Commentary on Walt Jockety -- This is a great compliment...

Read this guest commentary as I was perusing the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, www.stltoday.com. As I was reading it, I couldn't help but tell myself -- this is a great sort of goal to aim for, and achieve.

Of course, Jocketty was with the Cardinals. The same class outfit that gave us Stan Musial (who keeps giving and giving to Cardinal nation. And Schoendist, and Smith, and Pujols... So it shouldn't surprise me too much.

Enough intro. If it's still on the stltoday.com website, it'll be here. Otherwise, it's below.
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Reaching out to ordinary fans

By Paul Turner

10/08/2007

CHICAGO

Last week, my brother-in-law called at the steakhouse where I work on Wednesdays to tell me the Cardinals had fired general manager Walt Jocketty. I was stunned. Team chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and president Mark Lamping had kicked to the curb the person most responsible for assembling the talent for one of the most successful eras in St. Louis baseball history. I thought it was a slap in the face to a man who deserved better treatment.

Jocketty's record speaks for itself. Let the baseball experts, columnists and fans in the sports pages, blogs and chat rooms ruminate on it. Yes, I mourn Jocketty's firing for on-field reasons, but I regret more deeply the loss of someone I thought was not only a tremendous baseball man, but also a tremendous man, period.

I'm a native of southern Illinois who lives in Chicago and, who, thankfully, has retained my passion for the Cardinals. Like many others pursuing careers in acting and writing, I have supplemented my income for years by working in restaurants.

Over the last decade or so, I happen to have worked in places frequented by members of the Cardinals organization. That has allowed me to serve and talk to and get to know people I worshipped as a child. I mean, listening to Mike Shannon, Red Schoendist and long-time Cardinals traveling secretary C.J. Cherre tell baseball stories and getting paid for it? On days when the Redbirds have been in town, I've sometimes felt as though I were attending a kind of baseball fantasy camp.

These people have indulged my questions and love of the team, but no one ever has asked to be seated in my section more times than Walt Jocketty — even though he had to know I was going to talk his arm off.

I don't know about the reported behind-the-scenes divisiveness in the Cardinals front office, but I do know what I've experienced personally: Walt Jocketty is one of the most decent and classiest people I've ever encountered.

At the restaurant few years ago, Jocketty asked me if was planning to come down to St. Louis anytime soon and invited me to be his guest for a game at Busch II. I casually mentioned that my next trip to St. Louis was going to be for an extended-family reunion in conjunction with a particular baseball game, so I'd have to take him up on his offer some other time. He said he'd call me anyway.

No big deal, right? It would be easy enough for him to leave me a couple of tickets.

Not long afterward, a package arrived from him in the mail: 12 tickets to a private suite and six more tickets behind home plate, four rows up. He had given me the use of his family's luxury box, the whole thing, for a night. It was a night the members of my family will remember for the rest of our lives.

Who does that kind of a thing for a guy he knows only casually, a guy who waited on him in a restaurant maybe a dozen times? And who does that while trying to run a baseball team in the middle of a pennant race? The same person who was dumped unceremoniously last week by his employer: "Thanks for the nice run, Walt. There's the door."

I'll continue to be a Cardinals fan. I can't help it. It's in my blood. But with $6 beer, legal in-house ticket scalping, the radio fiasco and that shop behind the bleachers that sells used game balls and bases at outrageous prices, I've started wondering how much the current ownership group considers its average fan base.

Right now, I'm thinking about this extremely nice guy who worked for the team until last week, someone who showed kindness and consideration to ordinary people who love those birds-on-the-bat. He was incredibly successful, too — maybe the best at his job in the business. And he was a really good tipper.

Thanks for all of it, Walt.

Paul Turner is an actor and writer who lives in Chicago. He was born in Cairo, Ill., and immediately was whisked off to St. Louis as a medical precaution. He has returned to the city as often as possible ever since.

Article is (c) 2007, by www.stltoday.com, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, L.L.C. All rights reserved, and used by permission.