Tim Kirkjian’s head is obviously spinning from the weekend. The longtime baseball writer-turned broadcaster was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame over the weekend and judging by his appearance on the Baseball Tonight Podcast with Buster Olney, this memory isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Olney congratulated Kurkjian and then with little hesitation, the newly enshrined Hall of Famer told his first story from the weekend.
“I’m sitting on the bus from the hotel to the ceremony and this guy comes up to me on the bus and says ‘Can I sit next to you?’ and it was Sandy Koufax. So I sat next to Sandy Koufax and talked to him for fifteen minutes.”
Kurkjian told another great story from the weekend.
“At the party on Friday night, Johnny Bench walks near my table where all my family is and I say ‘Johnny, could you come over and meet my brothers,” Kurkjian began. “He goes, ‘Sure, let’s get some pictures.’ So I assumed that meant we were going to gather around him and have someone take our picture with Johnny Bench and instead, he pulled out his own camera and started taking pictures of my entire family.”
Kurkjian couldn’t believe it. “Here’s Johnny Bench, the photographer, taking pictures of my family. We said ‘Johnny we need a picture with you, you’re the greatest catcher ever’. He gets in with us, he hands the camera to somebody else who takes the picture of us and that person was Paul Molitor, who got more hits than Willie Mays. That was one of those moments where you went ‘how can this be happening to me?'”
Olney also asked how difficult the weekend was for Kurkjian considering how he had worked so hard in his career to never be the story and this weekend, he absolutely was the story.
“That was one of the hardest things I ever had to go thru because this is not supposed to be about me,” he said. “It’s never been about me. This weekend it was. Cooperstown got me thru it. In other words, a bunch of my family and friends had never been to Cooperstown… People went to the museum, they had never been there before. They had never walked down Main Street. They had never been to an induction ceremony… This is like a bucket-list trip for some people… It was way more than let’s go watch Tim talk for sixteen minutes, it was let’s go visit a place that we’ve never been before and it was just breathtaking for them.”
