History is littered with famous cigar smokers, from Mark Twain to Winston Churchill to George Burns. It was actually Burns, the ageless and quick-witted comedian, who delivered the money line, “If I had taken my doctor's advice and quit smoking when he advised me to, I wouldn't have lived to go to his funeral.” Burns died at the age of 100 and was buried with three of his favorite cigars.
Neither cigar smoking nor longevity is lost on Pirates legend Steve Blass, whose own charmed life has been littered with stogie stories. Like the time Blass, shortly after helping the Pirates win the 1971 World Series, wound up touring the General Cigar Company's New York City offices. Or 15 years ago, when Blass thought he was ready to retire, told one of his best friends, Greg Brown, over a cigar, then changed his mind weeks later.
That’s why, as Blass' (official) career in baseball burns closer and closer to the band, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sought out the 77-year-old Blass to talk about all he's experienced and what's ahead. That conversation, naturally, occurred over a cigar. A Rocky Patel, Steve’s choice.
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Wearing a suit sans sport coat because he would appear on AT&T SportsNet later that night, Blass leaned over the railing and pointed across the Ohio River toward his apartment on Mount Washington. There was a "no smoking” sign to his left, but let’s be honest here: Who’s going to tell Steve Blass he can’t smoke at PNC Park?
Since the ballpark’s inaugural season in 2001, and for a couple years prior at Three Rivers Stadium, this has become their pregame tradition: A few hours before first pitch, on a cement landing a level down from the press box, Blass and Brown each light a cigar.
They sit on plastic chairs they stash near the fire escape. Occasionally, other members of the broadcast team show up, too, though Blass and Brown are the two constants.
It’s here, before pretty much every Pirates home game, that Blass will most often reflect — about baseball, life, whatever. “Freestyle conversations,” he called them, flicking an ash. On this day, the topic was a fairly obvious one: It’s September, only a couple weeks before he signs off. Was Blass thinking about that?
Yeah, absolutely, he admitted. How could he not? He’s somewhat nervous, too. But Blass is hoping some of his previous experience will help him figure it out.
“I’m kind of weaning myself off,” Blass said with a laugh. “When I stopped playing, I really missed it a lot, that whole season. Now it got better, and I’m fine. Then the first time these guys got on a bus and went to the airport [Blass stopped doing road games in 2005], I felt a little left out.
“I’ll miss it, obviously, but I feel like it’s time. I feel good about it. … It’ll be an adjustment. Four o’clock, though, I know I’ll think to myself, ‘Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be in the car now.’ ”
While Blass is eager to live less of a structured life — playing plenty of golf and cards, traveling with his wife, Karen, and watching their grandson, Christopher, pitch for Upper St. Clair — the Godfather of the franchise will miss his pregame ritual.
“It’s a place to catch up,” Blass said.
Added Brown, “You can’t smoke a cigar in 20 minutes. You have to take your time with it. It forces us to get away from the stats, the phones, and actually interact with another human being for 30 or 45 minutes.”
If anybody should know about taking one’s time, it’s Blass, the grandfather you wish you had, the gifted storyteller, the walking party.
Blass next season will transition into an ambassadorial role, where he will be counted upon to represent the Pirates and be … well, Steve Blass, one of the most important members of the franchise’s storied history and someone whose number (28) should absolutely be retired.
“I wanted to announce this in January to make sure I had time to say goodbye,” Blass said. “So I’m not saying on Sept. 29, ‘Hey, I’m done. Don’t forget to tip your servers and bartenders.’
“It’s made for a wild summer because there has been so much awareness of [the impending retirement]. Shame on me if I don’t acknowledge it and welcome it, and I do.”
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Nobody quite knows how the cigar tradition started, but Brown and Blass know it originated at Three Rivers. Back when Lanny Frattare was calling games, they tried to get Frattare to join, though he initially resisted.
Once the Pirates moved to PNC Park, Frattare picked up smoking cigars as a hobby and would prepare for games outside on West General Robinson Street, in a swivel chair that he brought down on the elevator.
Brown and Blass would smoke some on the road, too, but that began to get too difficult. In typical Blass fashion, he told the story of the time he and Brown got busted smoking atop Bank One Ballpark in Arizona and how Dodger Stadium used to have a designated smoking area with lines painted on the concourse.
“I would come out early because I wanted a cigar, and I’d be standing behind the yellow line like a mental patient; I was conditioned,” Blass said, clearly shifting into storyteller mode. “I didn’t get near it. It was like the open area of a prison.”
It’s a little-known fact that Blass actually retired once before, too. One morning in late 2004, he called Brown and asked him to meet at Cioppino — a restaurant and cigar bar in the Strip — that night.
“It was unusual for him to say, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Let’s go to Cioppino,’ ” Brown said. “It took a little while, and he said, ‘I’ve decided this is it.’ ”
For whatever reason, after a discussion with his wife, Blass concluded that he would only do home games and thus returned to the broadcast booth.
“A week or two later, he goes, ‘I’m not quitting. The heck with it. Karen said I would go crazy,’ ” Brown explained, laughing. “So I just said, ‘Welcome back. It’s good to have you as part of our broadcast team.’ ”
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This latest retirement — the real one — has been tugging on Brown, who knows he’ll be extremely emotional at the end of the month.
“I don’t want to spend too much time on it because it makes me sad,” Brown said. “Very sad.”
The pregame smoking tradition, Brown figures, will disappear. “I’m not going to come out here by myself next year and do this,” he said.
That’s when Blass interjects.
“Fine, I’ll come down there,” he pretended to grumble. “Right in the middle of rush hour.”
To be fair, Blass isn’t going far. For the ambassadorial role, sure, but also 5 o’clock games of liar’s poker for $1 that indulge another of Blass’ hobbies: gambling.
“Don’t worry,” Blass said. “I’ll still be around.”
That last weekend will be met with plenty of pomp and circumstance, as Blass takes a well-deserved victory lap. There’ll be a bobble head, a ceremony and the public coronation of a franchise legend.
How cool is this?! Special MLB baseballs will be used for @Pirates #Reds game on Steve Blass Night on Saturday, Sept. 28 7:05 pm! #TheBlassChronicles pic.twitter.com/NLq9WTVKfV
— Greg Brown (@gbrowniepoints) September 19, 2019
Brown will take it all in and celebrate Blass along with everyone else. But he’ll also miss these interactions with Blass, the two talking about what they did that day, who’s slumping and what the Pirates need to do to win.
“People have been asking me about what am I going to do,” Brown said. “All year long, I haven’t thought about it; I’ve put it in the back of my mind. I won’t be able to deal with it. Obviously the last weekend it’ll hit, and it’ll be very different.”
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Cigar time with Blass and Brown leads to some interesting stories and eventually, somehow, the wheel stops on this one, with Blass watching his grandson pitch.
This past season, following an outing where Christopher struggled with his control, Blass approached his grandson with a few simple words of advice.
“I said, ‘Christopher, throw the damn ball over the plate!’ ” Blass said. “Karen just looked at me and said, ‘Do you realize what you just said?’ You’re telling your grandson to throw strikes? You, of all people.
“I said, ‘God, forgive me.’ ”
There’s a truth here beneath the joke, and it doesn’t involve the grace with which Blass handled his sudden and inexplicable loss of control, a disease that, to this day, makes Blass’ home phone ring whenever it happens to someone else. (Blass always answers reporters’ calls, by the way.)
Blass wants to watch Christopher pitch more. He also wants to play golf whenever he wants. He doesn’t really want to make that 4 o’clock drive to PNC Park, and he’d rather not have to check the Pirates’ schedule to see if he’s available that night.
Already with a quality start turned in, Blass wants to enjoy the rest of the game from the dugout. He wants to play gin rummy with friends at the South Hills Country Club and skip town for a couple days if he and Karen get the urge to go somewhere.
“I’m 77, and you start to count backwards,” Blass said. “The average male in the United States dies at 74. There’s only so much time, and I want to be healthy. I don’t want to say, ‘I’m going to retire because I don’t feel well.’ Again, it just feels right this time.”
The Throw Strikes story eventually morphed into talk about Blass’ idol, ElRoy Face, who’s sharp as a tack at age 91. “Full range of motion and everything,” Blass said, shaking his head.
“You know, he actually forced me to play left field before [Kent Tekulve] ever did,” Blass said.
The date was Aug. 31, 1968. Face needed to pitch in one more game to set some sort of record for appearances with one team. Even though he had been traded to the Tigers, Face pitched for the Pirates and “relieved” Blass, facing the second batter of the game.
Blass shut the Braves out the rest of the way — 8⅔ innings. It would’ve been his eighth shutout of the year, tying the record for a right-hander in one season.
“I said, ‘You cost me a shutout to tie the record.’ ” Blass said. “He said, ‘Well, I had to get the record. I needed that record.’ ”
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Tell him about the debriefing, Brown said with a laugh.
Every fall, after the Pirates are done, Blass invites all of the Pirates broadcasters to his cabin near Seven Springs. They play golf in the morning — split into teams and, yes, for money — then sit around the campfire at night, drinking and arguing. In a way, it’s like the airing of grievances during Festivus.
“If you could record that,” Blass says with a laugh, “you could sell it.”
“Let’s just put it this way,” Brown said. “The lines are open.”
Thus far, there have been no major injuries, Blass pointed out out, although he did once try to tackle AT&T SportsNet color commentator Bob Walk.
“He didn’t go anywhere because I’m not good at it,” Blass said.
“C’mon,” Brown interjected. “The two of them went down!”
Another year, because of the heat from the fire, Blass and Walk started burning their clothes, eventually finding themselves in … well, probably not what you would wear to Giant Eagle.
Why, you ask?
“Because we were drunk,” Blass said. “That explains a lot. That was a foundation.
“Hey, we’re not getting in any cars. We stumble inside, then find a place to sleep. We get up, play golf and go home. Everybody’s good.”
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Across the river, in the mornings, Blass likes to go for a walk, from incline to incline, about 2 miles total. He doesn’t wear earbuds; instead, he tries to flesh out his thoughts, the same thing he’s done for years.
Every day, Blass will pass by former Steelers PR man Joe Gordon, and he inevitably thinks of the famous Gordon-Myron Cope story. (Cope trusted Gordon to say something if Cope started to slip. Gordon eventually did, and Cope retired.)
“But he’s not slipping,” Brown quickly pointed out.
Maybe not, but Blass does think about the game differently these days. For one, the huge influx of numbers — exit velocity and launch angle, that sort of stuff — has become a little much.
“It’s devouring us,” Blass said before catching himself, careful not to sound like a 77-year-old man screaming at a cloud.
“You need to balance the stats and analytics with stories, so it’s not all sterile,” Blass said. “There’s not a lot of laughter with the numbers. You have to have the stories. It’s a game of stories.”
The stories are what drive Blass, and this season has been full of them. It’s been a nice gesture from the Pirates, too — basically giving Blass two seasons for the price of one as he calls it a career.
“The big surprise is what happened in July,” Blass said. “This is more of a solid core of players than people give it credit for. It wasn’t all that surprising they were doing well. [Josh] Bell was on fire. Our pitching was raggedy, but it was hanging in there, 2½ games out. This has been a season of two seasons for me.”
One of Blass’ favorite parts of his job involves what he does during Saturdays at home, when he interviews pitching coach Ray Searage.
“We’ve got a friendship,” Blass said. “It’s good with him. He’s current because he has to be, but he’s also got a little nerve of old school in him that I can hit every once in a while. We’ll get down and dirty about stuff.
“I just can’t pound that because it’s a different world now. You have to respect the current world.”
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Steve and Karen Blass lived in the same Upper St. Clair home for 42 years, but four or five years ago they decided to downsize. Now, in their 56th year of marriage, they rent a small apartment, content on one floor.
“Now if the faucet leaks, we just call somebody,” Blass joked.
Blass has since sold a bunch of his older memorabilia, donating it to the five trust funds created for his grandchildren. But people also keep giving Blass various retirement gifts. During a visit to his apartment he showed a reporter a funky painting of Three Rivers Stadium and one of his favorites, a shot of Roberto Clemente, Bill Virdon and Willie Stargell.
“Here’s one with all my highlights,” Blass said, rummaging through a cardboard box and mustering a sly grin. “It’s a blank frame.”
Blass’ apartment is on Grandview Avenue, in the same building as Monterey Bay. It’s a part of the city that Blass used to think about often, when he and Brown smoked cigars at another part of the ballpark, one closer to the Allegheny River, fantasizing about what it would be like to live up there.
“It’s nice to look down on this city,” Blass said. “There’s always something to look at. We just feel so good about being up there.”
There’s something poetic, cool or comforting about Steve Blass having the ability to smoke a cigar and sip a glass of wine on his patio, all while keeping a watchful eye over PNC Park and the city of Pittsburgh.
It actually mirrors the end of one of Blass’ favorite TV shows, “Boston Legal,” where Denny Crane (William Shatner) and Alan Shore (James Spader) finish every show by smoking cigars and drinking cognac on a rooftop.
“This is our version of ‘Boston Legal,’ ” Blass said, talking about his routine with Brown and also the time spent on his small, rectangular patio.
It’s not the end for Blass; far from it. There’s golf to be played, trips to take and many more people to make laugh. Oh, and a whole bunch of cigars to smoke.
“It just feels like the right time,” Blass said. “Baseball has always been possessive because of the length and volume of games; you’re never away from it. But now, I won’t have anything hanging over me.
“If we want, we can pick up, go somewhere and do something. The way I see it, the rest of my life is going to be an offseason.”
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Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: September 19, 2019, 10:30 a.m.