When Joe screwed up

This doesn’t have much to do with baseball, but here are three great stories from everyone’s favorite baseball writer, Joe Posnanski, about times he screwed up royally on the job.

Which reminds me of one of my own stories…

I was a disc jockey at a small radio station in the mid-70’s. Back then, Ford was competing against the Japanese automakers by advertising that they had the “best-selling small car lineup in American.” My job was to read that tagline live every evening around 7:00.

Trouble was, I just couldn’t get it right. The first night, I proclaimed (in my best DJ voice) that Ford had “the best-smelling small car lineup in America.” Oops, I thought. I’ll do better next time.

The next night, I thought I was ready. I had thought about it and thought about it, practiced saying it a hundred times. But when I got on the air—yup—”the best-smelling small car lineup” came out of my mouth again. Well, maybe no one noticed, I thought.

No such luck. The next night, one of the other DJ’s was waiting for me, ready to coach me on how to say “sell” instead of “smell.” We practiced for about fifteen minutes. I was confident, I was ready. He got in his car and drove away, listening on the car radio. And, of course, I did it again. He almost wrecked the car.

When I showed up at work the next night, they had moved the ad to another time slot.