Mike Schmidt was back in the Phillies television booth on Thursday night, and for one inning the game gave way to the kind of company that can stop a broadcast in its tracks. Schmidt spent the fourth with Tom McCarthy, John Kruk and George Brett, even though he did not call the game himself.
That return mattered because the Phillies were heading into a national-TV weekend against the Mets, with Friday off and two games left to play. It also marked a rare on-air reunion for Schmidt after he walked away from NBC Sports Philadelphia this season following 12 years as a part-time announcer.
What unfolded in the booth was less a standard game segment than a long detour through baseball memory. Schmidt and Brett, taken one behind the other in the 1971 MLB draft, traded numbers that only Hall of Famers can trade with a straight face. Brett had 1,596 career RBIs; Schmidt finished with 1,595. Brett said the 1980 World Series was hard to swallow, while Schmidt replied with his own reminder that he had 48 home runs and 121 RBIs that season. At one point, Schmidt joked that he went 0-10 in the last series and slipped down to.250.
The broadcast lost the thread of the game at times, which is what happens when four men with that much history get loose in front of a microphone. Ben Davis also jumped in with a line that made the room sound even more crowded, noting that between Schmidt, Brett, Don Mattingly and Keith Hernandez there were 31 Gold Gloves and 9,723 hits in the building. The conversation even veered into self-mockery, with Brett saying he had someone go back through his career to find an RBI and that he had 7,000 outs, while Schmidt answered that he knew he had 7,000 strikeouts and could count those.
The noise settled only after Derek Hill drove in Bryson Stott to tie the game in the bottom of the fourth, and McCarthy and company turned back to the action. Brett was in town to help Schmidt promote his Play Sun Safe skin cancer awareness campaign, something Schmidt has embraced since being diagnosed with melanoma in 2013. As part of that effort, 12 sunscreen stations were placed across Citizens Bank Park during games. The booth reunion gave the campaign a national stage, but it also showed how easily a game can disappear when three Hall of Famers start talking like they still have all night.
