of photographs of famous athletes. On another wall a bank of television screens beams in baseball games.

Kruk is built like a professional wrestler from the era before bodybuilding and steroids. He stands five-foot-10 and weighs more than 230 pounds.

His head appears to be screwed onto his shoulders without the benefit of a neck. His short brown hair is plastered down as if he had combed it with the flat of his hand, like a boy on his first day of school. He sports a goatee, and his small eyes are always downcast from either wariness or shyness. Today he wears a nondescript brown suit that gives him the appearance of a very large Idaho potato.

At his newsroom cubicle Kruk checks his schedule. Over the three days I talk with him, Kruk always seems to be eating. This time he has nachos and drinks a soda.

Kruk describes his years with the Phillies as being "as good as it gets." After he retired, he missed baseball. "I didn't miss playing," he says. "I missed the clubhouse. We were a family for eight months." Kruk pauses a minute, then says, "Aw, I missed the competition, too. There was never enough winning. I see college teams win the College World Series and it brings tears to my eyes. I'm so competitive, I once screamed at my mother-in-law over a Scrabble game."

Kruk and his Baseball Tonight cohorts sit around a long, curved wooden desk bathed in spotlights, waiting for their cue. Ravech is a trim, handsome man in a designer suit and polished loafers, a quick-witted, caustic type A personality who had a heart attack in 1998. Reynolds, dressed in his black double-breasted pin-striped Johnny Dangerously suit, is an amiable man with a big smile. Gammons, wearing pink suspenders and pink socks, has a puff of blow-dried white hair and a bored expression on his pink bloodhound's face. Kruk looks like–well, like an ex-ballplayer in an ill-fitting suit. He's chewing gum nervously. Kruk says, "Wearing a suit and tie and combing my hair is the most painful part of my life."

The show begins. Ravech introduces topics. Working his gum until his jaw quivers, Kruk says he likes the Yankees' veteran pitchers in a pennant race. Gammons, a Boston native, says he likes the Red Sox. Kruk says that although Johnny Damon, then Boston's lead-off hitter, calls himself an idiot, "he's a dynamic player." Then they watch video clips of games. A producer hands them shot sheets, notes on the clips. Kruk tells me he has difficulty concentrating on the clips and the shot sheets at the same time, and it's gotten him into trouble. Once, he laughed at a player who tripped over second base only to discover from the shot sheet that the man had torn his ACL. Another time he noticed that Marlins pitcher Jim Mecir was limping, and Kruk said Mecir was injured and shouldn't be pitching. Kruk later learned the pitcher was born with clubfeet. He felt so bad that he called Mecir to apologize.

"My mouth gets in the way of my brain," Kruk says. "I can never sleep after a show. I'm up thinking, Did I say anything stupid? Any bad words? Usually the answer is yes."

Kruk doesn't edit himself or work things too finely. See ball, hit ball. See video, comment on video. It's his talent and his curse, but it's what his fans love about him. "They think I'm honest," he says.

During a break in the show, Ravech jokes with Kruk. Reynolds comes over and introduces himself to me with a big, guileless smile. Gammons leans back in his chair.

Kruk likes his ESPN colleagues. "There's a jocklike clubhouse atmosphere here," he says. "In TV no one talks about money. That's the beauty of it. Not like baseball. It's sad, but when you talk about baseball, you end up talking about money."

Kruk describes Reynolds as "the nicest man I ever met. But Harold won't get on players because he remembers how hard it was. We argue a lot. I go off on a rant, like with Alex Rodriguez. He defended A-Rod for laying down a sacrifice bunt when A-Rod was going bad. I said it was a selfish play. He's the number-three hitter; he's supposed to drive in runs. If he wants to get out of a slump, he should hit a line drive in the gap."

Although Kruk seems to have the least in common with Gammons, a career journalist, he still admires him "for the way he works the phones to get the inside information. He always helps me get in touch with players." Of Ravech, Kruk says, "He brings out the best in me. If I say the Orioles' pitching isn't good, he'll say, 'You're an idiot,' to get me to think up a strong argument."

After the show, Ravech talks about Kruk. "He had a reputation as a ballplayer's ballplayer, and I thought that would translate on TV." He smiles. "Something always tweaks him. You'll see sweat on his forehead and think he needs CPR. Some player won't run out a ground ball and Krukker will go ballistic. He's old-school. We love it when foam starts coming out of his mouth. He doesn't worry about (continued on page 146)John Kruk(continued from page 110) offending players, but I have to be the devil's advocate, a fan of all 30 teams, and say, 'What do you mean?'"

Ravech has only one criticism of Kruk. 'John has the most tremendous lack of sensitivity for the plight of others of anyone I've ever known. Cold. I say, 'You can't say that, John,' and he'll say, 'That's the way it is.' That's John Kruk. You know exactly where you stand with him. But it's refreshing." Kruk admits he's a curmudgeon—but that's not a word he would use. He says he doesn't take time to know anybody. "I act dumber than hell so people will leave me alone."

The next afternoon Kruk and I go to lunch at a Mexican restaurant. He wears a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, a T-shirt, baggy shorts to his knees, gray sweat socks and sandals. I say, "Nice socks." He gives me the finger.

The owner of the restaurant hovers over us throughout lunch, but Kruk seems oblivious. He's lost in the story he's telling me about the Mexican League, where he played in 1986. "There's a perception in baseball that Latin players are lazy," he says. "But they're 16-, 17-year-old kids in a foreign country where they don't know the language." When he played in the Mexican League, unfamiliar with the country's customs and unable to speak Spanish, Kruk seemed aloof from his teammates too. He rarely ventured from his hotel room. "They must have felt I was lazy," Kruk says. "You have to feel bad when you hear people talking about Latin players being lazy."

The rabid Mexican fans bet on every game. When his team played for the championship, "the other team's owner offered me $20,000 to throw the series," Kruk says. "That was a lot of money to me then, but I said no. Then one night I was in a restaurant, and this guy behind me kept bumping my back with a gun. He said, 'You play tomorrow, you die.' Then a girl called my hotel room and said she wanted to come up. I said I had a game that night. She said, 'You don't need to play.' I said, 'I do.' Then a guy got on and said, 'You play, you die.' During that game they kept me in the clubhouse until it was my turn to hit.

"In another game I was at bat and the umpire called two strikes on pitches nowhere near the plate. I said, 'How much you gettin'?' He said, 'Fuck you, fat boy.' I went nuts. I threw my helmet and hit him with my fist. The next day our owner told me I had been suspended for life. A few years later my wife said she wanted to go to Mexico for a vacation. I said, 'We'd better not.'"

The restaurant owner appears at our table with a tray of rich desserts. Kruk digs into chocolate cake smothered with syrup and ice cream. He is quiet for a minute, then he looks up and says, "You know, those Phillies teams were special." No matter what Kruk is talking about, his conversation invariably circles around to his years with the Phillies, as if he's deliberately picking at the scab to keep the wound fresh.

"I was so pissed when they let me go in 1994," he says. "They said I didn't hit for power. I said, 'How many guys play in this league with cancer and hit .302?'"

In a 1993 game in Los Angeles, Mitch Williams fielded a bunt and threw to Kruk at first base. The ball bounced in the dirt and hit him in the testicles. He thought nothing of it for months until he noticed a lump, which was diagnosed as cancerous. When Kruk learned Williams's errant throw hadn't caused the cancer but only revealed it, he said, "The best thing that ever happened to me was getting hit in the nuts." After his operation, in the spring of 1994, Kruk underwent radiation treatments. "The radiation made me sick to my stomach," he says, "because the cancer had spread there. After each treatment I'd go outside the hospital to a street vendor, get a soft pretzel and walk back to my hotel."

In 1994 Kruk went to extended spring training at the Phillies' camp before joining the team for its home opener. He calls that day "the most unbelievable experience of my life." He went directly from his radiation treatment to the ballpark and got three hits to the thunderous applause of more than 58,000 fans. (Those same fans had earlier booed Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey, who, after having recently undergone a heart-liver transplant, threw out the first pitch.)

"After my first hit, a double," says Kruk, "I was standing on second base, and the fans were going crazy. I didn't know what to do. The other team's shortstop said, 'Hey, stupid, tip your fucking hat.' So I did."

After the season, Kruk expected to be rewarded with a new three-year contract, but the Phillies didn't re-sign him. "I accepted it," he says. "But I didn't talk to anyone in the organization for five years. I was so disappointed, I just wanted to quit baseball." But the next season the Chicago White Sox hounded him to sign, and he said to himself, "The hell with it," and signed. Kruk played for the White Sox for a few months in 1995, hitting over .300, but his heart was no longer in the game. "They made me shave and cut my hair," he said. He confided in teammate Ozzie Guillen that he planned to retire. Guillen formulated one of the greatest exit plans in sports. When Kruk hit a single in his last game, he waited for a pinch runner, then jogged toward the dugout, up the runway and out through the clubhouse to a waiting car while still in his uniform and rode out into the real world. Not until later did he find out his final hit had pushed his career average up to .300. "I didn't know that," he says. "I know nothing about my stats."

For the next few years he hung around Keyser, getting drunk and playing golf, until he got divorced from his first wife, Jamie, a West Virginia girl. "I lost half my money to her in the divorce," he says, "and half of the rest in the stock market crash after 9/11." When he remarried, to a Philly girl named Melissa, he told her, "I gotta make some money." At the time he was coaching the Phillies' minor-league hitters for "no money." Then Fox TV called to ask if he'd audition for a new sports program. "They asked me who I wanted to work with," he says. "I said, 'I don't care, as long as it's not Tom Arnold'—he was brash, loud and obnoxious. Then they called and told me I was working with Tom. I had to remind myself that my family had to eat. Funny thing is, Tom and I became friends."

Best Damn Sports Show Period was hosted by Chris Rose, who was described as the ringleader of an irreverent crew—Arnold, Kruk, John Salley and D'Marco Farr. The show featured outrageous comments, jocklike camaraderie, audacious and often sexist puns and an occasional hot chick in skimpy clothes. "Your brain can work at half speed with us," Rose has said of the show, "and maybe we'll catch up to you at some point." According to Arnold, "it was like needling your buddy." What Kruk liked best about the show was that it allowed him to say anything. "I could call Tom an idiot, and he called me a fat slob," he says.

The show's only female panelist was Lisa Guerrero. Kruk tried to be nice to her, but, he says, "she didn't like me. Maybe I was too gritty. But Lisa was the hardest worker on the show." When asked about Kruk, Guerrero says, "Oh, he's just crazy." Kruk's inability to connect with Guerrero still bothers him.

When flying to L.A. became too much for Kruk and he discovered he could drive from Philly to ESPN's Connecticut headquarters in less than three hours, Kruk jumped to ESPN. But his new job wasn't much like his Fox gig. ESPN didn't tolerate the outrageous tomfoolery that Fox did. Furthermore, ESPN tightly edited what its analysts could say. "On Fox," Kruk says, "I ripped baseballcommissioner Bud Selig. I called him a puppet of the owners." Fox loved such outrageous comments. ESPN didn't.

"We were looking for a fan," says Jay Levy, senior coordinating producer of Baseball Tonight. "He filled the bill on Best Damn, but I think the person he is on Baseball Tonight is who he is. I'm sure on many occasions he has said things we wish he hadn't. John tells it like it is. There's complexity in his simplicity."

Kruk's comments are insightful. It's just that he uses the language of the clubhouse—he'll call players lazy or selfish, jerks or morons—cleaning it up a bit for popular consumption. This causes some people to overlook his insights and dwell instead on his word choice. But Kruk is all about content, not at all about form. During one show his colleagues criticized Phillies slugger Pat Burrell for not bunting a runner to second base in a crucial situation. Kruk disagreed adamantly: "He's an RBI guy; he's supposed to drive in runs. Besides, he probably hasn't bunted in years."

Being on the show has taught Kruk a lot of things about himself, baseball, TV, the media, athletes and fans. Despite his earlier protestations that "image is bullshit," he has learned that he owes his present career to his image. But, he says, "I never went out of my way for my image. I don't say things just to be controversial. I made a career out of being me. I mean, why would they want me?"

•

It's about eight P.M., a few hours before Baseball Tonight will air. Kruk, Ravech and a few other ESPN staffers are sitting around a long, rectangular table in a conference room, watching a bank of TVs broadcasting various baseball games from around the country. Kruk, his tie loosened, looks disheveled as he studies some notes. Ravech, looking slick, rocks back in his chair with his small, polished loafers on the table. On one of the TVs Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox left fielder, jogs after a single hit in front of him, kicks it, then walks after it.

"Geez, Manny! You idiot," says Ravech. "If the Red Sox are supposed to have so many leaders, why can't they do anything with Manny?"

Without looking up from his notes Kruk says, "Cause they don't have any leaders."

A staffer takes orders for dinner. Kruk asks for a cheeseburger with french fries. Ravech says, "Attaboy, Krukker. Grease it up." Ravech orders a chicken salad.

Kruk says, "You know, I made the All-Veterans Stadium team in Philly."

"Yeah, every time the Phillies win," Ravech says, "Krukker goes out to the parking lot and turns on his radio to 'Oh, Happy Day.'"

Kruk says, "You know, we were lousy too, but we were more interesting to watch than these guys."

Kruk doesn't think much of the way today's players play the game or live their life away from it. He disagrees with the reverence for baseball statistics, which try to make the game a mathematical problem to be solved. Baseball today is too cerebral—also not a Kruk word—compared with the simpler days of see ball, hit ball. "I don't agree that you live and die by stats, like Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa thinks," he says. "Nobody plays the game by feel anymore. They try to make players robots and not athletes. They always try to come up with a gimmick that makes it seem as though they invented something new for the game, like middle relievers and closers. If I couldn't hit a starting pitcher, I'd beg them to bring in someone else." He remembers a time with the Padres when an opposing team's best hitter came to town having recently fanned nine times in a series against Houston, mostly missing inside fastballs. So the Padres staff threw him inside fastballs, and he hit three home runs. "He'd fanned against Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott in Houston," Kruk says. "They threw 98-mile-an-hour fastballs. Our guys threw 85. I wasn't that bright, but I thought there was something wrong there. When I was in the minor leagues, my coaches told me the dumber you are, the better you are. Today's players have too much information." In 2003 Pat Burrell was undergoing a terrible yearlong slump. He grabbed Kruk at a game and asked, "What am I doing wrong?" Kruk said, "That's exactly what you're doing wrong—asking everybody. You gotta dumb down."

Kruk goes off on one of his rants now, unable to stop. He says that years ago players were not superstars but workingmen with salaries closer to their fans'. "I was in a golf tournament with Hall of Famers Robin Roberts and Al Kaline, and Roberts told me how he had to get a winter job one year," he says. "Geez, he won 28 games that year."

Kruk thinks no athlete or movie star is worth $15 million a year. A fan once called him an idiot when he said acting wasn't work. "I mean, they do a film for two months for $20 million, then they gotta take time off to cleanse their soul," he says. "If you do something you love, it's not work. Anyone who says, 'I made $20 million, and I earned it,' is full of shit. Guys who say they can't feed their family on $12 million better stop having kids. People need to get over the fact that they think they're more important than what the fuck they are."

Ravech says to me, "Did Krukker ever show you his fans' salute?" Ravech tips back his head and raises an imaginary beer botde to his lips.

"Drunks love me," Kruk says.

Kruk stopped drinking in 1999. No 12-step program, no whining about how hard it was to stop drinking. "I just stopped," he says. "I had no problem stopping."

He started drinking in the minor leagues because bars were the only places still open where players could get something to eat after a night game. When he reached the majors, he began to drink more to blunt his fear of flying. After a while it became habit. "As a player, I just worried where my next beer was coming from," he says. "I drank to get as drunk as I could get." Then he began to have blackouts. Before one such incident, he was driving to see his future wife Melissa in Philly, and he got so lost, he says, "I ended up in four states," none of them Pennsylvania. When he finally reached her he blacked out on the floor. When he woke up he told her, "I'll never have another drink again." And he hasn't.

•

The following afternoon, Kruk and I have lunch at Chili's. I wait for him in a booth while he stands outside in the parking lot and calls his wife to check on his two children, Kyle, who is now four, and Keira, who is one and a half. Before he retired from baseball he never wanted to have children, because "as a player I would have been a horseshit father," he explains. When he got cancer and lost a testicle, he assumed he would never be able to have children. Then one morning Melissa showed him her pregnancy test. "I was shocked she'd gotten pregnant after a year and a half," he says. "That's why I'm so overprotective now. We have sensors in the kids' rooms to monitor them. My kids, to me, are a miracle."

When his son was born, Kruk stood behind the glass partition that separated him from all the newborn babies and insisted that the nurse pull down his son's diaper so he could make sure he had two testicles.

Kruk's cancer and his family have been the most profound influences on his life. "Now if I feel a lump, I see a doctor," he says. "I'm preparing for death by making sure my family is taken care of." He's already started to put money aside for his baby daughter's wedding, even though he says, "I'm never gonna let my daughter date, especially anyone like me."

He adds, "When people come to my house, they want to see all the baseball stuff in the basement. But there's nothing there. You wouldn't know that the person who lives there ever played baseball. I'm keeping the basement empty so I can fill it up with my kids' interests. You know, I once said baseball was as good as it gets. But now my family is as good as it gets."

After Kruk polishes off a steak and fries, he orders another obscene triple-chocolate dessert. I ask him if his wives ever complained about his weight. He says no, except every once in a while Melissa makes cracks. He digs into thechocolate cake, syrup and ice cream.

After lunch Kruk and I drive to a Wal-Mart so Kruk can pick up some country-music CDs. Along the way he tells me about taking his son to the doctor recently. Kruk waited in the lobby while Kyle went into the doctor's office. When the boy emerged, he ran to his father and said, "Daddy, you're my best friend." Kruk tells me, "I almost lost it right there." His eyes tear up. Then he scowls, remembering something. "I wanted to take him back to Keyser one day when he was grown to see where his father grew up and played ball," he says. He shakes his head, disturbed. Then he relates a story that makes him increasingly angry as he tells it.

In December 2004 Kruk was told Keyser was building a new baseball field that would open in March 2005 and that the town wanted to call it John Kruk Field. Would he show up for the first game to dedicate the field? Kruk says, "I was so excited, especially for my kids. I said, 'Absolutely.'" Then he called a friend who had served in Iraq. Kruk told him he wanted to put up a plaque, at his own expense, that would read, "I rededicate this field to the men and women of the National Guard. If it weren't for them, we would not have the freedom to play this game we love." He asked his friend if he could get together an honor guard for opening day. His friend said yes.

"Then nothing for months," Kruk says. "They never called me in March. I heard they opened the field with a temporary banner that read 'Welcome to John Kruk Field,' and then the next day they took the banner down. A reporter called to tell me they were looking for more-deserving candidates. I felt foolish, dumbfounded. I had to call my National Guard friend and tell him he couldn't do it. I just thought it would be so neat to take my son back to the field named after his father."

Kruk browses the CD racks at Wal-Mart on this hot, sunny afternoon. No one notices him. In his shorts, socks and sandals, he looks like a construction worker on his day off. He picks up a CD and shows it to me: David Allan Coe. "He lives in a cave," says Kruk, as if in admiration. Then he shows me a Dolly Parton CD. "She's my favorite," he says. "She sent me a picture of herself in a low-cut dress and wrote on it, John, I hope the mountains of West Virginia are as pretty as these.'" Kruk says he has three things left that he wants to do in life: act in a movie, have his own TV sitcom and record a country album. But one problem with his music dream is that he gets stage fright. When a country band asked him to join in for a song one night at a club, he couldn't do it. "I saw all those people and said, 'Fuck that,' and ran off the stage," he says. A friend told him he should record some "rogue songs" about sitting in bars, drinking and getting in fights, but now that he has a family he's reluctant. "I'd rather sing stuff that matters to kids growing up," he says. "You know, Dr. Phil songs."

Though Kruk is on TV, he isn't on a sitcom, even if some people think he was when he was on Best Damn Sports Show Period. He has, however, acted in a movie. He was in The Fan, starring Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes, who played a baseball player. Kruk says all the younger actors on the set would always watch De Niro work. "He's a great actor, I guess," Kruk says. "Maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't see De Niro do anything different from anyone else." He says it was comical the way Snipes's legs shook when he had to bat in a movie game in front of thousands of extras as fens. "Actors can't play athletes," Kruk says. "Why don't they just get athletes to play athletes in movies? Hell, we can act. We're entertainers. And we won't need any do-overs."

On the way back to Kruk's hotel, I ask what he'd be without baseball. He says, "What would I be? Same thing as the other guys in Keyser. Work in the bottle factory. Get drunk. I wouldn't know any better."

We drive in silence for a while, Kruk thinking. Finally he asks, "How many words is this article gonna be?" I tell him 6,000. He looks across at me. "Six thousand? That don't seem hardly enough to capture the essence of a man." Then for the first time in three days John Kruk smiles.

"My mouth gets in the way of my brain. I can never sleep after a show. I'm up thinking, Did I say anything stupid? Any bad words? Usually the answer is yes."

"John has the most tremendous lack of sensitivity for the plight of others of anyone I've known," says Ravech.

"They said I didn't hit for power. I said, 'How many guys play in this league with cancer and hit .302?'"