The White Sox family is a close-knit bunch, from the security guards at the clubhouse door to the office of Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf.
You understand why just by glancing through the media guide, where you’ll quickly notice the number of employees who have worked two, three or even four-plus decades in the organization.
You come to the corner of 35th Street and Shields Avenue for the job, and one day you look up and realize you’ve been there your whole career.
That’s one of the reasons the loss of Ed Farmer resonates so much. Few members of the Sox family were as beloved as Farmer, the longtime radio voice who died Wednesday night at age 70.
Robin Ventura, the former Sox manager and third baseman, put it best Thursday when discussing the death of his old friend from his home in Stillwater, Okla.
“He was a South Sider all the way through,” Ventura said. “It’s a sad day.”
Farmer liked to talk and he loved to tell stories — from the minute he got out of his car in the Sox Park parking lot to the moment he left the booth after the game. And he was always networking, even before the term became popular.
“One of the greatest things about him, no matter what situation he was in, no matter who he met or who he was around, he was always himself,” Ventura said. “He was opinionated but also knowledgeable. His love of Notre Dame was funny. He never went there, but he was like the sacred son of Notre Dame.
“He just knew so many people, had different connections and would always try to connect people together. He didn’t care what was going on, he was going to connect two people. Even with his health issues, he never had bad days.”
Farmer and I had a few things in common. We were born in the same hospital — Little Company of Mary in Evergreen Park — went to Catholic schools and grew up going to Sox games and loving Notre Dame football. I loved listening to his old stories, whether they were embellished or not.
But as affable as he was, Farmer could also be stubborn, such as last spring when the Sox offered him a handicapped parking pass and he refused to use it. I tried to talk him into it, telling him the word itself didn’t mean anything — that the pass would simply make his walk from the parking lot to the booth a little shorter and a lot easier.
Farmer’s response? He said he would just get to the park a few minutes earlier, but thanks anyway.
It was the old ballplayer in him, or maybe it was the South Side attitude he could never shed, even if he wanted.
When you know everyone, as Farmer seemed to, it’s hard to tell anyone not to stop by and say hi. That’s why the Sox radio booth was often as crowded as the State Street “L” stop at rush hour.
“A guy of his stature could’ve been phony and fake,” WGN-AM broadcaster Andy Masur said. “But the way he treated everyone was what I’ll remember. He was real. The true characters of the game, those old-school guys that have their opinions about how the game should be played and how it was played, there are not many of them left.”
Masur said Farmer had “a multitude of stories,” adding with a laugh: “Sometimes they ended differently than the first time you heard it.”
My favorite was about the time he went to New York with his family in high school and tried to get into Yankee Stadium during the offseason. His mother told a security guard that Ed would one day be playing in the majors, but that still didn’t convince the guard to let them inside.
Years later, Farmer finally made it to the majors and was entering a game at Yankee Stadium out of the bullpen. Back then relievers were driven to the mound in bullpen carts, and as luck would have it, the same security guard — who Farmer said he remembered because he had a couple missing fingers on one hand — was driving the cart.
“Ed noticed the guy’s fingers, and looked at him and said ‘Remember me? You’re the guy that wouldn’t let me in,’ ” Masur said. “Then he got up and walked to the mound. He wouldn’t take the cart. What are the odds on that happening?”
Cardinals radio voice John Rooney, who was Farmer’s former radio partner with the Sox, recalled him flinging a burnt pizza onto the netting behind the plate during a game and once using a swear word after a brutal loss, referring to Detroit as the “(bleeping) Tigers.”
Farmer was a homer, no doubt about it. During a Sox losing streak in 1993, he decided to help out during a trip to Boston.
“The team wasn’t going well, so to lighten things up, I borrowed a bellhop uniform and went out one day and got the players cabs,” he told me later. “Made about $35 in tips.”
“Really?” I asked. “From the Sox players?”
Farmer scoffed and walked away.
True story? Who knows? But in 2000, he gave the idea to Sox manager Jerry Manuel, who had been suspended for his role in the team’s brawl with the Tigers and had to go back to the hotel before the start of a game. When the team bus came back after a win, Manuel was there in the lobby wearing a bellhop hat, greeting the players as they entered.
Later that season, Farmer and coach Bryan Little bought giant Afro wigs for Frank Thomas, Ray Durham and Bill Simas to wear during pregame stretching, helping to lighten the mood.
Whatever it took.
But while Farmer never took himself too seriously, he was very serious about his craft.
“Ed knew what was going to happen in a game many times before it happened,” Rooney said. “He knew his baseball, really knew his pitching, and that’s what made him a good scout and then a good analyst. He was a quick study on play-by-play as well.
“You never knew what he was going to say, what was going to come out of his mouth, but you knew it would be pretty entertaining. I like to think I learned a lot of baseball from Ed, and he learned a lot of play-by-play from me, and that’s why we got along so well.”
In his final years on the job, Farmer became a target for a vocal minority of Sox fans who didn’t like his style. That’s an occupational hazard for all broadcasters, though much of the criticism was unnecessarily harsh and personal.
“It bothered him a little, but at the end of the day he moved forward,” Masur said. “It wasn’t in his nature to let that stuff bother him. No one wants to hear that, but it didn’t affect the way he went about his job or his personality at all.”
Farmer fought through a hereditary kidney disease that eventually led to a kidney transplant from his brother, Tom, nearly three decades ago. But you wouldn’t know about his health issues from talking to him. During the SARS outbreak in Canada in 2002, he couldn’t travel to Toronto for fear of catching it, so he provided the color while watching games on TV back home.
“He battled the polycystic kidney disease like crazy,” Rooney said. “But he was so upbeat about it. He did the first game from the studio in Chicago, and you wouldn’t know he wasn’t there. Ed is definitely one of the voices of summer you’re going to miss. I don’t care if you’re a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan. We both shared the opinion that if we’re not having fun, the fan is not having fun.
“I know Ed enjoyed going to the ballpark every day and being around those people that he liked. I heard (Vin) Scully say in his message to the country on this coronavirus, that when he left the booth, it wasn’t so much the game he missed, but the people. Ed, I think, was the same way.”
Back in the mid-1990s, Farmer convinced me to become an organ donor to help others in need. I still have that faded donor card in my wallet, which was signed by Ventura, who was serving as a witness at the event Farmer organized seeking organ and tissue donors. Ventura said he wound up getting an ankle joint transplanted from a tissue donor after he retired, years after breaking it during a game.
Maybe the best way to honor the memory of Farmer is to become an organ and tissue donor yourself.
It would be a fitting tribute to a guy who was a South Sider all the way through.
