Photograph courtesy of Randall Slavin
Unless your name is Google, you do not know more about sports than Randy and Jason Sklar do. Period. No, seriously, stop arguing—you just don’t. The stand-up comedians and Parkway North grads have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure sports trivia so freakishly vast, it’s enough to make you think that Peter Gammons, Bob Costas, Chris Berman and Jim McKay had a
kid … but then the combined volume of stats and player analysis and pre-season forecasting was too much for one brain, so they had to have another one to hold the overflow. Or something like that.
A career in sports wasn’t in the cards (“We’re a couple of short Jews,” Randy says. “We were better at comedy”), but luckily for us, they still decided to use their powers for good. If you’re a fan of late-night TV, you may have seen reruns of ESPN Classic’s Cheap Seats, the brothers’ cult cable show in which they lobbed snarky insults—Mystery Science Theater 3000–style—at footage of oddball sporting events like professional wrestling and putt-putt golf championships. And even if you’re not, you’ve probably seen or heard them somewhere else: They regularly guest host radio’s The Jim Rome Show and appear on SportsCenter every other Sunday. This summer they’ll play the fictitious heirs to the Topps baseball card empire in a Web series on topps.com. Basically, they’ve become the sports broadcasting community’s go-to guys for comedic commentary.
To be honest, they know so much about sports, it can be a little intimidating to interview them. (In the span of a 45-minute phone conversation—they live in California now—they managed to name-check former St. Louis pros Jack Brownschidle, Steve Zungul and Novo Bojovic.) But who better to hold up as prime examples of St. Louis baseball fandom than the guys who developed Utilityman, a faux documentary about their failed attempt to get retired Cardinals infielder Jose Oquendo into the Baseball Hall of Fame?
Can St. Louis take credit for turning you guys into the sports nuts you are today?
Randy: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Jason: It definitely made obscure-sports fans out of us.
Why is that? You guys know way too much about the minutiae of obscure sports.
Jason: I don’t know. I remember going to see boxing matches between the policemen and the firemen at the old Checkerdome. They were all-out brawls. It was like watching professional wrestling.
What are some of your favorite baseball-related memories from St. Louis?
Randy: Our dad used to sell real estate, and he would take us to houses that he was showing, and we would sit in the back of his Monte Carlo and listen to Jack Buck call a Cardinals game. No one would ever leave their kids alone in a car outside of a house anymore, but you could back then.
I also remember Ken Wilson when he was announcing. He would always put product placement into whatever call he was doing. I remember he called a home run by Tommy Herr, and he was like, “Tommy Herr hits a ball deep to right field, it’s back, Raines is at the track, he’s at the wall … Nobody beats Pizza Hut for quality and price. Nobody ever has.” We’re like, “Wait … what just happened?”
Jason: Here’s a great one. It’s sort of baseball-related. Randy was up in the Arch, and it was wintertime. He looked down and saw that someone had walked off “Jesus is No. 1” in the snow, which is fine, but it gave Randy an idea of how to improve upon that statement. He didn’t want to defame that statement at all because, hey, to a lot of people, Jesus is number one. So he just added “Ivan De” at the front and another 1 after the initial 1, so the message then read “Ivan DeJesus is No. 11,” which was true. [DeJesus played 59 games for the Cardinals in 1985.]
You guys played baseball growing up, didn’t you?
Randy: We did.
Who was better?
Jason: We were different players. He was an infielder, and I was an outfielder. We were about even. There were some years when one was better than the other one.
Randy: One time at a freshman high school game, our coach had me warming up for three innings, and then he brought Jason in to pitch. So I was like, “No, you warmed me up.” He was like, “Yeah, I know I warmed you up, but I wanted to bring in a cold-armed pitcher.” He was so proud that he couldn’t admit the fact that he made a mistake.
On a scale of Fredbird to Albert Pujols, how would you rate your athleticism back then?
Jason: With a Ken Oberkfell in the middle? I would say I had the speed of a Ken Oberkfell, the good decision-making of a Vince Coleman and the sheer foul-ball power of Mike Laga. That’s how I would describe myself. So, closer to Fredbird.
You came here for Cheap Seats when they were tearing down Busch, didn’t you?
Randy: Yes we did. The whole episode was about how we were going to try to get the city to combine the two stadiums and make the biggest left field ever. We were trying to save Busch Stadium. In the final scene, we thought that our plans were going to succeed, and then right behind us they hit it with a wrecking ball.
Were you sad to see it go?
Randy: I was a little sad to see it go, the circular monolith that it was. We had a lot of memories of that place.
Jason: I was totally sad to see it go. It stuck around long enough that it was the final one of the multipurpose stadiums, and that made it unique.
I gotta put you on the spot now: Who do you like in the NL Central this year?
Jason: I want to say the Cardinals. I don’t know why, I just have a feeling. The Astros are falling apart. And I love that Milwaukee is a team built on beer, but I can’t get behind them. The Cardinals just know how to win. I feel like if the Cardinals get healthy, they have a real shot at winning the Central.
Randy: I think it’s wide open, like it is every year. But I really do think you need to watch out for the Cubs. It scares me to say that. As a Cardinals fan, I don’t love the Cubs. But if the Cardinals can’t win, I’d like to see the Cubs win.
That’s not going to make you very popular around here.
Randy: You know what, though? St. Louis fans love their teams, but if somebody came into Busch Stadium and threw a no-hitter against the Cardinals, that man would receive a standing ovation. And that’s why St. Louis sports fans are the best. That’s what makes St. Louis great. And I think it’s what makes players excited to play there. I think we’ve got a good young team and anything can happen. A lot of it is going to depend on the pitching. But we’ve always got a shot because we have a great manager.
So how did you choose Jose Oquendo for the Hall of Fame special? Was he your favorite player growing up?
Jason: He was one of them. I think we started out thinking, “What would be the most interesting choice, and what would tell the best story?” And then as we really started to get into it, as we talked to players and managers, we started to believe in the quest. We know how hard it is to get into the Hall of Fame—there are lots of guys with better numbers than Oquendo—but he had the intangibles. And I think in a weird way, Randy and I feel like the Oquendos of comedy. We’re not the best-looking guys. We’re not the biggest guys. We’re guys who scrap.
Have you talked to him lately?
Randy: We saw him when we came back for the World Series. He’s just a great guy. I really do believe that they’re grooming him to be a manager. He’s just a fun-loving guy, and all of the players really respond to him and love him. I think he could be the next manager of the Cardinals or end up managing somewhere else.
So if he gets the job and calls you up and says, “Hey, I’m looking for a pitching coach …”
Randy: I would be so onboard. I used to throw a knuckleball in high school. So I would teach whoever needed to be taught to throw my version of the knuckleball, and let me tell you, its main quality was its ineffectiveness. You guys want to throw an ineffective knuckleball, call me.
