Get Up, Baby!: My Seven Decades with the St. Louis Cardinals by Mike Shannon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Get Up, Baby!: My Seven Decades with the St. Louis Cardinals by Mike Shannon Scott D. Peterson Mike Shannon with Rick Hummel. Get Up, Baby!: My Seven Decades with the St. Louis Cardinals. Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2022. 240 pp. Cloth, $30. If longevity alone were a measure of greatness, Mike Shannon's sixty-four-year tenure as a minor league player, major league player, and radio broadcaster would put him in rarified company on that criterion alone. There are more dimensions to greatness, just as there is much more to Mike Shannon as legions of line-time fans in Cardinals Nation would attest. Those myriad, multifaceted elements are illustrated in Shannon's autobiography Get Up, Baby!, as told to Rick Hummels, whose own impressive fifty-year career covering baseball for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch makes him a fine composition partner for Mike the "Moon Man." Shannon's nickname is just one of the one of the many inside details that will entertain Cardinals die-hards and newcomers to the city described as "a drinking town with a baseball problem." One of the features of the book is the roster of heavy hitting baseball figures who offer commentary and corroboration in each of the ten chapters. For example, St. Louis' own Bob Costas sets the tone with the forward and readers like me might find newfound respect for Costas upon learning that he once lined a single off Bob Gibson in a fantasy camp game—albeit on a pitch tipped—much to Gibson's chagrin—by Shannon. Every page of the book is filled with anecdotes like this one to tell the story of an adult life in baseball. A subtext taken up by the roster of commentators, but notably not by Shannon himself, is whether Mike belongs in the Broadcaster's Hall of Fame. The proof to this issue lies in the tapes, but there is plenty of support to this claim in the pages of Get Up, Baby! as well. Shannon's "Moon Man" moniker is one of the book's gems and it's very well documented. Former teammate and fellow player-turned-broadcaster Bob Uecker alleges that Shannon "didn't get that nickname—Moon Man—for nothing. He was one of those unique guys who comes along every once in a while, hangs around, becomes a friend of everybody, and they believe what he says" (103). According to Dal Maxville, another former teammate [End Page 131] (and eventual Cardinals general manager), the nickname "goes all the way back to the minor leagues," when players discussing Sputnik said, "You know, Shannon's up there, too. He's around the moon all the time" (168). The Moon Man himself weighs in on his moniker when he says he was trying to distract Bob Gibson one time on the mound by telling him, "'There's going to be a guy that is going to walk on the moon one of these days.' So he started calling me, 'Moon Man'" (75). The book is replete with other surprising and engaging details, like the revelation by Dick Musial (Stan's son and Mike's football teammate at Christian Brothers College—which is Mike's answer to the all-important St. Louis question: "Where did you go to high school?") that Shannon was a great athlete but not a good cadet (52). Musial's testimony would seem to support Shannon's claim that he has been the only high school athlete to be voted Missouri's best as both a football and baseball player (46). The book even contains wit and wisdom akin to that attributed to fellow St. Louis local-boy-made-good, Yogi Berra: "I do everything long term but also day by day" (107). For those seeking inside baseball, the book has plenty, including the source of the titular call: Mark McGwire's MLB-saving seventieth home run in 1998 (119). There is an anecdote that has Shannon concerned about the prospect of paying five thousand dollars to fix a sign after he broke the "U" in "Budweiser" when he was making just four thousand dollars a year as a player (74) and another about how...