Portrayed as outlandish criminal in ‘Simpsons’ classic, A’s Steve Sax looks back
A’s broadcaster Steve Sax, who grew up in the Sacramento area and lives in Roseville, was one of Major League Baseball’s best second basemen of the 1980s and early ‘90s, making five All-Star teams.
But the thing Sax might be best known for? His appearance in a classic 1992 episode of “The Simpsons,” titled “Homer at the Bat.” The premise: Springfield Nuclear Power Plant has a looming softball game against Shelbyville, so series antagonist C. Montgomery Burns hires nine ringers, including Sax.
Sax told The Sacramento Bee on Saturday, before the second-to-last game of the A’s season, about how he and Yankees teammate Don Mattingly had recorded their lines when they came to Anaheim, where the Angels play.
“We knew ‘The Simpsons’ was already out, but we didn’t know it was going to be an iconic feature that it turned out to be, so we just did it,” Sax said.
In the episode, eight of the nine ringers suffer calamities on the eve of the game which preclude their participation, with Sax held on comically-unfounded suspicion of committing approximately 600 murders in the New York City area. Sax said people still make cracks to him about this.
When Mattingly came to town this year, he and Sax also reminisced about the plot point in the episode that kept Mattingly out of the game: sideburns only Burns could see. Sax said it harkened to a real-life interaction Mattingly had with Stump Merrill, who managed the Yankees during a moribund stretch for the team.
“I mean, out of all the things that we’re going through, you pick that fight with that guy,” Sax said. “It’s not very smart.”
For his participation in the episode, Sax receives residual checks that have ranged from what he believed was a high of $0.67 to a low of $0.01.
Sax said he doesn’t cash these checks.
