When Jerry Springer, James Caan and Eddie Vedder crashed my office

A sportswriter’s world often collides with the exclusive mini-universes of actors, musicians, presidents and VIPs

Jerry Springer with a Marlins beat writer (and future Palm Beach Stories correspondent) at Dodger Stadium in 2011.

Rest in peace, Jerry Springer. And thanks for the fond memories of the day you showed up at my workplace.

As the Miami Marlins beat writer for The Palm Beach Post from 1999 to 2013, my office on any given day was the field, clubhouses and press box of every Major League Baseball park in North America.

Every now and then, that work world collided with the exclusive mini-universes of presidents, VIPs, Hollywood B-listers and other boldface names whose celebrity statuses somehow gave them the same special access sportswriters had to ballpark areas off limits to non-credentialed mortals.

It’s been that way for decades, and not just in baseball: Professional athletes and their safe spaces inside sports arenas are magnets for entertainment big-shots. When I covered the Marlins, my fellow scribes and I usually ignored them. We were too busy interviewing the manager and players and writing and filing pregame and postgame stories.   

But there was lots of downtime on the job, too. So, if saxophonist Clarence Clemons was leaving the field after practicing the National Anthem or actor/director Rob Reiner was watching batting practice in the dugout, of course we’d walk over and strike up a conversation.