Safest jobs in sports    Andy Dolich

Professional sports is a money-mad merry-go-round with owners buying and selling teams, managers getting hired, fired, rehired and refired, executives moving from team to team, players being drafted, signed and traded. Sometimes the sports employment landscape seems like a Bedouin All-Star game where you can't tell the players without a scorecard or DNA sample.

If you are looking for the safest jobs in the world of professional sports, don't look into the owners' suite, spend no time in the GM's, manager's or head coach's office, and forget the corner offices populated by front-office business suits. Program your career GPS to take you into the nooks and crannies of the stadiums and arenas to see who really has job security.

Let's take a quick snapshot of the safest of the safe in Bay Area sports. Longevity on the job usually lives in these areas:

* Team clubhouse operations

* Concessions and merchandise

* Ticket operations

* Stadium operations and security

These Career Longevity Hall of Famers have seen thousands of colleagues come and go in the passing parade of pro sports careers.

Mike Murphy: San Francisco Giants equipment manager

"Murph" has been a fixture with the Giants since the team moved west in 1958. He is such a legend that the Giants immortalized his work by naming the team clubhouse in his honor. He has 56 years with the club, 34 as equipment manager. He started out as a bat boy and was promoted to visiting clubhouse attendant. Giants GM Brian Sabean had this to say about him in the midst of the jubilant clubhouse celebration after clinching their first World Series: "Murph is as important to this organization as anyone. He makes all the players feel comfortable in a family way, and that should not be overlooked."

Murph has seen it all: four ownership changes, seven general managers, 17 managers, five Hall of Famers -- plus a few others who were short-term Giants -- and somewhere in the vicinity of 1,600 players wearing Giants laundry,

Now Murph has added three World Series rings, which is any sports employee's Holy Grail.

Steve Vucinich: Oakland A's equipment manager

Steve Vucinich, aka "Vuce," has been prowling the home and away locker rooms of the A's since 1968, when he was hired as a ball boy. Vuce is an East Bay original; he graduated from St. Joseph's in Alameda and Chabot College. He has been the man with the A's equipment plan through six World Series -- four of them resulting in rings, 11 American League championship series and abunch of league division series.

Vuce has been through four ownership groups, five team presidents, five GMs, 15 managers, 13 Hall of Famers, and thousands of players, not to mention a donkey, orange baseballs, one mechanized rabbit and an Earthquake World Series.

Jim Sweeney: San Francisco Giants Merchandise maven

If you are wearing a piece of Giants merchandise celebrating their World Series victories, there is a good chance that Jim played a role in getting it onto your anatomy. He might not have the rings to show the number of world championships he has been involved in, but just check his T-shirt drawer and you will find championship swag from the Warriors, 49ers, Raiders, A's and Giants. If it says "We're No. 1" on it, Jim has sold it. He has done it with a smile on his face, civility in his manner and a foam finger of friendliness. Career longevity runs in the Sweeney DNA: his brother Tom is San Francisco's most famous doorman, having welcomed visiting VIPs for 38 years at the Drake Hotel in his signature Beefeater uniform.

Mickey Morabito: Oakland A's director of team travel

Mickey will be completing his 36th season as the A's director of team travel after 10 seasons with the New York Yankees. He has been part of six World Series winners and has the bling to prove it. "The Mick" has been on more planes, trains and automobiles than the most traveled Samsonite. Once a traveling secretary establishes his reliability, he becomes indispensable, and that cements the team's long-term success. If you wanted the ultimate insider's view of the craziness of pro sports, it would come from the secrets locked in the mind of any pro team's traveling secretary.

Jim Mercurio: VP of 49ers stadium operations and security

Jim has been with the 49ers for 21 years. He spearheads a game-day group of up to 1,500 employees that he has to keep organized to make sure you have a safe and enjoyable time at 49ers games. Jim plays a major role in stadium ops and security for the NFL during Super Bowls if the 49ers aren't participating. He spent thousands of hours working on the transition from Candlestick to Levi's. Just imagine the details involved in setting up a new house for 68,000 of your closest friends and preparing to host Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7, 2016.

Jorge Costa: Giants senior VP of ballpark operations

Jorge is completing his 25th year after having worked in a similar position with the cross-bay rival A's for eight years. Jorge was a Coliseum usher before he was hired for his present job in 1981. He kept order when Candlestick was rocking and rolling during the 1989 Earthquake World Series, and he too has three World Series rings in his jewelry collection.

David Rinetti: VP of A's stadium operations and security

David and and several other Bishop O'Dowd students were hired as interns in 1981 at the princely sum of $3.35 an hour. One of his A's buddies, Kevin Kahn, is now the Colorado Rockies' VP of stadium operations. Rinetti was elevated to skybox coordinator in 1987. He has been with the A's for 25 years. He had his Hollywood moment with the filming of Moneyball at the Oakland Coliseum. If you want to know what Brad Pitt is really like, just ask David. He is in the midst of a video board face lift and other fan-friendly upgrades at the O.Co, getting ready for another season of A's baseball.

Harvey Pollack: Philadelphia 76ers' director of statistical information

Harvey is the only individual still working in the NBA since the league started in 1946. That's an incredible 68 years on the job for the 92-year-old wonder, nicknamed "Super Stat" by his legion of fans. He was the official scorekeeper at Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game in Hershey, Pa., and was the one who came up with the sheet of paper with"100" inscribed on it, displayed by Wilt in the legendary photo. He is the author of Harvey Pollack's NBA Statistical Yearbook, which is the Farmer's Almanac of pertinent NBA numbers. If you want to become a genius on the NBA, read this book.

So for all you pro-sports job seekers, let this be a valuable lesson. If want want to have sports career security, it's the jobs with the grit -- not the glitz -- that will pay long-term dividends.

Lefty O'Doul's persuasive charm persists   Dave Newhouse

With baseball awake from its winter slumber, I returned to my baseball roots, in a way. I paid a visit to Lefty O'Doul's restaurant and bar, feeling I had lost touch with baseball, a game I no longer recognized.

My wife and I went to San Francisco to hear the Irish Newsboys, a band that plays the first Friday of every month at Lefty's. They are mostly Chronicle journalists, though Bob Loomis and I worked together at the Oakland Tribune with Kevin Fagan, before the latter joined the Chronicle. Loomis couldn't make it this night, but the Newsboys (who have one woman in the band) delivered their usual songbook of clever Irish ditties. Ink-stained wretches never sounded so good.

But Lefty's was a good place for me to get in touch with baseball again. Because O'Doul, the man, was the manager of the Triple-A San Francisco Seals when I became infatuated with baseball, at age 10, in 1948, 10 years before O'Doul opened his eponymous restaurant on Geary Street, and 10 years before the Giants replaced the Seals at watchcharm Seals Stadium at 16th and Bryant.

For those too young to know, O'Doul was as much a San Francisco tradition as his hofbrau is. He managed the Seals from 1935 to 1951, before managing three other Pacific Coast League teams, including the Oakland Oaks in 1955, the year before they moved to Vancouver.

A baseball ambassador, O'Doul promoted the sport in Japan. Prior to managing, he was quite a hitter. He won two National League batting titles, in 1929 (with Philadelphia) and 1932 (Brooklyn). His .349 career batting average is the fourth-highest in major-league history, and the highest-ever by a non-Hall of Famer. In 1933, he was both an All-Star and World Series champion (New York Giants).

I knew of O'Doul's background as a kid, because I already was engrossed in baseball's history. I learned later that he dressed well, drove expensive cars and dated beautiful women. He was both a San Francisco native and an iconic San Francisco baseball figure. He died at 72, in 1969.

Though baseball was the first game I loved, thanks in part to Lefty, I soured on its national-pastime image this century, because of steroids. Baseball's records, especially the home run record, are the most hallowed sports records in America, and to see them bloated out of proportion by bloated ballplayers turned me off completely.

And that's why I gave up my Hall of Fame voting privilege -- because I didn't want to elect cheaters. I don't fault my newspaper brethren for holding on to that privilege, but when they argue that baseball's cheaters were Hall of Fame-caliber before they used steroids to ramp up their statistics, I come unglued. A user is a user, a cheater is a cheater. And the doors to Cooperstown should remain closed to both forever.

But on a Friday night in March, with the Giants and A's gearing up in Arizona, I enjoyed a corned beef sandwich and a draft beer at Lefty's, listening to the Irish Newsboys and enjoying the baseball ambiance at this crowded, popular saloon. My wife and I were then joined, unexpectedly, by novelist Richard Lupoff and his wife, Pat. The evening had turned into a happy roundtable discussion, and my mind was starting to imagine the fresh green grass of a spring baseball diamond.

Then I looked at the wall at O'Doul's, with Lefty and Johnny Evers -- of Tinkers to Evers to Chance double-play lore -- smiling down at me. Even though Cy Young eyed me quizzically, I was warming up to the call of balls and strikes until I noticed on the same wall Hal Chase, a noted fixer, and Napoleon Lajoie, a Hall of Famer, but a known racist. My smile turned to a frown.

It was time to pay our respects and leave. So what happens when I get home and fall asleep: I have a dream in which I'm trying to interview Russ Hodges, the great Giants announcer ("The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"), on the day he retired. This didn't actually happen, and I had no idea why it was happening now, but he was a reluctant interview regardless.

That wasn't the case in real life. I recall a 1960s Giants road trip when I filled in for the Tribune's beat writer, Emmons Byrne, who needed some time off. I'm standing outside the airport in Houston, looking for a taxi, when Hodges, Lon Simmons and Bill Thompson, the Giants broadcast team, invited me into their cab. All the way to the hotel, Hodges, a congenial man, sang Irish ballads: "Danny Boy," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," etc. The Irish Newsboys could have used him.

With April coming, and Opening Day, I know that I shouldn't give up on baseball. I'm trying hard not to. Some day, some way, baseball will win back my heart. The first, most conclusive, way is to keep steroids users out of Cooperstown, the whole gamut from Barry Bonds to Alex Rodriguez, and anyone in between, before or after -- not to mention Bud Selig, who did nothing to stop its spike.

But when they throw out the first official pitch of 2015 I'll be watching baseball as always, just not inside some ballpark. That's my one small protest, though I will root as strongly as ever for the A's and Giants. Another Bay Bridge World Series? Why not.

I may be a baseball grouch, but I'm not a baseball goner. See what you started, Lefty?
 

  Highly Recommended! 

 Bay 101 Casino 

1801 Bering Drive, San Jose, CA

(408) 451-8888 

www.Bay101.com

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