Team Player
He’s never given an interview. Sportswriter Jerome Holtzman says Yosh is the story he’s been chasing for 35 years.
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Pitchers dust their hands with rosin to dry them on the mound. Ryne Sandberg says, “Yosh has always had his way of doing things. He still makes his own pine tar rags. He might still make his own rosin bags. His way is from the old school, and that’s the way baseball is still meant to be.”
“It’s amazing how many people Yosh knows,” says former batboy Jim Flood. “Every year Yosh would buy the batboys a suit. Then he’d take us to dinner at Binyon’s and he’d want us to wear our suit. It was really our first time going out as young men. The night Yosh took us out it so happened Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante were in town and eating at Binyon’s. And I’ll be damned if both of them didn’t spot Yosh and greet him by name.”
“Then Yosh would work with the visiting clubhouse personnel to make sure everything was hung up in everybody’s locker and ready for the game,” says Ned Colletti, the former Cubs vice president who’s now assistant general manager of the San Francisco Giants. “As soon as the team gets in, the equipment guy will do that. Sometimes they’re getting into the city at two or three in the morning. On the way to the ballpark, they’ll drop off the suitcases at the hotel. Of course Yosh wasn’t the only guy loading and unloading, but he was in charge of all of that.
There’s a mystique that Colletti believes Yosh acquired by keeping so much to himself. “He has a hard exterior shell. It is very difficult to get inside that shell. Once you get in there, you find out he has a great heart.”
