I am crossing a line or two here, I realize that. And I do not do obituaries or character profiles as a rule. Plus, I’m stretching as far as Joseph Anthony Pepitone would to keep his foot on first base to tie this all into news industry related column All that said, Joe Pepitone was a poster boy for sports transcending life and vice versa and therefore he was in my mind a news magnet.
Just as worthy of line space as anyone named Don Lemon, George Santos, and certainly Tucker Carlson.
Sportswriters both loved and hated him because his work on the field kept them going in any of a thousand directions. News writers felt the same way because off the field he was what dreams, nightmares and headlines were made of.
For the cities of New York and Chicago primarily, it was not even necessary to be a baseball fan to appreciate the aura around Pepitone.
He had his own glitz, a silk-suited sheen and style even my old man could not help but admire.
Joe Pepitone had the daily papers writing about him even before they knew who and what he would be to them. Beaten in gang fights, shot inside his high school all while the baseball scouts were picking up the trail.
What he was to become on both the back and front pages of the New York Daily News and the NY Post was not even considered. Even the New York Times would regularly find his life on and off the field interesting enough to print.
I was a Mets fan as a kid but reading Tom Seaver’s The Perfect Game or Tug McGraw’s Screwball was nowhere near as life altering as feasting my 12-year-old eyes on Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.
That book, oh that book. How many times have I reread it over the years just to finally understand something I had not back in 1976?
(I pinched my older sister’s copy after of course she had read it.)
My mother thought I was just reading another in a series of baseball books, what did she know? To me, it was Nabokov, Mailer, and Miller for baseball fans.
Pepitone was a continuous news story. His social activity and personal life became public domain as the years unfolded.
Everything that would find itself on the front pages of the New York papers became intertwined with Pepi’s name at some point.
Booze, Drugs, Wise Guys, and girls down to financial and mental health issues. Wives 1, 2 & 3.
He did not really seem to run from the attention, by all accounts, he would talk pretty openly about personal things long before it became chic to do so.
That didn’t make him a hero and as when his on-field performance waned, those criticizing and complaining now had reasons to point to. The sports pages and TV sports reports, which were longer and more detailed back then, could now be more widely speculative.
When there was still less of a social and financial gap between professional athletes and us regular folks, they say Joe Pepitone’s problems were almost relatable.
There were business ventures to capitalize on his name and fame, not different really from many celebrities. A bar, a restaurant, a hair salon all with promise but something would go wrong, and the news would be right there, often talking more about the death of an idea as opposed to its birth.
When you’re trying to sell papers and keep your TV and radio audiences around, relatable is good.
We can say he was loved in Chicago and certainly New York, liked in Houston, and tolerated for the brief time he was in Atlanta. It’s a safe bet Pepitone and Japan had long stopped trading pleasantries.
Even after his playing days were done, the spark didn’t go out. He never really disappeared. He always reemerged, not just at Old-Timers’ Day and not always for something good.
There were arrests and incarcerations, a return to Steinbrenner’s Yankees, card shows and bar brawls and sadly, a ridiculous, short-lived legal battle with the National Baseball Hall of Fame over a bat.
That last blast of publicity was more disappointing than anything else. I hope in time we all leave it behind.
I say that because when the news of Joseph Anthony Pepitone’s death became known, the headlines used the right words, and the right adjectives: flamboyant, rowdy, popular, legend and favorite of generations.
Another one, enigma, made the most sense of all to me and that’s why Joe Pepitone will always be a news story first.
Bill Zito has devoted most of his work efforts to broadcast news since 1999. He made the career switch after serving a dozen years as a police officer on both coasts. Splitting the time between Radio and TV, he’s worked for ABC News and Fox News, News 12 New York , The Weather Channel and KIRO and KOMO in Seattle. He writes, edits and anchors for Audacy’s WTIC-AM in Hartford and lives in New England. You can find him on Twitter @BillZitoNEWS.
