CINCINNATI — On June 22, 2002, Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty stood with team athletic trainer Barry Weinberg in the parlor room of Darryl Kile’s suite at the Westin on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Jocketty had just identified the body of the 33-year-old pitcher, who had been scheduled to start the next night at Wrigley Field on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.”
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“I looked at Barry,” Jocketty recalled Monday night, 17 years after Kile’s death due to a heart attack, “and said, ‘now what do we do?’”
Angels general manager Billy Eppler, sadly, faced a similar question on Monday after 27-year-old pitcher Tyler Skaggs was found dead in his hotel room in Dallas.
Monday afternoon, Jocketty’s son, Joe, who is a scout for the Reds, called his father to see if he’d heard the awful news about Skaggs. The elder Jocketty turned on MLB Network and heard the details — and immediately was taken back to Wrigley Field, 17 years ago.
“When I got my GM job with the Cardinals, Bob Gebhard, who I worked for in Colorado, he said, ‘you’re ready for this, you’ve trained for it, you’ve done everything that you’ve had to do to take this position on,’” Jocketty said. “I remember telling Barry, ‘this is something you don’t train for.’ There’s no checklist, no book to tell you how to handle a situation like this. You just have to do what your instincts tell you to do.”
Even with all the time that’s gone by, Jocketty, sitting in a conference room behind the press box at Great American Ball Park, has to take several moments to collect himself and deal with the emotions.
“I was going to reach out to Billy Eppler today, let him know that I know what he’s going through and if he needs anything, to let me know,” he said. “It’s tough to figure out what to do with your team.”
Jocketty was in his eighth season as the Cardinals’ general manager in 2002. His squad had just moved into first place in mid-June of that season, overtaking the Reds on June 18 when Kile beat the Angels and the Mariners beat Cincinnati.
Even if he didn’t know what to do at the time of Kile’s death, Jocketty had dealt with everything, from meeting with police to set up a conference room in the hotel for meetings both the night of Kile’s death and the next morning, to finding a way to get on with the job. In the end, the baseball season doesn’t stop. There would still be games played; the roster would be restored to 25 players, and someone new would have to take the ball every five days. As the general manager, Jocketty had to deal with all of that — just as he would again five years later, when reliever Josh Hancock died in an automobile accident.
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Today, Jocketty’s most vivid memory of Kile was a fleeting moment earlier that season at the team’s hotel in Houston, which was connected to the giant Galleria shopping mall. Jocketty was on another floor, and looked down and just happened to see Kile and his wife, Flynn, holding hands as they walked through the mall.
“He was such a good guy, a great family man, a great teammate,” Jocketty said. “He was very popular on the club. That was right after Jack Buck died, too.”
Legendary Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck had died on June 15, after Kile beat the Angels to move the team into sole possession of first place. The Cardinals were in Chicago to face a reeling Cubs team on national TV, first the Fox day game on Saturday and then on ESPN for Sunday Night Baseball with Kile on the mound. As far as anyone knew on that Saturday afternoon, the Cubs and Cardinals would be playing as usual as the national Fox broadcast opened with a remembrance of Buck, hyping the upcoming game.
Jocketty had arrived at Wrigley Field around 11 a.m, along with scout Mike Squires, like everyone else expecting just another game. When they got to the field, Cardinals athletic trainer Barry Weinberg told Jocketty that Kile wasn’t at the park. Kile was scheduled to start the Sunday night game at Wrigley Field, but even if he wasn’t starting, he’d usually be at the field by then.
“Darryl was usually one of the first guys to the ballpark,” Jocketty recalled.
Cardinals catcher Mike Matheny was close friends with the pitcher and had been calling his room repeatedly with no answer. Finally, Jocketty called the hotel and had hotel security check on Kile. He was told to come to the hotel.
After identifying Kile’s body, Jocketty called team owner Bill DeWitt. Then manager Tony La Russa. That was followed by a call to Cubs president Andy MacPhail.
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“I said, ‘Andy, we can’t play today.’ I told him what happened,” Jocketty said. “He said it was the game of the week and I said, ‘I don’t care.’ They got ahold of Major League Baseball and canceled it.”
A YouTube video taken from KTIV-TV in St. Louis shows FOX switching to a Red Sox-Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium, where Thom Brennaman is telling the national audience that the game is in a delay. The St. Louis audience already knew as a crawl went across the bottom of the screen with the news: “Breaking news from FOX 2 News … The Chicago medical examiner confirms, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile has died. The circumstances are not yet known. As a result, today’s Cardinals/Cubs game has been canceled.” Shortly after that, Brennaman announces that the game has been canceled, but doesn’t say why.
At Wrigley Field, someone had to tell the 40,000 people gathered that there was no game. That fell to Cubs catcher Joe Girardi.
The way Girardi stepped on the field with teammates behind him and a microphone in front of him is a lasting memory for many who saw it. In one of the biggest rivalries in sports, Girardi struck the right chord. He was direct and spoke simply.
“He just said ‘there was a tragedy in the Cardinals’ family,’” Jocketty recalls, his voice breaking at the same spot where Girardi’s did just more than 17 years ago. After a moment, Jocketty pulled himself back. “He made the announcement…”
At the time, Girardi didn’t offer any specifics, and he didn’t mention Kile’s name. He just asked fans to be respectful and say a prayer for the Cardinals.
The reason for the lack of specifics was that nobody had been able to get in touch with Kile’s wife, Flynn. The Kiles were planning on moving to a new home in the San Diego area with the family’s five-year-old twins and 10-month-old son. She was out furniture shopping for the new house.
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Jocketty called on Cardinals reliever David Veres, who was traded along with Kile from Colorado in 1999, so that Veres’ wife, a friend of Flynn Kile, could try to get in touch with her to tell her what happened.
Meanwhile, Jocketty said they called in the team’s employee assistance program staff and the team chaplains, flying them to Chicago on a plane that belonged to one of the team’s owners.
Next, the team gathered in a meeting room at the Westin and La Russa spoke to the team, where they decided to play the Sunday night game.
Kile’s wife was finally found and another private jet flew her and her father to Chicago, where Jocketty met them at Midway Airport.
On Sunday, the team held a memorial service, where Flynn said her husband, who never spent a day of his 11-year-career on the disabled list, would want them to play that night. There was none of the usual pomp and circumstance of a nationally televised Cubs-Cardinals game — they didn’t even play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the seventh inning stretch. Sammy Sosa didn’t sprint to right field. Matheny decided not to play. The Cardinals lost 8-3.
Many years later, Jocketty said he got a note from Flynn Kile, who had later remarried, that thanked him for what he did that weekend and how he handled the situation.
Of course, the loss didn’t end that weekend; it was part of the rest of the season. It wasn’t until the 27th that right-hander Travis Smith was called up to take Kile’s place on the roster and in the rotation. The official transaction listed it so plainly: “St. Louis Cardinals: Recalled RHP Travis Smith from Triple-A, Memphis to take the roster spot of the deceased Darryl Kile.”
Eventually, Jocketty had to focus on his day-to-day job. He made a series of trades, including acquiring veteran Chuck Finley from Cleveland to take Kile’s spot in the rotation, and the still-reeling Cardinals went on to win the division by 13 games. They swept the Diamondbacks in the Division Series before losing to the Giants in the NLCS, with their one win in the series going to Finley.
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“One of the things that was interesting was that Darryl’s number was 57 and we won 57 games the rest of the year,” Jocketty said with a small smile.
The season moved on, and the Cardinals had to move with it. But, said Jocketty, “you were never going to replace the guy.”
(Top photo: Elsa/Getty Images)
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