R.I.P.: Jerry Remy, Boston Red Sox Player, Broadcaster

Jerry Remy November 8, 1952 – October 30, 2021

Jerry Remy, an undersized everyman of a ballplayer who hustled his way to the American League All-Star team in 1978, died Saturday, according to The Boston Globe citing a team source. He was 68 and had undergone repeated treatments for cancer since he was first diagnosed in 2008.

Nicknamed “The RemDawg” by play-by-play partner Sean McDonough in the 1990s, Remy became a cultural icon during the franchise’s early 2000s renaissance, a welcome nightly visitor in fans’ living rooms across New England. He was elected to the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 2006.

During a broadcast career that began improbably in 1988, two years after he retired from playing due to chronic knee problems, his accent was always comfortable and familiar — the Tigers were always the Tigahs.

Fun-loving and quick with a wisecrack that drew guffaws from a play-by-play partner, Remy came across to viewers as “the guy you’d like to have a beer with after the game,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner once said.

But it was Remy’s ahead-of-the-curve analysis that set him apart from other color commentators.

Though he only hit seven home runs during his major league career, he could break down a swing on air with the best of them, and he was peerless at anticipating pitches and steals.

Before he ascended to the broadcast booth, Mr. Remy’s boyhood obsession with baseball helped him soar to uniquely personal heights: starting for his favorite team.

Remy also endured wrenching lows that were headline news, and which he addressed in his 2019 memoir “If These Walls Could Talk”: the cancer recurrences, his struggles with depression, and his son Jared Remy’s conviction for murdering his fiancée, Jennifer Martel.

To viewers who knew Remy primarily as a broadcaster, it might have seemed he was a Red Sox lifer. In spirit, he was. But he actually began his major league career with the California Angels, for whom he played three seasons before the Angels traded him to the Red Sox in December 1977.

Remy’s later years were shadowed by tribulations. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, the first of seven times he required treatment for the disease.

But his greatest pain occurred in August 2013, when his son Jared was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to murdering Jennifer Martel, the mother of their daughter, who was then 4 years old.

Remy and his wife, Phoebe, endured public criticism after the Globe reported their efforts in the years before Martel’s murder to protect Jared, despite his long history of violence.

“Did we enable him? Yes. We paid for lawyers,” Remy told sports radio station WEEI in March 2014. “We paid for psychiatrists. We paid for the help that we thought he needed.”

The couple, he added, did what most parents would do for their children.

Jared Remy is serving a life sentence without parole in the correctional center in Shirley.

Remy’s struggled with his health for more than a decade.