NASHVILLE, Ill. — About 50 miles from St. Louis, there’s a shed. Except it’s not a shed, it’s a house that’s visible from the main road that runs through town, and it’s bigger than the house you grew up in. Considering that there are apartments where the Polo Grounds used to be, an Office Depot where Seals Stadium used to be, and a baseball museum in upstate New York that’s fussy about who it honors, this shed is almost certainly the beating heart of Giants baseball away from 24 Willie Mays Plaza.
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Also, it’s capitalized. The Shed.
And if you think I’m getting too breathless about someone’s outbuilding, buddy, you must be new here.
Kirk Rueter asked some contractor buddies for a shed to display his eternally expanding collection of baseball memorabilia, and three months later, he got The Shed, a building that’s been mythologized and talked about for almost two decades. It’s hosted Giants teams and Hall of Famers, current major-leaguers and team owners. If it’s not being mentioned on the telecast or radio broadcast when the Giants are in St. Louis, that’s because it’s about to be mentioned. When a fan writes, “I would gladly accept a tour of The Shed over the (Hall of Fame) any day of the week,” believe him.
About 50 miles from St. Louis, there’s a shed, and if you’ve followed the Giants for longer than a few months, you’ve probably heard of it. Inside there’s an unfathomable amount of sports memorabilia, a TV the size of a minivan and all the amenities a person could hope for. But the mythology of The Shed doesn’t really have anything to do with that. That it’s filled with pieces of Giants lore isn’t that important. What’s important is that it’s become a piece of Giants lore.
How that happened is a way to explain just how different — how much better — the late ’90s and early ’00s were for Giants baseball. It was a golden era to which all future golden eras owe a debt. And this museum just happens to be curated by the perfect player.
When getting a tour of The Shed, you will hear a variation of the same phrase a lot. Think of it as a catchphrase, just said in different ways, over and over again. An incomplete list:
- I stole this.
- Stole these.
- This is my best pilfer right here.
- Took it right off the window.
- Here’s one of the signs I stole.
- I didn’t really steal that. I kinda traded for it.
- I always say “stole,” but they just give it to me.
- The best one is in here. Peter (Magowan), when he was here, he was like, “Hey! That’s where that went!”
Halfway through the tour, Rueter makes sure to clarify his hyperbole. “I don’t know if I ever really stole anything. People thought I did.”
Shawn Estes, matter-of-factly, from the other side of the room: “You definitely stole some crap.”
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The collection is magnificent, but the thrill of the hunt was even better. When he was a rookie with the Expos, Rueter noticed a clubbie with a sock filled with baseballs. Asked what they were for, the clubbie explained that he was going to be something of a courier, taking requests for players who want a ball signed from someone on the other team. Rueter thought, hey, I want some baseballs signed from players on the other team, and that’s how it started. The first time he took advantage of this was when the NL East rival Braves were in Montreal.
He gets excited talking about the players from that first safari. “Smoltz … Glavine … Chipper …” They’re all displayed on a wall of 162 autographed baseballs, a collection that includes too many Hall of Famers to count. There are also baseballs from Tom Brady, Arnold Palmer and Wayne Gretzky. Billy Bob Thornton is next to Lynn Swann, a couple rows down from Rueter’s first hit (a two-run single off John Smoltz with the bases loaded, two outs and an 0-2 count).
Greg Maddux was in that first collection, which makes him a nice bookend for the end of Rueter’s playing career. He proudly shows off a ball upstairs in The Shed. “That’s from his 300th win.”
“How’d you get that?”
“He pitched it against us!”
And, with that, the story reaches a logical end. Except …
“Every time they would throw out a game ball, I’d be standing there. Fooooomp.”
The onomatopoeia is followed by full-body laughter, as most of his heist stories are. The thrill of the hunt, man. The thrill of the hunt.
Close to the Maddux 300 ball, there’s a picture box display with a silk shirt and two leather boots. The shirt is embroidered with “Say Hey” above the pocket. Everything is signed by Willie Mays.
“Now that was a good story, too, Estes. Did I ever tell you that? When I took that from Willie?”
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The earnestness and absurdity of the sentence breaks up the room. Ah, yes, who among us doesn’t have a story of taking a shirt and boots from Willie Mays?
“He threw out a first pitch. He comes in … he has a silk shirt, a sport coat … and his boots, these zippered-up boots,” Rueter said. “I’m sitting in Murph’s (Mike Murphy, clubhouse manager) office, looking at him and the ‘Say Hey’ on his shirt, and I said, ‘Hey, that’d look good in The Shed.'”
He says that last part with an affected tone, comically devious and cunning, like a charming cat burglar. More laughs around the room.
“He starts unbuttoning, and I go, ‘Heck, you gotta sign it!’ So he signs it, and I’m still looking at him. Then I’m like, ‘Well, crap, those boots … those would look good in The Shed …'”
More laughter, this time with Rueter joining in. He already knew how ridiculous this was, but it’s all coming back to him as he tells the story again.
“So then he walks out, and he’s walking out of our clubhouse. Murph gave him a pair of shower shoes, and then all he has on is a little tank top. That’s all he’s got as he’s walking out of the clubhouse to go to his car, and everybody is like, ‘You just made the best player ever go out of the clubhouse in shower shoes and a tank top!'”
Rueter’s laughter this time is full-body, again, and punctuated with clapping hands. If he were telling a story about taking my dog’s medicine and throwing it in the ocean, it still would have been impossible not to laugh along.
If Rueter is ever indicted, Murph will be the first one to get a subpoena. The legendary clubhouse manager, who has been with the team since it moved from New York, is Rueter’s main accomplice. A promotional mirror with both a Bud Light and Giants logo was appropriated by Murph and donated to The Shed with the additions of a banner reading “THE SHED” and signatures from every Hall of Famer who was still with the organization: Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda and Lon Simmons.
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When Magowan exclaimed “That’s where that went!” up there, he was referring to a custom clock made to commemorate the opening of Pacific Bell Park. There were three of them. One of them was in Magowan’s office. One of them was in Larry Baer’s office.
One of them was in The Shed. How’d it get there?
“Murph. Murph gave it to me.”
It was a sentence that came up a lot. We already knew that Murph was a danged hero, but this pushes him over the top. What good would that clock be doing now, in an office or a closet? Here it is, on display in The Shed, a museum dedicated to an era of Giants baseball when everyone realized the team was never leaving San Francisco. The man who was more responsible for keeping the Giants here than anyone saw the clock and laughed at how it got there. What’s implied is that he almost certainly had a feeling of, yeah, this is where it should be.
It’s not just a museum of Rueter’s playing years, of course. There are autographs and jerseys from Tim Lincecum, Brian Wilson and Matt Cain, mementos from all three championship runs. How did you get those?
“Murph.”
If The Shed is a museum — and it definitely is, even if it’s a better place to watch the Super Bowl — then Murph is on the board of regents. The place didn’t need any help with the mythology surrounding it, but it’s getting a whole bunch from one of the greatest cult heroes in Giants franchise history.
Those cult heroes have to look out for one another, you know.
In order to understand the mythos of The Shed, you have to understand the mythos of Kirk Rueter, one of the most popular Giants of the last few decades. On another team, he might have been just a guy. In another Giants era, he might have been just a guy. On the Giants from 1996 to 2005, he became “Woody” — the right player in the right spot at the right time, almost to a comical degree.
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Consider Jim Barr, a right-hander who pitched for the Giants in the ’70s and ’80s. He appeared in 10 seasons with the Giants, just like Rueter. He threw 1,800 innings for them, almost 200 more than Rueter. His ERA was almost a full run lower (3.41 to 4.32), and even after you use advanced stats to take their respective eras into account, Barr comes out ahead in ERA+ (109 to 96) and WAR (28.4 to 12.3).
The odds are against a Jim Barr bobblehead giveaway in the future, though, and while he would get a warm ovation at a pre-game ceremony, it’s hard to imagine a lengthy, standing ovation. This isn’t just because Barr was underrated (which is definitely true). It’s because he had the misfortune of playing on the Giants in the 1970s, which was the darkest era in franchise history.
The team couldn’t win. Willie Mays was gone. The grass at Candlestick was replaced with Astroturf. It wasn’t unusual to read a headline like, “Giants deny team has been sold.” Lawyers were arguing that they should be allowed to move to Toronto, saying “The Giants are broke. They have no cash. They are living on handouts from the National League.” The team regularly played in front of a few hundred of their closest friends, except those hundreds of friends were drunk and very, very angry at them.
It was hard for a player who was in that zone between “solid” and “Hall of Famer” to get noticed on the 1970s Giants. It was harder for him to become a franchise icon. Take a look at what Jack Clark did with the Giants and compare it to what Will Clark did. The younger Clark was certainly a little better, but there’s only one “CLARK 22” set to hang from the second deck of Oracle Park next year. The 1970s were a rough scene for the Giants, and even the best players got sucked in.
The late ’90s and early ’00s Giants, by contrast were absolutely alive. They were planning to move from the worst ballpark in baseball to the best, with all of the deserved anticipation that brings. They had the best player in baseball — if not baseball history — and they were winning. The Giants of Rueter’s vintage felt permanent for the first time since Mays was on the team. There was no Toronto lurking in the shadows, no Tampa hiding under the bed while you slept. There was just San Francisco. That doesn’t sound like a big deal here in the future, where we know how it all turned out. But it was a remarkable reversal of fortune back then.
Rueter wasn’t responsible for most of this, but he sure was around for all of it.
He wasn’t a perfect pitcher, of course, and he knew it. When Karla Rueter recounted a story of her husband starting a game the day their first daughter was born, she mentioned that it was in the middle of a historic heatwave. How hot was it? It was so hot that manager Dusty Baker told Rueter that he was only going to throw six innings that day.
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“No, I always just pitched six innings.”
But he won. A lot. Even before becoming the winningest left-handed pitcher in San Francisco history (until Madison Bumgarner came along), Rueter got a deserved reputation for being a winner. The Giants were 165-113 when he started, which means they were essentially a 96-win team when he was on the mound. If you go just from 1996 to 2003, when he built this reputation, they were 143-84, which means they were like a 102-win team when he pitched.
Yes, this has a lot to do with Barry Bonds. And Jeff Kent. And Rich Aurilia. And Barry Bonds. It also has a lot to do with Barry Bonds. But it’s still impossible to watch those games, spread out over several seasons, and not associate Rueter with winning. When he pitched, the Giants played like the best version of themselves.
There was even more to it than this. There was the sorcery of Rueter’s pitching style, his pitch-to-contact mastery that was an anachronism even then. There was something beautiful in the way that he made huge, hulking sluggers swing as hard as they can, only to doink a ball to the second baseman. J.T. Snow told him that there was such a thing as “hitting speed.” You can throw faster than the hitting speed, but if you can’t do that, you have to throw just below it. Rueter was just below the hitting speed, and the joke back then is that if he would have done steroids, it would have ruined everything. All it would have done was push his velocity up to hitting speed.
When he was invited to pitch in the Hall of Fame Classic in 2014, his manager, Ozzie Smith, started him and ran him out for three innings, even though Rueter thought he was going to pitch maybe one inning in relief, if that. He was 43 years old, and he had been retired for nine seasons. When he woke up the next morning, his arm felt like it was about to fall off. He wasn’t just pitching against old-timers, either. Hideki Matsui was in the AL lineup, and he was just 40, two years removed from the majors. Jim Thome was there, just a couple years removed from the sport and four years removed from picking up down-ballot MVP votes.
How’d Rueter do?
“I did good,” he said. “They just kept friggin’ rolling everything over!”
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Of course they did.
All of this has a lot to do with his popularity. Although when Rueter was asked why he thought he might have been more popular with the fans than other ex-Giants throughout history, he laughed at the obviousness of the question.
“I’m a Disney character!”
Yes. Mike Krukow remarked on air that he looked like Woody from “Toy Story,” and Darryl Hamilton wouldn’t let the comparison go. A nickname was born, and the second winningest left-hander in Giants history became a Disney character.
Of course a Disney character, winning all the time, is going to capture the hearts of everyone paying attention.
Maybe I’m overthinking this.
The original Shed was too small, so there was an addition, but that was still too small. Now The Shed is a much larger building next to a much larger house entirely, and Rueter still can’t display everything. He can’t even come close.
(You could have had the original house and the original Shed for $100,000 if you were willing to pay the thousands and thousands of dollars in property taxes every year. It was on the market for two years, and it eventually had to be auctioned off. Where were you on that one?)
The legend of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is that while everything that’s on display is amazing, the basement … the basement is where the real goodies are. The people who have been down there, wearing a required set of latex gloves, tell of a storeroom that’s just as good as the museum. The Shed is no different, and in a room behind the minivan-sized TV, there’s a stockpile of memorabilia that doesn’t quite have a place. For now.
There’s an autographed Microsoft shirt from Bill Gates. There’s an autographed cap and gown from when Willie Mays was given an honorary degree from Dartmouth, unless it was from the time he was given an honorary degree from Yale.
Going through the collection behind the collection, Rueter still gets excited. He picks up team photos and talks about different players and coaches in them. He picks up a helmet signed by A.J. Pierzynski, with an inscription of “Woody, I tried to get u some runs, but struck out.” There are shirts, jerseys and more jerseys. There’s a whole mess of memorabilia from his beloved North Carolina Tar Heels, a Nebraska Cornhuskers helmet and even more jerseys. This isn’t where the bad memorabilia is banished. It’s all just there temporarily, waiting to get rotated back in.
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It’s all a nod to the erratic nature of sports. Heck, it’s all a nod to the erratic nature of life. The Shed isn’t just a way to point out that Billy Bob Thornton passed through Rueter’s orbit, it’s a way to point out that Rueter passed through Bob Quinn’s orbit. It exists because the 1996 Expos were contending and interested in a veteran like Mark Leiter. It exists because the Indians didn’t trade for Kirk Rueter at the 1996 deadline, even though they were exploring the idea. It exists because the Yankees wouldn’t pay an extra $6 million for Barry Bonds in 1992, but an owner who didn’t technically own the team yet would.
It exists in its current state because the Braves didn’t want to pay Willie Mays $15,000.
The Shed exists in its exact permutation because that’s how Rueter navigated his life, with events that both were and weren’t in his control. And that exact permutation happens to help describe why Oracle Park exists and how the Giants could sell it out season after season.
The stories are better than the memorabilia. Let’s say Gale Sayers signed a baseball that ended up in a plastic cube that was displayed at a restaurant. Here’s what that ball would mean to you: Gale Sayers, Hall of Fame running back, at some point in his life, held a baseball and, with his free hand, moved a pen around the ball in a distinctive motion. That’s it. Gale Sayers touched a baseball with a pen.
When it’s in The Shed, it becomes that time Gale Sayers came through town to see Dusty Baker, with an anecdote behind that. Guys like that were always stopping by the clubhouse to see Bake, and Murph would give Rueter a heads up. “Hey, Woody, such and such is coming tomorrow, so make sure you have a football or a basketball,” and this leads into another anecdote.
The Shed is a collection of this. This happened. And it was awesome. It’s an appreciation of just how strange this world is, and it’s curated by an 18th-round pick out of Murray State who couldn’t throw harder than 86 mph, fully aware of how unlikely and fortunate he is. This isn’t something that any ol’ player could collect and show off with the same zeal. It had to be someone who could appreciate it all the proper amount.
Upstairs, there’s a signed picture from Rich Aurilia. The inscription reads:
“I don’t want to be anywhere else. Put me on a wall, and bring me some prime rib.”
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Everybody wants to be on a wall in The Shed, and everyone wants some prime rib while they’re there. It’s a place for ex-teammates and friends to have fun. It’s a place that reminds you of just how unlikely and fun the Giants were as they transitioned from Candlestick to Pac Bell. It’s a place that reminds you of just how lucky Giants fans are on multiple levels, and every part of the collection reminds you of that more than the last.
(Photos: Grant Brisbee / The Athletic)
