Sweet Lou Piniella one of a kind

Sweet Lou.

You’ll get this instantly, but let me explain…

After all the hoopla last Sunday, introducing this column and making me sound like a cross between Mark Twain and Vin Scully, I spent the week in a rare state.

Lost for words.

Fortunately, I always have my readers to bail me out. Many of them have written — before and after The Press promoted this column — to ask about some of my favorite people who have popped up through several decades in sports.

So why not start this storytelling binge with one of my all-time pals, and pretty much the coolest guy I’ve ever known in baseball?

Surely you know him well, too...

Sweet Lou Piniella.

Yes, he’s still the Mariners’ all-time leader in wins as a manager, and he steered the club to its only playoff appearances in the 1990s and, of course, the 116-win season of 2001.

BUT I knew Louie from a completely different time in his career, when we were both kids.

In fact, I’d just started a journalism career when the Royals played their first-ever game at old Municipal Stadium in Kansas City — with the smell of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue restaurant wafting through the stands from just a few blocks away.

It made players and fans alike perpetually hungry.

Anyhow...

Did you know that Lou Piniella was the first batter in Royals’ history?

Yep, he led off (playing center field, which became quite a laugh later on) and hammered a double to left.

One batter later, he checked off another box by scoring the Royals’ first-ever run.

It was obvious almost instantly that Louie could hit — he finished the season at .282 and was named American League Rookie of the Year.

By the end of the Royals’ first season, though, it also was obvious that Piniella was one of the all-time characters I’d ever get to know in baseball.

Or anywhere else.

THERE WERE stories about how he’d jumped into a rain barrel after striking out in the minor leagues, and how he once raced out of a stadium in full uniform after hitting into a double play that ended a game.

Supposedly, his teammates got back to the hotel and found Lou in the lobby, standing in front of a full-length mirror in his batting stance — tweaking his elbow, his foot, whatever he thought was making him uncomfortable.

One afternoon in 1972, when Lou was leading the league in hitting at .330 or thereabouts, I walked into the stadium very early — but just in time to see Lou finish up a lone session in the batting cage.

After fouling off the last two or three pitches, he stalked away, then stopped and flung his bat about a hundred feet up onto the screen behind home plate.

He screamed: “This game is too f***cking tough for me!”

I thought: What if he were hitting .250?

YOU JUST couldn’t avoid becoming Louie’s friend.

I know, I know, reporters shouldn’t fraternize with people they have to cover objectively, but with Lou...

Well, I played cards at his house and golf with him on the Royals’ days off (there was a tale that Lou had once scuffed a shot and driven an electric golf cart straight into a pond).

One story I know to be true was that Lou bought a pistol for his wife, Anita — thinking that he wanted her safe when he was on the road.

So naturally, he stayed out late one night after a home game, and sometime in the wee hours, Anita heard some strange noises. She grabbed the gun and began creeping through the house.

Someone seemed to be in the bathroom, so she aimed the pistol and kicked open the door — only to find her husband, stark naked but with a bat in his hands, trying to fiddle with his stance in front of a mirror.

“I’ll never get another (blanking) hit,” Lou barked at Anita.

“NEVER!

“Go ahead and shoot me now!”

BUT AT the same time, Lou didn’t complain, not once, if I had to write something slightly unkind about him in the paper.

One night in 1970, Texas slugger Frank Howard hit a monstrous shot to left field, and Lou just turned to watch it — as outfielders will do when a ball is blasted far, far over the fence.

Except in this case, Howard’s ball didn’t reach the very deep wall at Municipal Stadium.

It landed on the warning track, and a very surprised Lou Piniella had to chase it down, holding Howard to his one and only triple of the season.

Lou saved me the trouble of thinking how to describe his idiotic play, simply by describing it himself.

“Little Louie (his son, who was about 4) could have caught that ball,” Piniella said. “At least it would have hit him on the head, which would have been less embarrassing.”

YOU KNOW, it never occurred to me back then that Lou Piniella might become a manager.

Not once.

He seemed to take the game, um...

Too seriously at times, and too lightly at others.

It turned out I was wrong by 3,574 games, 1,835 wins, a World Series triumph with Cincinnati and the Mariners’ only four playoff appearances — not to mention being named Manager of the Year twice in Seattle.

Lou’s arguments and tantrums are legendary, but let me tell you about one that was sort of special.

In fact, I’ll let Lou tell it...

“I was really scuffling, like a whole month where I’m behind the fastball and ahead of a breaking pitch.

“So I’m up there one night, begging for a bloop hit or something, and (umpire) Red Stevens was calling balls and strikes. He was retiring after that season, and he’d really lost it.

“Anyway, Red calls me out on a pitch that was not only outside, but it hit in the dirt. I turned around, and said, ‘For God’s sake, Red...’

“Before I could get out another word, he looked at me and I swear there were tears in his eyes. He said, ‘Oh damn, Lou, I’m sorry. I’m having a worse year than you are.’

“What could I say to that? I just told him I was sorry, and to hang in there.”

There are a thousand more stories than I have room to share, but that one kind of sums up Lou Piniella.

THAT, OR the time I developed an ear infection on a road trip and couldn’t fly home. I had to take a train, so Lou absolutely insisted that he should lend me a hundred dollars.

He refused to let me say no.

“You never know what could happen,” he said. “You could get stranded in Indiana.”

Me: “I won’t even go through Indiana.”

Lou: “Well, the railroad could get it wrong.”

Finally, I accepted his hundred-dollar bill — which I never used.

Three days later, I walked into the clubhouse and went to hand Lou the bill.

“What’s that?” he said.

He’d completely forgotten that I owed him a dime. It was a chore getting him to take it.

Sheesh!

There aren’t many like Sweet Lou, as Mariners fans know so well.

Hell, there might be none at all.

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Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday. Steve’s various tales from several decades in sports — “Moments, Memories and Madness” — run on Sundays.