Mike Berger: a practical joke remembered

Earlier this month, the Arizona Diamondbacks hired Mike Berger to replace A.J. Hinch as the organization’s director of player development. Berger was a scout for Toronto the last four seasons and has worked for Montreal, Houston, Colorado and Texas.

Oklahoma City baseball fans will remember Berger, who played in 1,038 career minor league games, as a player-coach with the 89ers almost 20 years ago.

I remember Berger for one of the crazy days in my journalism career.

Must have been about 1990, when I was sports editor of the Norman Transcript, former OU star Nick Capra returned to Oklahoma City to play for the 89ers. I sent a reporter up to All Sports Stadium to write a story on Capra, the star of Enos Semore’s 1979 Big Eight champion team.

Anyway, the reporter writes the story, and I started editing. It read fine, except for a couple of funny items. For instance, at one point, Capra said he might retire from baseball and run a gas station. Didn’t seem like something a professional ballplayer would say.

But in those days, we had a small staff, a ton of work and there was a paper to put out. So I didn’t think anything of it.

The Transcript then was an afternoon paper, which means the pages had to be complete around noon or so. That morning, my reporter said he wanted to check on a couple of things and called the 89ers for clarification.