Now 58 years old, Schmidt remembered how difficult it was to become a full-time major league baseball player. In his first full major league season, back in 1972, the future Hall of Famer batted .196, striking out 136 times in 397 at-bats as frustrated Phillies fans rained boos down upon his head.
The next year, he led the National League in homers. And he never looked back, leading the Phillies to their first World Series championship in 65 years in 1980. In his career, the smooth-fielding third baseman won 10 Gold Gloves and six Silver Slugger awards along with three MVPs.
“Luck is a big part of it,” he said. “For minor league players, so much of it is the luck of the draw – what round you were drafted in, who drafted you, what positions are available with your big league team. I was fortunate to be drafted by the Phillies, who were in last place at the time. They were starving for young talent. Greg Luzinski came through the system a year before me. I played with Andre Thornton, who became a good hitter with Cleveland. We got a lot of young players together at the right time and became a contending team. It’s like the (Tampa Bay) Rays this year. It’s fun to see a new team break into the pennant race.”
Schmidt laughed at the irony of praising the Rays while spending time in Boston Red Sox territory.
“Yeah, we get to see a lot of the Red Sox on television. Every night it seems,” he joked. “And every time the Yankees play the Red Sox, it’s a national (television) game. The rest of the country can get tired of that.”
Schmidt admitted that he has been a long-time admirer of former Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez.
“Until last month,” he emphasized with a grimace. “I don’t want this story to be all about him. I enjoyed watching Manny with a passion because he was a righthanded hitter with power who could produce in clutch situations. But I lost all my respect for Manny (when he orchestrated his departure from Boston last month). From a player’s standpoint, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
Still, there was something about Manny’s ability to hit the ball all over the park that fascinated Schmidt, who remains a student of the game, especially when it comes to hitting a baseball.
“The hardest part of the game for me,” he said, “was becoming a hitter like Manny who could poke one to right field with a runner on second base or drive a ball up the gap. I always wanted to be a hitter like that, a guy nobody wanted to pitch to when the game was on the line. Many times, I was walked intentionally. Maybe the opposing manager just didn’t want to get beat by Mike Schmidt. So they would have to take their chances with someone like Von Hayes, who might have actually been a better hitter in those situations than I was.
“Near the end of my career, I finally got to be as good as anybody with runners on base,” Schmidt added. “That’s because I was making more contact with the ball instead of trying to hit it out of the park. It was always easier for me to hit a 400-foot home run than to poke the ball the other way. I was familiar with hitting home runs. Going the other way, that took me a long time to learn.”
Schmidt just became aware this week that Alex Rodriguez is only two homers behind him on the all-time list.
“What does he have … 546?” Schmidt asked. “He’s a much more accomplished hitter than I am. I mean he averages over .300 for his career. (Schmidt checked in at .267 lifetime.) I’m not saying I wasn’t an accomplished hitter. A-Rod just lives in a statistical world that I am not familiar with. On the other hand, he’s never played in a World Series and I played in two (winning one in 1980). What does he have, two MVPs? (Three, actually.) Well, I have three.”
It was getting near time for Michael Jack Schmidt – as he was famously dubbed by Phillies announcer Harry Kalas – to go out on the field and promote awareness of enlarged prostates among men.
“I enjoy it,” he said. “When I’m signing autographs for the kids, I’ll look up at the fathers and ask them when’s the last time they were checked (for BPH, or enlarged prostate). And some of them will admit they haven’t. But they tell me they will go. If I can get two or three men to go to their doctors, then I feel like I’m doing something.”