Stripper's Guide

In the 1960s and 70s, Tug McGraw was a star relief pitcher for the Mets, then the Phillies, and a gregarious colorful character embraced by baseball fans. He chose to parley that goodwill into, of all things, a daily and Sunday newspaper comic strip. 

The strip was titled Scroogie, starring (who else?) a major-league relief pitcher, playing for the Pets. Scroogie's main co-star is Tyrone, his best buddy and outfielder. Other characters include Homer, a dimwitted slugger; Millicent Cashman, owner of the team; and Royce Rawls, a starting pitcher. Many characters were loosely based on McGraw's real-life teammates, and real player names were often dropped for gags in the strip. 

The strip, which was syndicated by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, offered a somewhat different take on the world of pro sports owing to a creator who was actually experiencing that world from the inside. The strip was much more realistic than old-school baseball epics like Ozark Ike. Gags often target the fans, managers and owners, and predictably there's a lot of material about the existential dread of a relief pitcher, the perennial hero or goat in every appearance. 

The real problem with any baseball strip, though, is what to do in the off-season. Options are slim -- you can either ignore reality and have your team blithely playing away in January, or you can find other things for your characters to do from November to March. Scroogie gave its characterts an off-season, and filled much of the time with what players do on their vacations. Scroogie and Tyrone also took a shot at playing pro football, a ridiculous contrivance also favoured by other sports strips in the past.

Although Tug McGraw conceived the strip and tried to keep a hand in it, the day to day creation of Scroogie was handled by the uncredited writers Dave Fisher and Neil Offen, and the credited artist Mike Witte. The strip debuted on March 17 1975* (just in time for spring training) in a pretty healthy number of papers. The other shoe fell, though, when the baseball season was over and papers inevitably started dropping the strip. With two writers, an artist, a syndicate and a pro baseball player all on the payroll, the strip soon failed to pull its weight. Scroogie was retired after just over two years, on April 24 1977**. The final Sunday strip (with a very funny gag) is our bottom sample. Oddly enough, McGraw made claims that he was going to revive the strip, self-syndicated. As far as I know this never came to pass. What did come to pass, though, is that McGraw had some costumes created of the characters and booked actors to wear them for personal appearances for several years after the strip ended:

Mall appearance in Allentown, March 1979

During its short life Scroogie appeared in two paperback collections, Scroogie (Signet, 1976) and Hello There Ball (Signet, 1977).

Oh, and why name the strip's main character Scroogie? That's baseball jargon for a screwball pitcher, an infamously tough pitch for pitchers to master, and when thrown correctly, for hitters to hit. Tug McGraw was a screwball pitcher, one of the best.

* Source: Editor & Publisher, February 15 1975

** Source: Oakland Tribune

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM