1990: Pitcher Mike LaCoss of the San Francisco Giants prepares to throw the ball.
Otto Greule Jr/Allsport/Getty Images
An ex-San Francisco Giants pitcher called in to KNBR-AM through the station’s main telephone line on Thursday morning and proceeded to rip Giants president and CEO Larry Baer and the hiring of Tony Vitello.
KNBR morning show hosts Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher weren’t even sure if the man they interviewed was Mike LaCoss, a Giants pitcher from 1986 to 1991. But in a follow-up phone call with SFGATE shortly after the six-minute call on the radio, LaCoss confirmed it was him.
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“Who the hell would call and try to imitate me?” LaCoss told SFGATE on Thursday morning. “I mean, a fake Barry Bonds or a fake Bruce Bochy or something like that, sure. But not me. Maybe if some guy’s on a mushroom trip or something at a party.”
LaCoss spent the final six of his 14 MLB seasons with the Giants, working as both a starter and reliever for the 1989 team that won the National League pennant. He said he was scrolling through YouTube on Thursday morning when the platform’s autoplay feature took him to the KNBR livestream of the morning show. So LaCoss called the station, wanting to talk about the Giants.
Shortly after 9 a.m., Murphy introduced “Mike in San Francisco” onto the air. LaCoss then asked the hosts if they knew his last name, to which Murphy and Boucher said they didn’t. Once LaCoss said who he was, Murphy — a longtime sportswriter before he moved to KNBR in the mid-2000s — seemed to be in disbelief as to who the caller was and feared they were getting pranked. He quizzed LaCoss on a tale about one of his old nicknames, “the Pink Pine-Tar,” and other information about the pitcher.
After those questions, Murphy turned the call into an interview. When asked if LaCoss is still in the San Francisco area, the pitcher bizarrely replied, “I’ve been dead for 10 years but I got resurrected, so here I am.” LaCoss told SFGATE he doesn’t live in San Francisco currently, but that he’s “somewhere in the Southwest.”
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LaCoss warned that he’s “negative” and that he might upset people with his views. Once he got around to talking about Wednesday’s 7-0 loss to the Yankees, LaCoss made it clear he didn’t like Buster Posey’s decision to hire Tony Vitello as the new manager directly from the collegiate ranks, as Vitello had been the head coach at the University of Tennessee.
“The hiring of the college guy, don’t you think that’s kind of a slap in the face to all of the minor league managers in professional baseball and all of the bench coaches in Major League Baseball that think about becoming a major league manager? They just bypassed all those guys and threw this college guy in there,” LaCoss said. “And of course when you saw the look on his face in his first real press conference, you saw a totally different look on this guy’s face, man. Like he just saw his dog got run over in the driveway.”
LaCoss said he isn’t hoping Vitello will fail, but quipped that the manager’s “word salads are going to get worse and worse” if the Giants go on an extended losing streak. Murphy then moved to end the call and take the show to a commercial break. Murphy said he wanted to make sure the station had the ex-pitcher’s phone number for a possible future guest spot, but noted that, “If you think the negative takes might be miffing some of the Giants brass, some of the front office guys don’t want the negative takes.” LaCoss had a reply ready to go.
“Of course not,” LaCoss said. “They have the most hated executive in Major League Baseball still around. Until they cut the head of the snake off, the baseball gods are going to continue to punish. That’s all I’m going to say. You’ll figure it out.”
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In his call with SFGATE, LaCoss confirmed that the executive he meant was Baer, saying that he “despises” the longtime Giants executive. Baer has been with the Giants since 1992, when he was a part of the ownership group who bought the team to prevent it from moving to Tampa Bay. He was promoted to the role of president in 2008 and added the CEO title in 2012. Baer has remained in that role even after he served a monthslong suspension in 2019 when a video surfaced of Baer in a physical altercation with his wife.
Back on KNBR’s airwaves, LaCoss’ call reverberated for the rest of the morning show, both with Murphy and Boucher’s breakdown and with audio from the call. And when the station posted the audio on their podcast feed, they still weren’t sure whether LaCoss was a prank or not and described his call as “easily one of the most awkward and uncomfortable calls in Murph & Markus history.”
Undoubtedly, it was a more entertaining thing to discuss than the actual Giants game from Wednesday night.
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