Don Zimmer’s good humor made him great baseball soul

I grieve today over the loss of my friend, Don Zimmer, who slipped away quietly Wednesday evening. At the same time, I feel a sense of relief and gratitude that the pain and suffering he endured during the last few months of what was otherwise a truly remarkable and fulfilling life, especially for a lifetime .235 hitter, is finally over for him.

His closest friends knew how bad it had gotten for him at the end, hooked up to the detested oxygen, still getting dialysis, even unable to talk because of a tracheotomy, and we knew, with each passing day in that state, the unlikelihood that he was ever going to come out of that hospital in Dunedin, Fla.

And much as we all wanted to be able to see him one last time, to say goodbye if that’s what it had to be, it is far better to be able to remember him as he would have wanted — the full-of-life, self-effacing, fun-loving character he was for 80-plus years, a baseball legend whose career ran the full gamut, from the courage of fighting back from two near-fatal beanings, to the heartbreak of losing the ’78 pennant to the Yankees as manager of the Red Sox, and ultimately to the triumph of winning all those championships as Joe Torre’s bench coach in the Bronx.

It is also heartening to know he maintained his wonderful sense of humor right to the end.

The night before Zimmer was supposed to go into the hospital to have a leaky heart valve repaired — doctors had determined it to be the primary cause of his breathing problems and the necessity to be hooked up with oxygen everywhere he went — he was having dinner at home and began coughing. The coughing had also been a common occurrence in those last weeks and Soot Zimmer, his wife of 62 years whom he had known since they were sweethearts in 10th grade in Cincinnati, became alarmed.

“We’ve got to talk to the doctors about this coughing,” she said. “We’ve got to get you something for this.”

Zimmer glared at her.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, admonishingly. “Tomorrow at this time, I’m gonna be out cold in a hospital bed, with my heart lying on a table beside me. You think I’m worried about a little coughing?”

This is how I will always remember him, for the self-effacing humor, much of which is sprinkled throughout the two books we did together. Like the time he and his Dodger teammate, Johnny Podres, both inveterate horse- players, blew their entire weekly paychecks at Roosevelt Raceway one night and sheepishly had to borrow a quarter for the toll home from the toll collector, who recognized them, to get back over the Triborough Bridge; or the time when he was managing an All-Star team in Japan and was having dinner with a party of 12 at one of the expensive Japanese steak houses and decided he wanted to pick up the tab — something he did with regularity — which came to 182,000 yen. As Zim recalled it, when he got upstairs to his room, he turned to Soot and asked how much was 182,000 yen.

She replied: “About $1,500,” to which Zim said, shaking his head: “That’s a lot of yen.”

He didn’t read books (not even his own, I always needled him). He didn’t follow world events, or politics or the stock market. The only things he read were the sports pages and the Racing Form.

And so, when he had that accident in the weight room of the Chicago Cubs’ spring training complex back in the ’80s — when he was a coach for his high school pal, Jimmy Frey — when a weight machine he was leaning on gave way and he tumbled to the floor, hitting his head (where there were four tantalum buttons planted, the result of his first beaning), nobody was surprised at his response to the trainer trying to revive him. Waving smelling salts in front of the groggy Zimmer, the trainer began shouting questions to him.

“What’s your wife’s name, Zim?”

“Soot.”

“What are your kids’ names?”

“Tommy and Donna.”

“Who’s the President of the United States?”

“Ah, c’mon, doc, that’s a loaded question.”

He wore his lifetime .235 batting average like a badge of honor, for all the “humpties” of the world like him who had to scrap and hustle their way to make a major league living. Even when he became the most acclaimed bench coach in baseball history as Torre’s righthand man for those four Yankee world championships, he found a way to make light of the job at his own expense.

“To be a successful bench coach it’s really quite simple,” he once told me. “When a hit-and-run or a steal works, he pokes the manager for the sake of the cameras so it looks like it was his suggestion. And if it doesn’t work, he walks down the dugout to the water cooler so he’s nowhere in sight when the camera pans on the manager.”

It’s the stories like those his many friends will be recounting with warm laughter on Saturday at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, where the Tampa Bay Rays, his final baseball team, will have a memorial celebration of his life prior to their 4 p.m. game with the Seattle Mariners.

In his honor, the Rays are said to be planning to wear retro Brooklyn Dodger uniforms with his No. 23. There will be speakers, Torre for sure, but the ceremony will be simple because that’s the way Zim wanted it. One of the things he repeated over and over to Soot was: “When I go, I don’t want no fuss being made over me.”

And so that’s how it will be. Just a bunch of his friends, gathering at a ballpark, to swap stories and share smiles.

A ceremony befitting a simple guy who loved life and never failed to leave us laughing.

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