Mike Berger: a practical joke remembered
Earlier this month, the Arizona Diamondbacks hired Mike Berger to replace A.J. Hinch as the organization’s director of player development. Berger was a scout for Toronto the last four seasons and has worked for Montreal, Houston, Colorado and Texas.
Oklahoma City baseball fans will remember Berger, who played in 1,038 career minor league games, as a player-coach with the 89ers almost 20 years ago.
I remember Berger for one of the crazy days in my journalism career.
Must have been about 1990, when I was sports editor of the Norman Transcript, former OU star Nick Capra returned to Oklahoma City to play for the 89ers. I sent a reporter up to All Sports Stadium to write a story on Capra, the star of Enos Semore’s 1979 Big Eight champion team.
Anyway, the reporter writes the story, and I started editing. It read fine, except for a couple of funny items. For instance, at one point, Capra said he might retire from baseball and run a gas station. Didn’t seem like something a professional ballplayer would say.
But in those days, we had a small staff, a ton of work and there was a paper to put out. So I didn’t think anything of it.
The Transcript then was an afternoon paper, which means the pages had to be complete around noon or so. That morning, my reporter said he wanted to check on a couple of things and called the 89ers for clarification.
An hour or so passed, and around 10:30 a.m. the phone rang. It was the 89ers. They had checked with Capra, and he said he hadn’t been interviewed by anyone from Norman.
Uh-oh. My reporter went into full panic mode, and the 89ers started investigating, and eventually the stunt was revealed. Mike Berger, the 89ers’ practical joker, had pretended to be Capra and given a full interview, complete with all kinds of nonsense.
I wanted to ring my reporter’s neck, but there wasn’t time. I had to tear down the front page and start over, in the middle of a summer day with very little going on, sports-wise.
I wondered what kind of carnival the 89ers were running. Berger eventually joined the coaching staff and, as we know now, worked his way up the baseball ladder. Enjoy him, D-Backs. You’re in for a riot.
Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel.
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You would think that even a small newspaper writer would take the time to at least know what the returning star from the local university looked like before going to interview him