Crim: Known for trustworthy approach to reporting, Hall of Famer and Quincy native Rick Hummel heading toward retirement

When it became apparent I wasn’t going to make a living pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals, even though I had spent most of my childhood emulating the windup and mannerisms of Bob Gibson, it seemed the next best thing would be writing about the team every day.

A baseball beat writer. In St. louis. It had a nice ring to it.

That dream job didn’t materialize, either, although my newspaper career enabled me to spend many days and nights in Busch Stadium II covering the Cardinals as an out-of-town sportswriter, including three World Series in the 1980s.

That allowed me to rub elbows with and get to know Rick Hummel, the 1964 Quincy High School graduate who has spent the past 50 years writing about the Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You could argue he’s been the Bob Gibson of baseball writers, minus the menacing scowl.

What many of us already knew became public knowledge last week, that this is Hummel’s final season as a full-time writer.

After 51 years with the Post-Dispatch, he plans to retire sometime during the offseason, once the Cardinals’ playoff run is done and before his 77^th birthday, which he will celebrate shortly after pitchers and catchers report next spring.

Fortunately for readers and baseball fans alike, he will continue to offer his insights and knowledge as a contributing writer for the Post-Dispatch’s print and online platforms.

(And hopefully continue his annual winter trek to Quincy to talk baseball with members of the Exchange Club and invited guests.)

He will write what he wants when he wants, finally putting the daily deadline grind that has been his constant companion for a half-century in the rearview mirror.

“I think I have a lot to say and that people still would like to (read) what I have to write,” he told Post-Dispatch sports media critic Dan Caesar last week.

They no doubt will.

Hummel credits the late Mel Tappe with steering him away from his dream of a career in radio broadcasting and toward being a sportswriter.

“I took (Tappe) at his word, even though I didn’t know how to type,” Hummel once told me. “I went to Quincy College and covered its sports for a weekly paper. I would write out the stories, my mother would type them up and I would turn them in. I eventually learned how to type.”

He has chronicled the Cardinals from the days of Red Schoendienst to Whitey Herzog to Tony LaRussa to today. Along the way he became one of baseball’s most respected writers, a man with an encyclopedic memory about sports, not just baseball, a friend and mentor to his peers.

He was enshrined in the writer’s wing of baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 2007 and the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame the following year. The press box in Busch Stadium III bears his name, along with that of the man who brought him to the Post-Dispatch, the late Bob Broeg.

Hummel was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1978, a rarity for a sportswriter.

“It beats having a real job, I guess,” he told me in 1989 while I was working on a feature story for The Quincy Herald-Whig about his life as a baseball beat writer.

At that time, Hummel, then 43, didn’t envision himself staying on the Cardinals beat past his 60th birthday, figuring it would be difficult for someone that age or older to relate to 20-year-old players.

“They would be a whole generation removed from each other,” he explained. “When the players could be your sons — or grandsons — then it might be time to sit back and look at things. Maybe that’s the time to find a nice (newspaper) desk job somewhere.”

That time never came, until now. He managed that generational divide just fine. “The Commish,” his nickname, can still work a clubhouse with the best of them.

To understand why, look no further than an article that appeared in the Post-Dispatch in July 2021 commemorating Hummel’s 50th year with the newspaper. Caesar wrote about the “trust” factor that has been a hallmark of Hummel’s career.

While the loudest voices often draw the most attention and the most critical columns get the most online clicks, Caesar wrote, “Hummel is true to his straightforward approach, chronicling what is going on without inserting a lot of hyperbole.”

Caesar interviewed sportscaster Bob Costas, who began his career in the 1970s broadcasting games of the American Basketball Association’s Spirits of St. Louis. Hummel also covered the team before taking over the Cardinals beat full time, forming a long-standing friendship.

“He gets the facts, paints an accurate picture and lets the readers draw their own conclusions,” Costas said of Hummel. “Other guys across the country who have covered a team might have more of an acerbic edge. But Rick’s advantage over time is that he is universally regarded as trustworthy. He adheres to a way that is old-school, and that has served his readers well.”

Costas told Caesar about the importance of a journalist to build trust, to properly handle off-the-record information, an area in which Hummel excelled.

“I’ve never heard someone say about Rick, ‘You quoted me out of context,’ or ‘that was BS,’ ” Costas said. “… One day at a time he built his Hall of Fame statistics. There was nothing that was flashy, just solid, well-written and reported stories” for decades.

“Some guys are there to stir it up. But they don’t generally last 50 years.”

Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright were in the Cardinals’ starting lineup Sunday afternoon for the regular-season home finale at Busch Stadium.

Pujols and Molina already have announced plans to retire after this season and were feted with a pre-game ceremony, and Wainwright has not yet committed beyond 2022. Fans were appreciative of what the players have accomplished.

Meanwhile, with considerably less fanfare, Hummel was in the press box writing the “gamer” for the Post-Dispatch.

That seemed fitting. Baseball, after all, is a game with perfect symmetry.