Spec loved the game
He was a husband to Tommye, and until the day she died she tried to make him behave. He was a one-man neighborhood watch, who never stopped peeking through his blinds. He was a surrogate grandfather to the cute little girl next door, and for 26 years she loved Mr. Spec. He was a baseball man, who sold peanuts, swapped players and rooted for the home team.
Spec Richardson was these things and more, and every baseball fan should have had a chance to hear the exploits of someone who was there when the game really was America’s Pastime.
He died Tuesday at the age of 93. He didn’t die in a fancy skybox in a monolithic stadium. He died quietly at home, in the town where he was born, where he and Tommye returned after he was general manager of the Houston Astros and San Francisco Giants.
Baseball, as he knew it, was fading but Spec still embraced the smell of freshly manicured infields and the sound of peanut shells crunching under his feet as he walked through wooden grandstands.
A master storyteller, he dropped names most of us knew only on bubble gum cards and shared an unending library of tales. These weren’t stories he read. These were stories he lived.
He died on the 40th anniversary of the night Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, but Spec remembered a skinny shortstop for the 1953 Jacksonville Tars. As the GM, the Milwaukee Braves asked him to look after Aaron, who with two teammates was breaking the color barrier in a league that crisscrossed the segregated South.
Spec tagged along on road trips through Columbus, Macon and Montgomery, making sure they were safe. On the night Jacksonville clinched the Sally League title, white players headed to a party. Aaron, Felix Mantilla and Horace Garner weren’t invited. Spec slipped them folding money so they could celebrate on their own.
As a Major League executive, he helped build the first dome and swung trades he never stopped explaining. He was even a super spy for the commissioner going to Minor League parks to see who was chewing tobacco and who was blowing bubbles.
From Golden Park to Candlestick, baseball was Spec Richardson’s life. And aren’t we glad it brought him home.
Richard Hyatt is an independent correspondent. Reach him at hyatt31906@knologynet.
This story was originally published April 16, 2016 at 9:47 PM with the headline "Spec loved the game."