Jerry Augustine Excerpt from V1 of Confessions of the Unmedicated Mind

Jerry Augustine Excerpt from V1 of Confessions of the Unmedicated Mind:

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If you’re a Brewer fan, and unaware; Bob Uecker will not be doing all the games this year on the radio.  Instead, three former players will be splitting duties, including Jerry Augustine.  Augustine is a current member of the Brewers TV crew.  I grew up a huge Brewers fan, but was not a fan of Mr. Augustine.  

In honor of COTUM Volume 2 being released, we are making COTUM V1 FREE on Amazon this upcoming Saturday and Sunday (March 8-9).  In honor of baseball starting, here’s an excerpt from Volume 1 that involves our run in with the former Brewer pitcher. 

Upon facing discovery, we’d leave out the side door and elude capture.  We were purveyors of pure genius.  We didn’t have to be displaying our mayhemic genius to concoct fun at someone else’s expense.  With my cousin Jeff mobile, this also meant he was working.  One of those jobs came at Mike Hegan’s Grand Slam USA.  Mike Hegan was a former Brewer first baseman who had stayed living in the area.  He opened up a warehouse with indoor batting cages and several other attention sponges.   Among the most gripping was an activity called Spaceball, which was like basketball Viagra for short kids who would never achieve greatness on the hardwood.  Trampoline meets volleyball nets with basketball hoops on either side; it was pretty engaging. 

And it was pretty cheap so long as my cousin Jeff was working.

 Sure, he was nervous about it, as he was with many things, but that didn’t prevent him from contributing to the distractibility of a minor or two by giving us handfuls of free tokens.  This on occasion got him in trouble with his direct supervisor, a former player for the Brewers named Jerry Augustine. 

Jeff was as big of a die-hard Brewers fan as I was, and when he took the job, was in awe as a smattering of former and current Brewers would pay their respective visits.   The awe would never really go away, but it was whittled down a few notches by working for Augustine.  He was apparently not the most pleasant person to work for. 

I say that with a grain of salt.  As an employee, I know for a fact that I was far from the most pleasant employee to have working for you.  I learned some on the job defiance from Jeff, who also could not exactly be described as a model employee.   I did not work for the former Brewer, but knew in going to Hegan’s Grand Slam USA that Jeff was not in his fan club.  

Ironically, Augustine grew up about fifteen minutes from my home in Sturgeon Bay.  He was a rare, hometown baseball hero from the state of Wisconsin.   We all might have dreamed of playing for the Brewers someday, but reality was that even the best kids were not likely to even play much college ball.  The weather here bastardizes the baseball quality.  It’s true.

Augustine, though, had made it, and we could basically recite the back of his baseball card off the top of our head.  He was a pretty good pitcher at one point, but had eroded in the mid-eighties and was let go.  I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it.   I’m sure working at the Grand Slam USA wasn’t among his career goals heading into a career in Major League Baseball.  I’m also sure that he wasn’t very polite to people who asked him for autographs.   We did.  It didn’t go well.  He blew us off.

To top it off, he yelled at my cousin for giving us extra tokens for the Spaceball.   He might have been a Brewer and he might have been from minutes from my hometown, but he definitely had pissed us off.

Hence, we were determined to seek out and attain a bit of comical revenge.  Our time would have to wait though, and in a sign of things to come, my brother and I had to bide our time, plot, scheme and carry out an act of stylistic revenge for a future trip. 

We did so with aplomb.  I went for a minimalist approach.  He wouldn’t remember us.  Guys like that never remember someone’s face.  They just cast it off and go on with their brooding.  This gave us the ability to go about our attempt to get the better of him without doing so with a fancy disguise. 

We scoured through our sport card collection and found cards of him that were either less than flattering on the front, or less than flattering on the back.   He wasn’t a photogenic man.  In fact, he is well known today in baseball card geek circles as one of the funnier looking players of the late seventies and early eighties.  If you know the era well, that’s saying something. 

On the back, while he started out okay in his career, he had some nightmarish years.  Reality is that had he not been from Wisconsin, he’d have not likely lasted as long as he did.  Left handed relief pitchers almost never die in baseball.  He never played for another team.  He had arguably his worst season in 1982, an epic year for the Brewers who made the World Series.    

Brian and I carefully selected a pair of cards to bring with us to ask him to autograph.  One of them was a comical looking card that featured him not in action while pitching, but while curled up in a glorified fetal position on the dugout steps, neglecting a clipboard he was given to take notes or chart something on.  It was from his worst statistical season on record. The other was from the 1979 season. On that card, the awkward looking pitcher took a striking resemblance to Alvin and the Chipmunks.  If you didn’t know better, you would have thought the cartoon was slated to feature Alvin, Simon, Theodore and Jerry Augustine.  Jerry’s baseball prowess must have taken him from the animated rodents and left them as a power trio. 

We crumpled both cards up.  We’d have drawn on them to enhance the comic value but he did that on his own. We’d remind him of this when we walked up to a busy desk at Grand Slam USA, and asked him sarcastically for his autograph.  We did this after playing Spaceball and hitting the batting cages.  We might have hated him, but we were in diversion heaven while there.  We understood though that we’d probably not be visiting for a while when this was over.

He tried to decline, but we put him on the spot.  It was busy and he had customers watching this time.   My brother put on his innocent face, and still drew a rebuke, albeit a softer one this time. 

“It would really mean a lot to my little brother if you signed these cards for us, sir.”  I added.  

“Fine,” he muttered.   He grabbed the pen and cards from us and did a double take when he saw how crumpled up they were. 

“The cards are crumpled up, kind of like your career, don’t you think?” I added.   Brian was trying not to laugh, but held it together long enough to tell him he picked the card he did because he looked like a chipmunk. 

Jerry was not amused.  He grumbled something about having to leave.  “Is this how it was when the Brewers released you, Jerry?” 

He was furious now and ordering us to get out, but because of the people around, he had to keep his composure at least a little bit.  He left the faulty sense of security provided by the front desk and was coming out to escort us to the door, with my brother and I asking him pointed questions about the cards the entire way.  I know in that short time we fit in quite a few questions that sounded innocent enough to the naked ear, but if you knew the man’s career were hardly innocent in any way, shape or form.  Brian asked him about his inability to take good pictures.   I asked him why he never got picked up by another team, and from being from Kewaunee.   Kewaunee is home to a nuclear power plant.  I know I asked him if he by chance had grown up a little too close to it, and implied it might be why he looked so funny. 

He found it less funny than we did.  

We didn’t go back there for a while, but I was okay with that.  It was for the best.