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Herm Starrette: The game of baseball and the game of life
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Published: January 18, 2010
The story goes that in olden days, hardcore baseball fans congregated in country stores, hardware stores and barbershops about this time of year to discuss their team's prospects in the coming season. These informal get-togethers were collectively referred to as "The Hot Stove League."
So, pretend you are in a country store of yesteryear, prop your feet up, grab a pack of cheese crackers and a soda and think about a local lad who did well for himself: Herm Starrette.
Herman Paul "Herm" Starrette began his career in baseball in the old ballfield behind Cool Spring Elementary School in the early 1950s, coached by teacher Paul Brendle.
Starrette pitched in every game from 1953 to 1956 for Cool Spring High's Red Devils. They won the county championship in 1955. "I had a good slider," he says.
When his class made their annual senior trip to New York, they took in a game at Yankee Stadium. Starrette says he sat there in the bleachers, daydreaming about being a player out on that green, green field. He told his fellow classmates that someday he'd be out there and they said, "Yeah, you'll be out there, as a waterboy!"
He graduated from Cool Spring High in 1956. Nine years later, in 1963, Herm Starrette was in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium warming up to pitch against the New York Yankees, including Hall of Famers Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, in front of 56,000 fans on a Saturday afternoon.
Born in Statesville in 1936, he listened to Orioles and Cardinals games with his father, Rob, who also took him and his siblings to see the old Statesville Owls play.
"I came from a sports-oriented family; ever since I can remember, I wanted to play baseball," he says.
After high school, he played for the Lenoir-Rhyne College Bears on a baseball scholarship, but left the classroom when he was offered a position with the Orioles. He signed with them on June 13, 1958.
For nine years (1958 to 1966) he was a right-handed pitcher with the Baltimore Orioles organization.
From 1963 to 1965 he appeared in 27 Major League Baseball games and pitched in 46 innings.
But it is as a pitching coach that Herm Starrette will likely be best remembered. He was a pitching coach with the Rochester Red Wings, the Orioles' AAA farm team, then was pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves in 1974, and served in a variety of positions with seven major league teams, ending up with the Boston Red Sox.
His greatest claim to fame may be that he was the pitching coach for the world champion Philadelphia Phillies in 1980, and has a World Series ring with a diamond in it commemorating that contest.
He also has a 1970 World Series ring from his contributions to the Orioles as their minor league pitching coordinator.
In 1980, the Phillies defeated the Kansas City Royals in a six-game series, Oct. 14 to Oct. 21, capturing their first World Series title. The series was notable historically in that it was the first World Series played entirely on artificial grass.
Starrette has been out of Major League Baseball now for eight years, retiring as a farm system official and coach in the Boston Red Sox system.
Herm married Betty Sigmon, an Iredell County gal, in 1960. They have a daughter and son-in-law, Lisa and Scott Bass, and a granddaughter, Laura Bass, who is currently a student at Lenoir-Rhyne University.
Sitting around the kitchen table at his home in the Cool Springs community, we talked of baseball and life. There is an old baseball on the table.
He remarked that he used to pick cotton as a boy in the field that is now his yard. I asked him what the best thing about baseball was.
"The best thing about the game of baseball, for me," he said as he rolled an old ball in his hand, "is that it helped me grow up, taught me to be a better person; I learned to communicate with people. One thing you find out quickly is that you're not the best in the world. Baseball, maybe all sports, toughens you mentally and you have to be tough mentally to play sports."
How about Football vs. Baseball?
"Professional baseball teams play 162 games a season, not counting pre-season exhibitions and playoffs. A professional football team plays 16 games in a regular season.
"There's no clock in baseball. Yeah, sometimes the game gets slow, but as Yogi Berra said, 'It ain't over till it's over.'
"I've seen teams come back from being five or six runs behind to win the game in the last inning. Life can be like that, too."
He continued: "There were three people who most helped me the most in my game. The first was my high school coach, Paul Brendle. We are still good friends. Earl Weaver was my manager for three years in the Orioles and George Bamberger, who was an instructor for the Orioles' minor league teams. They helped me understand the finer points of the game. I also owe a lot to Jerry Fox, my catcher at Cool Spring, who encouraged me to go on to college and play ball there."
I asked if he had a favorite baseball movie. He mentioned several and then said, "Honestly, I like any baseball movie that has someone playing Babe Ruth in it."
Starrette doesn't go to many games today, but he is working with a couple of promising high school boys, pro bono, and now and then he speaks to youngsters at schools, telling them how important an education is.
"I'm proud of what I accomplished," he said, tossing the ball in the air.
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