As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted. Months ago I filed my last column for MLBblog.com, since then being chained to an upcoming book. Next May Potomac Books will publish A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth. I hope that you enjoy.

A sequel to 1996′s The Storytellers, the book will feature about 120 big-league announcers telling their favorite stories: the largest total of Voices in any sport, in any work. Last year Potomac published Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story, in its fourth hardcover edition, recently released in paperback, and a “talking book” by Blackstone Audio.

While I was away, Joe Hardy became Stephen Strasburg, the 2010 Red Sox filled a big-league Medical Center, and Ray Halladay threw two hitless jewels. More nostalgically, baseballphiles were invited to a magical point of our past: October 13, 1960.

At 3:36 P.M. Eastern Time, Pirate Bill Mazeroski homered in the ninth inning to win World Series Game Seven, 10-9, against the Yankees: given plot and context, arguably the greatest game ever played. Never forgotten, NBC’s telecast was heretofore never again seen, since baseball was not then preserved by videotape.

Only a process called kinescope – to quote the New York Times’ Richard Sandomir, “an early relative of the DVR, filming off a TV monitor” — saved even random coverage. Yet kinescopes were bulky, thus often destroyed. Even later videotape was senselessly erased or discarded. The upshot was a 1950s-70s lost generation of classic ball.

Enter Der Bingle: Bing Crosby, the musical, film, radio, and TV star and longtime part Pirates owner. In October 1960, too nervous to watch the Series, Crosby went to Paris with wife Kathryn, listening there by radio. “He said, ‘I can’t stay in the country,” his widow said. “‘I’ll jinx everybody.’” At the same time, Bing knew he would want to see Game Seven if the Buccos won: thus, had a company “kinescope” the final.

Back in America, Crosby watched the five-reel 16-millimeter film, then put it in his wine cellar-turned-vault, chockablock with the legend’s records, tapes, and films. Undisturbed, the reels lay undiscovered till December 2009, accidentally found by Robert Bader, Vice President for Marketing and Production for Bing Crosby Enterprises. Ali Baba never found such gold.

“I had to be the only person to have seen it in 50 years,” Bader told Sandomir. “It was just pure luck.” Bader approached baseball, which, stunned, viewed the black-and-white film, grasped its cachet, and will show the game this December on the MLB Network, Bob Costas hosting.

“It is a time capsule,” said Major League Baseball Productions senior library and licensing manager Nick Trotta: simple graphic, sans slow-mo, instant replay, or analysis, but rich in look, sound, and feel. Mel Allen and Bob Prince did NBC’s play-by-play. Casey Stengel and Danny Murtaugh skippered. Forbes Field and the original Yankee Stadium were nonpareil sanctora: the Pirates’ hull so intimate you could almost reach out and touch the field.

Crosby’s film shows Forbes Field’s right-field wall, in-play batting cage, and vast stretch of outfield acreage heavy with gap hits. My next column will etch why Game Seven remains a generation’s touchstone with its Good God Almighty, can you believe that, one play-topper after another’s lilt.

In the meantime, I appreciate your patience with my 2010 sabbatical. I’ll try to do better as I begin a new book about Fenway Park’s centennial, to be released in 2012.

 

 

Some people get all the breaks. Regions can, too. Since 1958, 1977, and 1997, Vin Scully, Dave Niehaus, and Jon Miller have knit Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco, respectively. In 2010, Dick Enberg will join them with the San Diego Padres: to baseball, coming home.

“I’ve always been passionate about it, even doing other sports,” notes Enberg, saying he will televise more than 100 games next year. His last TV baseball was the 1985 Angels, later football and tennis precluding coverage. “What a great chance to now do the sport I love, in the city where I live, returning to my roots.”

Rod Stewart wrote You Wear It Well. Enberg wears age 75 superbly, as a CBS NFL viewer knows. Four months ago, contacted by a Padres source, I termed the possibility of Dick’s hiring “a 10-strike.” It still is: under full circle, viewers meeting the points of Enberg’s past. To use his signature, “Oh, my!”

Growing up in Michigan, Enberg loved how Detroit’s Ty Tyson “used the language.” Later he worked as a $1-an-hour janitor at Central Michigan University’s radio station, left for hills heavy with farmland shot by Ansel Adams, and got two degrees in health sciences at the University of Indiana.

In 1961, Enberg took his doctorate, left for California State University at Northridge, and began a teaching and coaching job. “Sportscasting was just a way to complement my salary.” Gradually, he became a boxing and Western Hockey League announcer, leaving seminars and blue books, play-by-play “now in my blood.” It is fair to say he never tried to cleanse it.

In 1969, Enberg, 34, added Angels baseball to Rams radio and UCLA TV basketball. His new park lay hard by Disneyland. The San Gabriel Mountains hued the backdrop. Palm trees swayed beyond center field. Arriving, Dick thought it Anaheim’s second magic kingdom.

“Never in contention,” he said, “so you looked for the bizarre.” One batter hit between shortstop Jim Fregosi’s legs. “That error?” mused manager Lefty Phillips. “Water over ithe bridge.” In 1970, Alex Johnson won the Halos’ sole batting title. Phillips fined (five times), benched (29), and suspended him. A judge called Johnson “emotionally incapacitated.” How different, Alex mocked, was the team?”

Then, in 1972, California got a Mets pitcher for Fregosi. Through 1976, Nolan Ryan no-hit four teams, including Detroit. “I’m in the booth where I’d visited as a kid,” Enberg said of 1973, “and Nolan’s on a tear.” Norm Cash thrice went hitless. Next up, he ditched his bat. “He had a leg from a clubhouse chair as a substitute. The home plate ump didn’t notice” till the first pitch was thrown. “Get a bat,” the umpire said. “Why?” Cash huffed. “I’m not gonna hit Ryan anyway.”

By now, Dick had hit the big time with TV’s syndicated Sports Challenge. Each show, ex-jocks turned panelists. “The people on these programs were idols to me as a kid. Now I’m asking them questions.” He produced PBS’s The Way It Was, aired the game show Battle, and joined NBC in 1975. Suddenly, the classroom seemed far away.

Curt Gowdy was the Peacocks’ then-apotheosis: “Name it, he did it,” said an NBC official. Dick ousted him on NCAA hoops, Super Bowl, Wimbledon, and 1980s Granddaddy of Them All, worked Sports World, and made the analyst look good. “Only he could work with us at the same time,” said Al McGuire, “and keep everything sane.” Not even Gowdy kept so many balls in the air.”

In time, ubiquity cost: Dick left the Angels in 1978. In 1982, he did NBC’s Game of the Week and the Brewers-Cardinals World Series, . “I kept recalling the fifties, when Milwaukee was everything. When things move me, it’s clear to viewers.” He was warm, kind, and open, unlike network dominoes.

“No room for me,” he mused upon Vin Scully’s 1983 hiring. “Game had enough guys for two teams a week.” In 1985, Enberg refetched Angels video. Even friends asked why. Like now, “I gave the most honest answer I can — I love the game. I miss it.” Casey Stengel said of baseball, “Not too hard, not too easy.” Dr. Dick struck the balance. Next year his wit and schoolboy awe will stud the Pads.

In 2002, Enberg was flying from Buffalo to Los Angeles — “ironically, after a football game” — when he learned of the Angels’ first pennant. Quietly he began to weep. Fearing trouble, a woman in the adjacent seat caressed her Crucifix and held his hand. Laughing, Dick explained: “I told her why it meant so much — the Angels — after all these years.” One religion, meet another.

In 2010, Enberg will help make the West Coast baseball’s best coast. Frank Lesser once wrote a musical Most Happy Fella. If you’re not happy hearing Scully, Niehaus, Miller, and now Enberg, you need a new sport, or pulse.

 

In 1939, Lou Gehrig called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Like the Iron Horse, another man of honor now faces a final inning. You will recognize the name, have heard his lyric verse. We are the lucky men and women to have known broadcaster W. Earnest Harwell.

Gehrig died of infantile paralysis. Last month Harwell, 91, announced he has inoperable cancer of the bile duct, shocking, a writer said, “his countless friends, admirers, and listeners.” For half-a-century, Ernie was radio’s beach bud, camp counselor, pillow pal: mythy and sweetly rural, his voice falling lightly on the ear.

Listing much, biography call tell too little: born, 1918; World War II veteran; announcer, 1948-2002, mostly with the Tigers; best-selling author; lyricist, 70 songs; contributor; Collier’s to Reader’s Digest; creator, baseball’s greatest essay, A Game For All America. Like Ernie’s plaque, it now hangs in Cooperstown.

Living one of these lives would be exceptional. Extraordinarily, Harwell has lived them all. Even more, as Red Sox radio prosopopeia Ned Martin once said: “The wonder of Ernie goes far beyond being so talented behind the microphone.” The musical Peter Pan sang “I’ve got to crow.” Having much to crow about, our friend never has.

I met him in the late 1970s, Ernie kindly writing a blurb for my first book, on Dizzy Dean. Later we staged series at the Smithsonian Institution and Baseball Hall of Fame. Out of the blue, he would call about a project, a certain game, another season, doing this, I think, with hundreds of people: each day a “new adventure,” as he now calls being “ready for whatever God’s got.”

At 6, he had been Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell’s paper boy; 8, minor league batboy; 20s, sports editor, Marine magazine Leatherneck. Talking, you wouldn’t know. Ernie sang a duet with Pearl Bailey, spoke at a Billy Graham crusade, invented a bottle can opener, had a race horse named after him, wrote for Sammy Fain and Johnny Mercer, and calmed Motown in 1967 after rioting killed 43. You had to find it from someone else.

Harwell donated the world’s largest private baseball book collection to the Detroit Public Library. He became the first sports Voice to air coast-to-coast TV, be baptized in the Jordan River, and be traded for a player. He called the Tigers “Tiges” and a double play “two for the price of one” and how “a batter just stood there like a house by the side of the road”: language-made-literate, making the complex simple. He was always there.

Ernie understood radio v. television: TV, still life; the wireless, a sonata. He grasped our two major sports: “football, packaged for the screen; baseball, the mind.” He even made the impersonal (foul ball) personal: “It’s snagged,” he said, fictively, “by a guy from Alma, Michigan” — or Grand Rapids or Detroit. As a boy, I told Mom that Harwell had a lot of friends. He did.

In December 1990, ex-football coach-turned-Tigers president Bo Schembechler fired W. Earnest, the Grinch stealing Christmas. Bayed the Detroit Free Press: “A gentleman wronged.” Rightly rehired, he was later named by Sports Illustrated Voice of baseball’s all-time dream team. Always learning, Ernie now has much to teach: How did he do all this with such magnanimity and grace?

Wife Lulu of 69 years became Harwell’s best friend. Their four children, reading, and exercise kept him young. Raised in Washington, Georgia, he distilled a small town’s rhythm and ritual and sitting on a front porch and “hearing Mom and Dad” talk about the people of their place. Finally, Ernie would tell you, he believed in The Kindly Light That Led.

In 1973, Harwell wrote the tune Move Over Babe, Here Comes Henry as Hank Aaron prepared to cross a most Ruthian line. Each Sunday Ernie sang more timeless songs: Rock of Ages and Amazing Grace and Abide With Me. In a sense, his voice was itself melodic — gentle, beckoning — redolent of the South’s lulling, siren past.

Baseball’s man of honor says he has “maybe a year or half-a-year left. Maybe two months. Maybe less.” Oscar Wilde penned The Importance of Being Earnest. Harwell’s life shows the Wonder of Being Ernie. God bless him, and He will.

 

 


 
 




NBC TV’s Dinah Shore sang circa 1956 “See The USA in your Chevrolet.” An author sees much of the USA in the obligatory book tour: in my case, touting this summer’s new Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story (Potomac Books, $29.95)

Raised on baseball, I enjoy meeting people who love play-by-play’s hypnotic rhythm. Weaned on television, I also like the chance to rediscover radio. Traveling an Interstate, lost on an artery, or sampling backcountry, I found: a) Baseball is still good company; b) announcers I too seldom hear.

In particular, let me suggest one Voice for your traveling and listening pleasure. Born in Colorado Springs, the Rochester Red Wings’ Josh Whetzel was raised in Helena, grew up in Parsons, Kansas, and in 1994 graduated from the University of Kansas. Straightway Josh became the Sunflower State’s KSCB Liberal news/sports director, airing the local BeeJays.

Cliche invokes “the old college try.” The Jays were a Jayhawk League colleague team. By turn, Whetzel did the Class A Albany, Georgia, Polecats, Kinston, N.C. Carolina League Indians, and 2000-02 Double-A Binghamton Mets. In 1962, Casey Stengel said of the N.L. expansion Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” After even a brief whiff of Whetzel, no one asked if Josh could broadcast it.

Almost To the Majors

“It’s conversational. It’s quirky. It’s what did you do today?” Bob Costas mused of play-by-play. “Tell me about the guy sitting down at the end of the dugout. Is he a character? Does he give guys the hot foot? Does he come from some tiny little town in Arkansas somewhere? How did he get here? It’s a story-teller’s game.”

In 2003, Whetzel took his story to what Hall of Famer Harry Walker once called “the closest you can get to the majors without actually being there”: Triple-A Rochester, New York. That year the Red Wings were ending a 42-year marriage to parent Baltimore. By coincidence, the new Twins affiliate also needed a broadcaster, Whetzel trumping more than 70 other candidates.

Half-a-century earlier, Brooklyn announcer Red Barber had told protege Vin Scully, 22: “Don’t listen to other annnouncers. You will water your own wine.” Now, hearing Red Wings audition tapes, general manager Dan Mason “got tired of listening. Everybody was trying to be Scully!” 

The exception was Whetzel, admiring Scully, but determined to be himself, baring realism, knowledge, anecdote, telling detail, and a born-for-the wireless tenor. Eddie Gomez, who played bass with pianist Bill Evans, termed the jazzman’s aim “to make music that balanced passion and intellect.” To Mason, Josh’s music ties “great pipes, a very easy-to-listen-to style,” and love of America’s greatest and oldest talking sport.

This is Josh’s seventh year in what Baseball America once voted “Baseball City USA,” bigs Voices Jack Buck, Lanny Frattare, Glenn Geffner, Hank Greenwald, Josh Lewin, and Pete Van Wieren having been raised or worked in Rochester. Reaching and pleasing his public, Whetzel also broadcasts winter University of Buffalo basketball. Many Voices work 12 months a year. Only one baseball Voice works with one lung. You’d never know listening at the park — or hitting the highway for a book.

Irony: Living in Upstate New York, I had heard Josh occasionally. This summer I heard him regularly, learning and appreciating. Further irony: I was traveling because of a book on Josh’s idol.

“Grace Under Pressure”

In 1955, Lawrence Peter Berra was introduced to Ernest Hemingway. ”What paper you write for, Ernie?” said Yogi. The novelist famously wrote about grace under pressure. Whetzel has shown it since turning 18 years of age.

Entering his senior year in high school, Josh “began to cough a lot. I had a feeling something was wrong,” he said. Something was: cancer, in particular, a football-sized tumor in Whetzel’s right lung, around his esophagus and hooked to the back of his heart. Before long he brooked chemotherapy, radiation, and two surgeries, the second to remove the tumor and right lung.

Cured, Josh’s last chemotherapy treatment was 1990 — his year of high school graduation. Around then several classmates contacted Dream Factory, similar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, vowing “the moment of a lifetime for a critically ill child.” Fulfilling his dream, the Dodgers fan chose a visit to Chavez Ravine, touring it and meeting, among others, skipper Tom Lasorda and, yes, Scully: to Josh, “the best broadcaster, ever.”

Back in Kansas, Whetzel was interviewed on a local radio station “about the trip. Afterward the station manager said I had handled myself pretty well on the air and asked if I wanted a part-time job,” he said. Soon Josh became a disc jockey and board operator for the Kansas City Royals, attended Labette Community College, and graduated from KU. Final irony: “Maybe none of the radio happens if I’d never been sick.”

Loving Rochester’s streams, greenery, and sky drawn by Ansel Adams, Whetzel knows “the goal is still the bigs.” Dinah Shore saw the USA in her Chevrolet. I hope Josh will soon see it where he should: The Show. George Eastman called color photography “a mirror with a memory.” Each day, Whetzel beautifully paints baseball memory’s look, sound, and feel.

 

 

 
 

In 1950, William Faulkner wrote the Nobel Prize for Literature, “Tokyo Rose” went to prison, and South Pacific cried gotcha to the soul. More enduringly, Vin Scully, 22, joined Red Barber at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field: ultimately, the Roy Hobbs of baseball broadcasting, “the best there ever was.”

           

Each game Scully asked the listener to “pull up a chair,” inviting and compelling. Recently his first-ever biography, Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story, was released. Booklist hails “a synchronicity between author and subject that’s as seemingly effortless and beautiful as a perfectly executed double play.” The book is already in a second printing.            

           

This year the American Sportscasters Association named Scully “The Top Sportscaster of All-Time”: at 81, still baseball’s lingua franca, refusing to deviance- or dumb-down.  May I tell you about my book and its subject: a nonpareil announcer, and career?

 

Youth As Prologue

 

Pull Up a Chair begins with irony:  Born in the Yankees’ Bronx in 1927, the son of Irish immigrants became a childhood Giants fan!  The émigrés often walked Vin in a baby carriage across Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus. “Vincent,” mother Bridget later said, “I dream that you will study here.”

           

Scully’s family lived on a fifth-floor flat in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan, within walking distance of the Polo Grounds and the Big Ballpark in the Bronx. “It is written that in every childhood a door will open,” Vin once said, “and there’s a quick glimpse of the future.” His door opened at eight years of age.

           

In Scully’s home sat a huge radio: “One of those deals,” Vin said, “a monster with a wooden cross piece under it for support, its receiver high off the ground.” Each Saturday he opened a box of crackers, poured a glass of milk, and literally crawled under the radio – sat under it -and heard Bill Stern, among others, broadcast college football.

           

“The sound washed over me,” Scully said, “like water out of a showerhead”: a tyke already intoxicated by the crowd. At 10, he and classmates were asked by the good Catholics Nuns what each hoped to be.  Most said a doctor, nurse, lawyer. Vin said, “I want to be a sportscaster.”

           

Youth as prologue: Vin worked his way through Fordham Preparatory School, entered its University in 1944, spent a year in the Navy, then returned to campus. Friends recall him lugging a heavy tape recorder, broadcasting sotto voce. Scully played center field on the baseball team: good-field, no-hit, and very fast.  His nickname: The Phantom.

           

In 1947, Fordham trekked to New Haven to play Yale: its first baseman my future boss and friend: George H.W. Bush. Yale won, 2-1. As the 41^st President said, years later, in a Scully video: “If I remember correctly, when we played each other, we each went 0 for 3.”

           

Red By Any Name

 

In 1949, the soon-to-be graduate became a summer intern at 50,000-watt CBS affiliate

 
WTOP Washington: amazingly, the only station to reply among the 125 Scully wrote. He became a news, weather, and sports substitute for, among others, Arch McDonald, Voice of the Washington Senators: “First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League.”

           

Since 1939, Barber had aired the Dodgers. A decade later, the also-CBS Radio Sports

director interviewed the intern. That fall, needing a sportscaster, Red phoned WTOP for references, then called Vin’s home. Barber got Scully’s mother, who that night greeted Vin at the door.

           

“You’ll never guess who called today,” Bridget said, red-haired and breathless. “It’s such a great thing that he called here, such a busy man, it’s so exciting.  He wants you to call him.”

           

“Who was it?” Scully asked.

           

“Red Skelton,” Mom said of the iconic comic.

           

The last laugh was not on Vin. Next day Barber gave him his first assignment: Boston University v. Maryland college football at Boston’s Fenway Park. Expecting a covered booth, Scully broadcast from the roof: no press box, in freezing weather, never whispering a complaint.

           

Barber was impressed: much later, calling Vin “the son I never had.” That winter, Ernie Harwell left the Dodgers for the hated Giants. Red chose Scully to succeed him. Six decades later, Harwell, laughing, terms it “my greatest contribution to baseball.”

 

Throwing Darts in the Fog

 

How did Vin become what Jim Murray called “The Fordham Thrush with a .400 larynx”?  In Pull Up a Chair, I discuss what makes Scully, Scully: elusive, since defining art can rival throwing darts in the fog.

           

His goods tie credibility, proportion, knowledge, discipline, grasp of everyday hope and fear, and melodic Irish tenor less Pavarotti than Perry Como. The package has graced a nonpareil 25 World Series, 18 no-hitters, more games than anyone in broadcast history, 1979-97 CBS Radio, and 1983-89 NBC Television Game of the Week.

           

Vin has made the Hollywood Walk of Fame, won a lifetime Emmy Award, entered every major radio/TV Hall of Fame, and been voted “the most memorable personality in L.A. Dodgers history”: connecting tissue between the public and its game. Churchill called “words you use as ammunition.” Scully uses them against temptation to turn the dial.

           

Retrieve Vin’s “twilight’s little footsteps of sunshine.”  Recall “He catches the gingerly, like a baby chick falling from the tree.” One day a weak dribbler-turned infield hit prompted Eugene O’Neill’s “A humble thing, but thine own.” Another, a mutton-chopped player entered the game. “What ho! What ho!” said Vin, inspired. “What men are these, who wear their sideburns like parentheses?”

Of St. Louis: “It was so hot today the moon got sunburned.”  Tom Glavine: “He pitches like a tailor: a little off here, a little off there, and you’re done.” A giveaway day at Dodger Stadium: “There’s something redundant about giving noisemakers under 14 years of age.” Rennie Stennett, giving out cigars, predicting his wife would have a boy. Said Scully of the girl: “[Stennett] only missed by one.”

 

Perhaps Scully never went deeper than May 7, 1959.  In 1957, the Dodgers had left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. That winter catcher Roy Campanella was crippled in a crash. Now baseball’s then-largest crowd, 93,103 at Memorial Coliseum, feted Campy before an exhibition.  Scully spoke magically, climbing a peak of place and mood.

           

“The lights are going out in this final tribute to Roy Campanella, and everyone at the ballpark … are asked in silent tribute to light a match,” he said. “The lights are now starting to come out, like thousands and thousands of fireflies, starting in center field, glittering around to left, and slowly the entire ballpark.” Then: “A sea of lights at the Coliseum.”

           

L.A. sees Vin’s lights nightly. Others see them on satellite radio, Scully navigating dead air by using language as an oar. Once Andre Dawson made the disabled list. “He’s day to day,” Vin said. Pause. “Then, aren’t we all?” His career is now year-to-year, still splicing a listener and the game.

 

Safe Harbor

 

Scully would have made a great politician, yet hated politics: too intrusive, too public, too little respect for silence. In 1955, Flatbush USA won its only world title. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world,” Vin said, simply. That winter people asked how he remained so calm. “If I’d said another word at that very instant, I’d have broken down and cried.” Since then, his ammunition has often included silence.

 

1974: On a rainy night in Georgia, Henry Aaron’s 715^th homer crossed a most Ruthian line. Vin called the drive, moved to the back of the booth, poured a glass of water, and hushed for half-a-minute. Then: “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol!”

           

Segue to 1986. Bill Buckner’s immemorial error froze time – and me, as a Red Sox fan. “Here comes Knight!” Vin said. “And the Mets win it!” Scully’s usually singsong voice rocked, throbbed, alight with feel.  He then quieted for an entire minute.

           

1988: Kirk Gibson heroically went deep. Sixty-seven seconds later: “in a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened”: still the 8-year-old, under the radio, letting the crowd hold sway.

           

It seems impossible that Scully will one day retire. Yet the Scully School can live:  vivid is good, personal better, and making the complex simple best. In today’s 24/7 attention span-challenged age, most Voices fall to meet their audience. Scully asks his to rise.

On October 26, 1991, I worked all day on a Bush 41 address. At 10 P.M., I left the White House, found my car on the Ellipse, and turned to CBS Radio’s Game Six coverage of the 88^th World Series.

           

At one point, a Minnesota Twins runner reached second base. Out of the blue, I heard Scully reference Broadway’s Death of a Salesman: its “tiny ship” – the runner at second base – seeking “safe harbor” – home plate. I almost drove off Pennsylvania Avenue. Only Scully could fuse baseball and Arthur Miller: literature in a highlight age.

           

Fast-forward to 2025. A grandchild will savor some announcer. Smiling, we’ll recall Scully: in memory, our safe harbor. From baseball, Vin seldom lets us wander far away.

 

Imagine the baseball in play 8-9 minutes in a three-hour game.  (You don’t have to.  It’s fact.)  Now picture a television viewer unable to see even that peewee action. (Below, read about the new Yankee Stadium.)  The mix makes baseball video-toxic.  Paraphrasing Churchill, seldom do many watch so long for so little.

 

Baseball’s rhythm has been a TV problem since Viet Nam and Watergate.  Yearly the bigs pledge to stop pitchers dawdling; batters stepping in, out, and in the box again; and umpires refusing to call a strike.  If baseball were the Politburo, it would be in the 40^th year of its first five-year plan.

 

“Next year,” Bud Selig vows of a quicker, better pace.  Next year never comes.  What has: a new problem compounding TV baseball’s plight.  A vertical wire and mesh backstop obstructs the home plate camera, often blocking an entire field: akin to watching through Attica prison bars, or peering through a net.

 

The home plate camera is football’s 50-yard or hockey’s center-ice:  a viewer’s picture window; the prism through which we look.  Till the early 1990s, each park perched its camera low, near the field, and above the backstop:  the screen rose 10-15 feet vertically, then angled at 45 degrees to just below or behind the camera, intersecting the top of the lowest deck.

 

The effect was intimate, wire/mesh-unhindered video:  We watched because of, not despite, coverage.  Today every park could use a similar up-close format:  In fact, only Boston does.   Elsewhere, declining local ratings show the madness of out-of-view, out-of-mind.  Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot by watching.  We rarely watch what we cannot see.

 

Last Decade TV Disaster

 

Opening in 1992, Camden Yards rivaled Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park as baseball’s most camera-friendly park.  “It’s your window on the game,” Orioles Voice Chuck Thompson called the home-plate camera, “so you place it near the field.”  Each’s shot was unobscured by any wire.  All aped the best box seat.

 

In 1994, trouble rose at Texas’ The Ballpark in Arlington, designed partly by owner George W. Bush.  (Full disclosure:  I was a White House speechwriter for his dad.)  Inverting custom, cash-hungry Bush fils put the broadcast booth over swanky suites:  home-plate shot players looked like ants.  Add lousy coverage to Bush’s Iraq, Katrina, and A.I.G. 

 

Miming W., for 15 years new parks have favored in-person high rollers v. crucial-to-baseball  viewers.  Example:  Instead of angling the backstop, each allows a towering vertical wire backstop to intersect the TV screen.  Baseball calls it “safer”:  in truth, the 45-degree wire protects more patrons.  The real reason is contempt:  Baseball doesn’t want to bother arranging a screen to serve the paying and viewing customer.

 

The new Yankee Stadium shows the error of mocking television.  The old House That Ruth Built’s low home plate shot avoided the backstop.  Today’s solely vertical wire screen blocks half the infield.  “Depending on your sense of what a new $1.5 billion park should be,” said the New York Post‘s Phil Mushnick, “impaired-view TV likely lands between annoying and intolerable.”  Playoff hockey never looked so good.

 

Incredibly, the team’s Yankees Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network didn’t investigate camera placement until weeks before the opener.  (Also missing: the old Stadium’s birds-eye first- third-base camera wells: “a must for a new big-league park in 1989,” said Mushnick, “let alone 2009.”)  A YESer added:  “In the old Stadium it was impossible to show a bad angle.  Here it’s impossible to show one good.”

 

Getting That Was Bad Gets Worse

 

The National Football and Hockey Leagues help teams ensure that TV lures new viewers, including kids.  “When a new arena [or stadium] opens,” said an NHL official, “it reflects league input on how to position camera angles.” Its home-plate equivalent – 50-yard line and center ice, respectively – is usually near the surface.  By contrast, Selig’s office is MIA, even as bigs TV cries SOS.

 

This decade A.C. Nielsen’s World Series, All-Star Game, League Championship Series, Game of the Week, and many local-team ratings have dropped.  One reason is baseball becoming intolerably untelegenic.  “Ratings sink,” said a Fox TVer, “because how baseball presents itself stinks.”  Out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

 

Since 1994, 18 new parks have opened:  e.g., Arizona, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, Washington, and now New York.  Intimate in person, they are distant on the screen. Many blare players-turned-pygmies.  Most brook a TV wire lattice.  Unlike the NFL or NHL, Selig doesn’t seem to care if baseball puts its video house in order. 

 

Make a pitcher throw the ball, umpire call a strike, and batter not leave the box.  Make it constitutional for a game to sing, rock, move.  Angle the backstop below the home plate camera.  Put each park’s camera as low as Fenway’s.  For what not to do, check Yankee Stadium.  For what to do, check baseball circa 1960.

Every once in a while I am asked the most honorable men I know in broadcasting. Among others, I cite Ernie Harwell, 91-turned-19; Bob Wolff, the USA’s long-running sportscaster; and Merle Harmon, dead last week, at 82.

Quoting Shakespeare, Merle was nature’s nobleman — not easy, having worked for Charles O. Finley; aired the Milwaukee-headed to-Milwaukee Braves; and replacing Dizzy Dean on network television. For a time, life mirrored the Twilight Zone:  “more like Alice in Wonderland,” he mused. The curiouser and curiouser is how Merle prevailed.

His window on America opened in southern Illinois. Then: Graceland College, the Navy, University of Denver and radio in Colorado. Harmon debuted on a 1949 Class-C doubleheader. “It lasted eight hours, the temperature was 104, and I had a headache,” duly noted on the air. A listener wrote: “Don’t tell us your troubles.  Broadcast the game.” 

Topeka’s team bus carried 17 players. Often it stopped, had to be pushed to a gas station, and maxed at 40 miles an hour — downhill. One rider, pitcher Ebbie Lubanski, bearded owner Joe Magoto: “I’m quitting baseball — my salary.” Joe pulled a gun: “Pitch your next game.” Lubanski packed, turned pro bowler, and snubbed meal money: $1 daily.

“The bucks went to the big club,” said Harmon. “Other things kept your interest.” One was Joplin’s 1950 shortstop.” At 18, Mickey Mantle already hit balls out of sight.” Doing 1952 basketball, Merle improved his. “No more bad passes,” Kansas coach Phog Allen said. “You players gotta see things happen — skip movies — rest your eyes.”

Allen mentioned Max Baer. Doctors told the boxer to visit California, lie on the sand, and look at the stars. “Instead, Max went there,” Phog said, “laid the stars, and looked at the sand.” Harmon never forgot the vision.”

Enter Charlie O.

In 1954, Merle did Kansas City’s last Triple-A season. Next year the Athletics relocated. Harry Truman threw out the first ball on Opening Day. Harmon huzzahed illusions: A’s 6, Tigers 2. “[Manager] Lou Boudreau, later an announcer, said, ‘If your team is good, you can criticize. If it’s lousy, show patience.’ In Kansas City, I was the most patient man in the world.”

The club never matched the ’55ers’ place (sixth) or gate (1,393,054). Nine skippers left. The A.L. lost K.C.’s 1960 All-Star Game, 5-3, despite a seven-Yanks roster. “[A's owner Arnold] Johnson gave ‘em Art Ditmar, Ralph Terry, Roger Maris,” said Harmon. “How it goaded us — ‘Yankees cousins.’” The A’s once bashed New York for 27 hits. “We felt like the powerhouse. ‘Course, the feeling didn’t last long.”

In December 1960, Chicago insurance broker Finley bought 52 percent of the team. Then Merle snubbed Charlie’s “Poison Pen Day” for Kansas City Star sports editor Ernie Mehl. “Ernie got baseball here in ’55 — and Finley’s trashing him!” said Harmon. Deeming Merle a traitor, Charlie sacked him in late 1961.

Nietzsche says, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” What happened next made Harmon feel like Charles Atlas. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

Both Sides Now

By late 1963, baseball’s ex-capital had become a lonely post, drawing 32 percent of 1957′s record date. Resigning, Voice Earl Gillespie saw Milwaukee’s writing on the wall. Could Merle, replacing him, retrieve its past? Attendance rose? Baseball yawned: only a temporary court order kept the Braves in town. “What a mess. They had to play ’65 in a city which knew it was losing them.” Mild and upright, Harmon became a loci of curse, slight, and hate.

“Hot? My seat burned. If I praised the Braves, people said, ‘Don’t root for traitors.’ If I didn’t, die-hards said, ‘Don’t mess up another club.’” Upping angst: an N.L. team record six players with 20 or more homers. “How could you not get excited?” Milwaukee vied till September, “baseball afraid we’d make the Series and County Stadium would be empty.”

Curiouser: a) Wisconsin swore the Braves’ 45-outlet network did games gratis. “A bank and three breweries paid, but wouldn’t say so — guilt by association”; b) WSB Radio Atlanta aired 53 games, 26 from Milwaukee. “One city doing every game even though its team is leaving. Atlanta doing a team it doesn’t have”; c) a legend, remerged as ghost.

In 1955, Merle visited Yankee Stadium — “first time, I’m quaking.” Entering the booth, he thought, “My God, it’s him.” Smiling, Mel Allen said, “Anything you need, let me know.” Fired in 1964, he took the next-year Atlanta job to avoid seeming yesterday’s dessert. Said Harmon: “We’d have cookouts in my yard and Mel’d pour his heart out about the Yankees” Why? he asked, like Milwaukee.

In October 1965, the Braves marched toward Georgia. Merle’s next mission: make Saukeville forget Dizzy Dean.

Going National

August 1961. Since 1955, Dean’s CBS TV “Game of the Week” had exteriorized baseball. One morning the phone rang at the A’s hotel in New York. “Merle Harmon?” a man said. “Yes,” Merle said, half-asleep. “This is Chet …,” the voice said. “Would you be interested in doing a national sports show for ABC TV?” Harmon tensed. A player was plainly kidding him.

“Sure, if I can work it into my schedule. Talk to my agent,” Merle jibed. “Who’s your agent?” said the man, undeterred. Harmon: “He’s tied up.” Caller: “We’d be glad to contact him, but can we see you? We’re leaving for Chicago today to do the [football] All-Star Game.” 

Merle sat up, gulping: “Excuse me. Who are you?” Chet Simmons of ABC TV Sports: “We want to talk to you about a show — today.” Harmon reddened: “I must sound like a moron.” Simmons laughed: “Boy, it must be fun to travel with a baseball team.”

Next month, Merle began “Saturday Night Sports Final.” ABC named him baseball Voice for its new “Game of the Week” in 1965. CBS’s series entered only non-bigs cities — its rub, and beauty. “The heartland was its habitat,” said Harmon. By contrast, the blackout of, say, St. Louis hurt.

ABC’s “Game” aired Saturday, Memorial and Labor Day, and Fourth of July in every city. Like Jack Brickhouse, Merle evoked just folks. Like Vin Scully, he dashed cliche. Like Curt Gowdy, he was “breezy, relaxed, and stylish,” said TV Guide.

“We had a sense of the ‘first ever’,” he said, “a prototype for baseball TV since” — truly national. The problem was habit: weekends meant Dean.

Ol’ Diz a New Problem

The Yankees declined to join ABC’s 1965 package.  Instead, CBS’s “Yankee Game of the Week” slayed Merle in Dallas and Des Moines. Worse, local TV split the big-city audience. “ABC’d show Cubs-Cards in New York, and the Mets’d kill us.” Desperate, one Saturday the network tendered a great chatterbox of the time.

At D.C. Stadium, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey joined the booth. “So loquacious, I almost asked him to do play-by-play,” Merle said, “but feared it would demean the office.” The Nats’ Bob Chance pinch-hits. Humphrey says, “Is he related to Dean Chance?” Bob was black, Dean white: Much of America still hailed Jim Crow. “I don’t think so,” said Harmon, retrieving the game.

Coverage ended Saturday, October 2. Harmon spent Friday phoning New York. Ahead by a game, the National League first-place Los Angeles hosted Milwaukee. If L.A. won, Merle flew to Cleveland — or via Chicago for the American League champion Twins. A Dodgers loss would revive the second-place Giants — and put him in San Francisco. Writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “I have known uncertainty.” Harmon now bore the “most uncertain 24 hours of my life.”

The last plane left at 12:15 A.M. Saturday. “I’ll only know where I’m going when I find how the Dodgers do!” Naturally, they went extra innings. At the airport, Merle tells the cabbie to “turn on the game!” L.A. wins. “Let’s see, this means Cleveland. Take me to United quick.” Finding a seat, he checks the ticket. Panic. “Cleveland? I’m supposed to be in San Francisco!”  Arriving, Harmon calls ABC’s hotel. “Yes, Merle, this is your destination.” Going home, he was tempted to take a train.

Better Deja Vu in Brewtown

That month, NBC bought 1966-68′s “Game.” Merle had already aired the Jets and Steelers (local radio) and NCAA and American Football League (ABC). He liked more than respected football. “You’re fine if you prepare weekly like a player. Baseball — try finding something interesting as you say the pitcher throws the ball — especially if your team is out of the pennant race.”

Harmon found Minnesota in 1967. Dean Chance went 20-14. Harmon Killebrew had 44 homers. The Twins drew 1,483,547, more than they had or would at Metropolitan Stadium, and lost a last-day flag. “If we’d beaten Boston [the Sox won, 5-3], I’d have done the Series with [NBC's] Gowdy.” He hurt, but shone. “I’ll never forget the letter I got from a woman criticizing me for not rooting for the Twins.”

Harmon aired them through 1969. On April 1, 1970, his old team bought the Seattle Pilots for $10.8 million. “Calvin Griffith [Twins owner, releasing him] knew what Milwaukee meant to me.” County Stadium reopened April 7: Angels, 12-0. “I learned quickly that it’d be a long year” — too, how the Braves’ rape stung. “The feeling was: ‘We won’t be hurt again.’”

In 1971, Bob Uecker joined Merle in the Brewers’ booth.  Harmon trained him, reveling in Uke’s growth. By 1973, Milwaukee passed a million for the first time since JFK. Slowly, the feeling warmed. 1975: 48,160 cheered Hank Aaron’s return from Georgia. 1978: The Brewers grand-slammed a record thrice in the first three games. 1979: Milwaukee more than tripled the Braves’ last-year gate. It was almost better the second time around.

“It took a while,” said Harmon, “to get back a decent team, then fans to get excited.” The ’82ers won a pennant. Curiouser: He was 850 miles away.

Coda for a Grand Career

In late 1979, inking a multi-year NFL TV pact, Merle ogled the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. “I’d have missed a dozen Brewers games.” Flagship WTMJ demanded he do each. Harmon chose none. “[He] will make more money [NBC],” mused The Milwaukee Journal, “get more exposure, and do less traveling.” Merle did “SportsWorld,” backup “Game,” and 1980 World Series. He did not, alas, call the Games. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. America boycotted Moscow. NBC promptly pulled the plug.

“A great letdown,” said Harmon. Another: being axed by NBC in 1982 for Bob Costas, 29. What goes/comes around. In 1966, Gowdy replaced him on “Game.” Each joined the Rangers in 1982: Merle, play-by-play; Curt, planning and evaluation. A similar cycle was Nolan Ryan’s, K-ing 21 Hall of Famers in four different decades. One batted August 22, 1989. “Three and two to [Rickey] Henderson!” said Harmon. “Ryan gives the okay. Strike three! He did it! He did it! Number 5,000 for Nolan Ryan! A record that will never be broken.” As usual, Merle was right.

Harmon had each player and umpire sign a scorecard laser print, retiring after three no-hitters, Joe Namath’s Super Bowl III “guarantee,” and 1974 World Football League, The Los Angeles Times having said:  “He may be the best radio football announcer of all time.” Wearable and modest, he exuded class. Routinely I routinely told friends: “If my son [now eight] is half the man Merle is, I’ll be one happy dad.”

The entrepreneur founded the Merle Harmon Fan Fair, soon the largest U.S. sports souvenir retailer.  Later, the Mormon lay preacher went belly-up, had a heart attack, and beat both — each a breeze, he joked, vs. Finley, the lame-duck Braves, and Diz.  Merle divided time between Dallas and Milwaukee, loved his children and grandchildren, and did not forget, and was not forgotten by, his public. Such amalgams are hard to find.

“Every day I do exercise on the treadmill,” the still-nobleman mused after a stroke.  Richard Nixon once said: “I get up every morning just to confound my enemies.”  Harmon got up to help his friends.  God bless him, and He will.

 
When Red Barber died in 1992, Steve Kelley wrote that “some people are meant to be immortal.  Their voices and their visions are meant to continue from generation to generation.”  Exemplum: Harry Kalas, this week dying suddenly and stunningly of a heart attack, at 73.

His face belonged in the Vienna Boys Choir. His voice evoked a bass, lead cello, or wrecker razing cars: to Bill Conlin, “a four-Marlboros into a three-martini-lunch baritone. Harry Norbert Kalas, a minister’s son, wooed the Delaware Valley, spreading the Phillies’ Word.

“It’s like Harry had opera training,” said long-time vice president Larry Shenk. ”No one can call a moment like him.” To the Main Line, Brandywine, and Center City, “Long drive … It’s outta here!  Home Run!” was outta sight. Someone will succeed the man whose popularity was more phenomenal than the Phillie Phanatics’s. No one will replace him.

In 1944, Kalas, 8, raised near Chicago, visited Comiskey Park for his first bigs game. Rain halted batting practice. ”The Senators stunk. I’m praying weather clears, so the Sox’ll win.  I go near their dugout,” where Mickey Vernon sat Harry on the bench. At that moment he pledged to hit, or call, the curve.

At the University of Iowa, Kalas majored in speech, radio, and TV. A blind professor said, “You have a voice that could take you a considerable way.” He was drafted, became a broadcast specialist, and recreated P.C.L. Hawaii. ”Road trips were too costly to do live.”  The bigs team hiring him was no bargain at any price.

The Colt .45s were a hero of every dog that was under. In 1965, they got a new name (Astros), park (Astrodome), and Voice, but not team. Doug Rader used the clubhouse as a driving range. Larry Dierker explained — “they wanted to live” — why no took his clubs.  Once Rader, Joe Morgan, Kalas, and his father golfed.  Increasingly, Doug’s language turned blue.

“Ease off,” said Morgan. “Don’t you know Harry’s dad is a [Evangelical United Brethren] minister?” Doug brightened: ”Mr. Kalas, I didn’t know that.  Jesus Christ!”  Scales fell from pop’s eyes like Saul on the Damascus Road.” Our heart, not eyes, hurts now.

He’d Rather Be In Philadelphia

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin wondered during Philadelphia’s “long hot summer” whether the sun painted on the president’s chair was rising or setting. ”But now at length, I … know that it is a rising, not a setting, sun.” In 1970, the sun set on Connie Mack Stadium. Many wondered when decent baseball would rise.

April 1971: Veterans Stadium opens. Kalas, replacing Bill Campbell on Phils radio/TV, finds the city up in arms. “Bill Giles had been [V.P.} in Houston. Coming here, he offered me a job," not saying those. "Bill was very popular. For several years my confidence level faltered." He was not bolstered by the 1971-73ers, dredging last.

"You kept hoping pieces' merge," said Harry. One day Greg (Bull) Luzinski drove deep in batting practice. "Wow, that's way out of here!" gawked Larry Bowa. Nearby the new Voice stood: "It's outta here!" began. Like Kalas, another piece braved a rough initiation. "He came up [1972], and you saw the skill. But he’d miss wildly, make an error at third, and sulk.”

In 1975, Mike Schmidt and Luzinski combined for 72 homers. Bowa made shortstop hermetic. “Two-thirds of the world is covered by water,” wagged broadcaster Ralph Kiner. “The other third is covered by [center fielder] Garry Maddox.” Byrum Saam soon retired, making Harry lead announcer. Finally, the sun began to rise.

“This City Loves It!”

Even Napoleon, said Danny Ozark, “had his Watergate.” The Phils skipper and a player had “a wonderful repertoire.” Morality, he said of team morale, “is not an issue here.” The ’76 Bicentennial was. Philly won the National League East — first title since 1950. Even then,” Harry rued, “our luck wasn’t great.” Two men reached base vs. St. Louis’ Al Hrabosky. Maddox smoked an out. The shortstop caught Schmidt’s liner, sprawling. Hrabosky deflected and retrieved the Bull’s game-ending smash. “We had everybody played right,” joshed manager Red Schoendienst, “except maybe Al was a little shallow on Luzinski.”

Cincy swept the playoff.  Next year Philadelphia led League Championships Series Game Three, 5-3, in the ninth: two out, none on; 63,719 shook the Vet. “Maybe we were thinking World Series,” said Larry. L.A. scored thrice. A day later Phils ace Steve Carlton lost, 4-1, ending the L.C.S. By now Harry the K distilled a region’s hope, hurt, and fatalism.

Already he had done, or would, Notre Dame, DePaul, Marquette, Southwest Conference, Big Ten, and Big Five basketball, Irish, University of Houston, and Westwood One’s network football, and NFL Films, as co-host/voiceover.  Too: videos, team highlight reels, and U.S. Mint, Sears, Campbell’s Soup, and Dilbert’s animated cartoon.

“All stemmed from Harry’s baseball stage,” said Shenk. When would Philly, filling it, fill a rep as Red Sox South? The ’80ers again took their division on Schmidt’s next-to-last-day blast. The L.C.S. against Houston followed, an 8-7 final aping jai-alai. “Finally, after all these years, a Series!” Kalas chortled — the Phillies’ first since 1950.  There was, as they, a hitch.

Baseball’s then-policy barred local-team Classic coverage. “So NBC gets a petition of thousands of names” said partner Andy Musser. “‘Let Harry broadcast on [flagship] KYW!’” The Peacocks demurred. Next season, too late for Kalas, the radio ban ended. “I understood NBC,” he said. “I just wish I could have done something I’d dreamed of since a kid.”

On October 21, at 11:29 P.M., the Phils, 97, won title one. “World champions of baseball!” Kalas, re-creating, roared. “It’s pandemonium at Veterans Stadium! All of the fans are on their feet! This city has come together behind a baseball team! Phillies are world champions! This city knows it! This city loves it!” Rising sun: A million Quakers jammed next day’s victory parade.

Michael Jack & Whitey

“The [50-day 1981 players'] strike] killed our championship momentum,” said Harry. In 1983, a lesser club won the flag: Kalas did the Series in customary white loafers and blue slacks, cigarette in hand, filling a homemade scoresheet. Rose hiked to Montreal. Carlton skipped to San Francisco. Remaining: “There’s a smash down the third-base line! What a stop by Schmitty! … Struuuckhim out! … Watch that baby go!” In suburban Wallingford, a ninth-grader penned a “favorite person essay.”  Kalas’ voice “is sleepy and invigorating all at once,” Rich Beck, 15, wrote. “It is a beautiful thing.”

In 1986, Schmidt won a 10th Gold Glove, led the N.L. for the eighth time in homers, and took his third MVP. Next April 18, he faced Pittsburgh’s Don Robinson. “Here’s the pitch … He take a shot at it! There it goes! It is outta here! Michael Jack Schmidt [another Kalas signature] has hit his five-hundredth home run! What a spot! What a spot! And the entire team comes out to greet Schmitty! He puts the Phillies in front, 8 to 6! For Mike Schmidt, his five hundredth homer!”

In the clubhouse, mates cried “We want Harry!” then four times replayed his call. Rising/setting: the Phils twice plunked last; the ’93ers won the East. Kalas brayed “High Hopes,” his favorite song. Once the team’s pear-shaped, green-haired, elephant-nosed mascot crashed the booth, scaled a ledge, and mugged his way around the bowl. “What does it say,” partner Richie Ashburn asked Harry, “that you’re one of our biggest stars — and the Phanatic is the other!”

By now, towhead Ashburn — “Whitey” — and Kalas had become, by any norm, the team.  “We were friends immediately,” said Harry, “and best friends, eventually.”  Baseball is routine.  A listener soon anticipated theirs like a pet book or favorite film:  Ashburn, cap and piped blacksmith’s son; Kalas, the piano man — “George Burns,” said the Inquirer, “to Whitey’s Gracie Allen.”

One year the Phils finished next-to-last.  “What are they going to name their highlight film?” said Harry. Richie: “How about, ‘The game not so easy.’” Another night:  “Harry, you know I did something Babe Ruth never did.” Kalas:  “What’s that, Whitey?” Ashburn: “Hit a home run in Dodger Stadium.” Pause: “Yeah, Whitey, I guess that Babe Ruth wasn’t the player he was cracked up to be.”

Ashburn knocked pitchers, baited umpires, and bayed, “Oh, brother” and “Bet the house on it” — the Inquirer‘s ”most beloved Philadelphian in the world.”  Getting an award, Richie told the City Council, “I always wanted to be an institution before I went into one.  The race is pretty close.” Tri-staters loved his barb and view: like Kalas, a pal at the corner bar.

In 1995, 50,000 watched Harry’s best friend enter Cooperstown.  Two hundred buses drove from Philadelphia.  Phillies red dyed the crowd. “Do I have to treat you any differently now?”
said Kalas.  Whitey: “Yeah, with a little respect.”  Jest can ***** a funny bone. Truth can break a heart. On September 9, 1997, in a pone call from Phillies trainer Jeff Cooper, Harry learned that “Whitey just died of a heart attack.” Stunned, he sat and sobbed.

Three days later the K gave a eulogy. “Never in [Philadelphia] history has there been such an outpouring of love and affection for our beloved departed friend,” Harry began, voice cracking. “Why this overwhelming reaction? Because Don Richie Ashburn was Whitey” gentle and easy as a country breeze, down home, biscuits and gravy, Norman Rockwell come to life.” Today that “outpouring” seems to apply to his friend.

“We Have Lost Our Voice”

In 2004, the Phils opened new Citizens Bank Park; Harry, a restaurant, Harry The K’s.  At Veterans Stadium you could propose marriage on the scoreboard for $120, Kalas swooning like a schoolboy in 2002. “I’m on cloud nine,” he said of the Hall of Fame (also, the team’s 2008 world title). “For a kid who fell in love with the game at ten, to be going in … is mind-boggling.” A full house at the Vet, including Mickey Vernon, got bobble head dolls of Mr. K. and Ashburn. Harry toured the field in a convertible: said the Daily News, “as much a local figure at cheese steaks, the Art Museum, and the Summers Strut.”

In July, Philly fanatics filled another field near the Hall of Fame, buses again trekking to Cooperstown from Center City. “This is the ultimate honor, ” the 19-time Pennsylvania Sportscaster of the Year began. Tearing, he imagined Richie’s twist: “Hard to believe, Harry!” ending with a poem that read, “Philadelphia fans, I love you.”

From a distance a voice yelled, “And we love you, too, Harry!”  Phils president Dave Montgomery expressed similar love upon Kalas’ death, “We have lost our voice.”  At such a time, “It’s outta here!” seemed less chant than simple definition of his appeal.

 

By 1939, Lou Gehrig was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a hardening and collapsing of the spinal cord.  On July 4, he gave baseball’s Gettysburg Address.  “Some may think I’ve been given a bad break … Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

 
Segue to 1960.  A World Series break tears limb, not life.  In Game Seven, Gino Cimoli singled to start Pittsburgh’s eighth inning.  Bill Virdon grounded to Tony Kubek. “A sure double play,” said the Yankees shortstop,” except the ball hit something” — pebble, divot, or Forbes Field rough spot, no one knows — “and hit me in the larynx.”

Tony fell, grabbed his throat, began to choke and cough blood, and was carted to the hospital.  En route, Bill Mazeroski swung.  In 1965, doctors found that Kubek had broke his neck, likely from Virdon’s grounder.  Three vertebrae had fused:  a collision could paralyze him.  Ironically, the bad break spun identity:  the average guy knew who Tony was.

Retiring, Kubek, 29, was to fly home to Milwaukee. “I was going to sell [Laughing Cow] cheese,” he laughed.  Instead, NBC poo-bah Dave Kennedy cornered him at Mr. Laffs, Phil Linz’s Manhattan club.  The Peacocks had just acquired Game of the Week.  Would Tony audition as a backup analyst?  Unlike Gehrig, luck had bounced Kubek’s way.  This year it will carry the 1966-94 bigs Voice to Cooperstown.

Home-Town Boy Made Good

On July 26, Tony will become the Hall of Fame and Museum’s 33^rd recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence.  It is an historic pick:  the first analyst-only honoree.  Inducted, Tony may recall a time when teams broke the bank for a bonus baby:  in his case, 1954, each wanting the “painfully shy” 17-year-old who never dated in school.  Papa took a longer view.  “‘Forget a big deal,’” said the ex-Triple A Milwaukee Brewer. “Their rules make you stay with the [parent] club.”  Dad wanted his string bean to mature in the bushes.  Agreeing, New York gave him just $3,000 to sign.

In 1957, Kubek made the Yanks, became Rookie of the Year, and homered twice in World Series Game Three at — Milwaukee.  “Local people called my parents, heckling them.”  Next year Tony played shortstop, third base, and the entire outfield in one Series game.  “Casey [manager Stengel] liked to be cute.”  He was fired in 1960, making Kubek the daily shortstop.  “He’ll play there, period,” new skipper Ralph Houk said, and did, leading 1961 shortstops in chances per game.

“Don’t write about me, write about Kubek,” Roger Maris told a writer.  “He plays great every day, and fans don’t know.”  Maris encored as MVP.  He and Mickey Mantle had 115 homers.  Whitey Ford went 25-4.  “Ellie [Howard, catching] was a star.  Moose [Skowron] at first, Kubek and Bobby [Richardson] up the middle, [Clete] Boyer at third,” said Voice Mel Allen.  “Ft. Knox had more holes.”

The Yanks hit 240 homers, went 109-53, then won the Series.  Tony got married, was drafted, entered the Army, and returned to home in his first Yanks at-bat.  Thomas Wolfe thought he would never die.  Kubek could not imagine their meridian might end.  Each year Allen and Red Barber invited him on their post-game TV show.  Tony appeared once:  The camera made him twittery.  “I was the last guy you’d ever think of going into it,” he said.  At NBC, Kubek began by throwing up.

New York, April 1966.  About fifty baseball, network, and ad officials discuss Game‘s first year.  Strangely, its primary match — Detroit-New York, with Curt Gowdy and Pee Wee Reese — aired everywhere but there. “Blackout rules gave them the B [backup] game,” said NBC producer Scotty Connal.  Tony and Jim Simpson beamed Reds-Cubs into Motown and the Apple.

A rain forecast was read for Tiger Stadium.  Another report said that Simpson had laryngitis.  The crowd looked at Kubek.  “If Simpson’s got laryngitis and somebody thinks I’m doin’ the” — gulp, national – “Game alone, I’ll be in the bathroom ’cause I’m going to be sick.”  Weather cleared.  Simpson healed.  Kubek reverted to the B’s.

One Saturday morning the A game was rained out.  “We learned the whole network is our,” said Charlie Jones, Simpson’s sub. “I’m thrilled.  Everybody’ll see us.” Excusing himself, Kubek left the booth.  “Thirty minutes before the game, no Tony.  Twenty, no Tony.  Fifteen, no Tony.”  Finally, Tony.  “Where you been?” said Jones.  “Throwing up,” said Kubek.  “I’m not ready to go national.”

By 1968, he was.  “The problem,” said Connal, “is being hidden on the backup.”  That fall a good Series hop found Tony’s glove:  He wowed as a field reporter. “Tony wormed his way around, but I wasn’t bitter,” said Reese, soon fired.  “I just think if you don’t have anything to say, you should shut your mouth.”

Kubek had a lot to say, though at first didn’t say it well.  “I stuttered, talked too fast,” he said.  “In the early ”70s, Curt suggested that I work offseason on my delivery.”  Buying a recorder, Tony often read poetry aloud for 20 minutes a day.  One night Monday Game of the Week guest Howard Cosell began trashing baseball.  “No amount of description can hide the fact that this game is lagging insufferably.”

“Baseball’s athletes top everyone’s,” Kubek countered.  Cosell smirked, “No, my friend, try auto racing.”  Tony was almost speechless.  It did not become a trend.

Honesty His Best Policy

In 1973, NBC launched the “Celebrity in the Booth.” Kubek panned it at a network luncheon.  Cosell?  Bobby Riggs?  Danny Kaye?  A great guy, but come on.”  Why not Marcel Marceau, Harpo Marx, and Linda Lovelace?  Designated hitter?  “Dumb rule.”  Salary structure?  “Complete irrational.”  Replacement players?  “I’m a union guy.  They’d have to be called scabs.”

Tony called the 1969-75 All-Star Game, L.C.S., and Series.  In 1972, Oakland’s Bert Campaneris, knocked down, threw his bat at Detroit’s Larrin LaGrow. “It’s justified,” said Tony.  “Any pitch like that,” aimed squarely at Bert’s legs, “endangers his career.”  Incensed, baseball’s sugar daddy, Motown’s Chrysler Corporation, phoned Commissioner Bowie Kuhn called, who called NBC, which pressured Kubek.  A day later he stiffed them all.

Would Tony speak offseason?  “Some guys write jokes for you.  It wouldn’t be me.”  National ads found the can:  “I don’t need the money.”  Winter meant family.  “I got hunting, coach junior high basketball, and wait for baseball.”  To The Sporting News, he had “really no sense of humor, speaks a little too often, and may be too much in love with his sport.”  Still, “One listens, as in the 1975 World Series.

Cincy’s Cesar Geronimo reached first in Game Three’s 10th inning.  Boston catcher Carlton Fisk then flung Ed Armbrister’s bunt into center field.  “Armbrister interfered [with the attempted forceout]“! charged Kubek.  Plate umpire Larry Barnett disagreed.  Joe Morgan plated the 6-5 winning run.  Barnett blamed Tony for death alarum.  Later Tony got 1,000 letters dubbing him a Boston stooge.”

“It would be unfair to call him the last honest network broadcaster,” wrote columnist Jack Craig. “But he may be the most honest.”  The critique still stands.

Joe G. and Rapid Robert

In 1976, Gowdy, Tony’s favorite partner, was axed for Joe Garagiola.  Game‘s tone and feel changed.  “I grew up with a baseball of legend,” said Lindsey Nelson.  Antipodal:  sport as job, not lore.  “To players, it’s a livelihood.  That’s how they treat it.”  Vin Scully’s and Harry Caray’s menu starred wine and beer, respectively.  Joe’s and Tony’s blared meat and spuds.

“A great example of black and white,” said Connal.  A pitcher throws badly to third.  “Joe says, ‘The third baseman’s fault.’  Tony:  ‘The pitcher’s.’”  Media critic Gary Deeb termed “[theirs] the finest baseball commentary ever carried on network TV.”  In 1978, Kubek targeted another critic:  Boss George.

“He’s got an expensive toy,” Tony said of George Steinbrenner.  “Baseball’s tough enough without an owner harassing you.” Irked, the Yanks’ memoed each owner, Kuhn, and NBC about “biting the fan that feeds it.”  Tony:  “George likes to use people as pawns.”  King George:  “No player will grant [Kubek] an interview.”  Tony: “A lot of owners were ready to cave to Steinbrenner’s bullying,” said Kubek.  Diogenes would not.

Most Voices would kill for an Olympics.  Tony’s pact forebade it.  He seemed as immutable as 27 outs until Scully joined NBC, Garagiola became his partner, and Bob Costas joined Kubek on B.  “I’m not crazy about being assigned to the backup game but it’s no big ego deal.”  NBC’s tunicate doubled salary to $350,000.  Costas roved a newcomer, not neophyte.  “I think my humor loosened Tony, and his knowledge improved me.”

Increasingly, many preferred them even to Vin’s musings and Joe’s asides.  Then, in late 1988, Kubek went back to a future where he never expected to reside.

Farewell, Then Cooperstown

 

“I can’t believe it,” Tony said of baseball leaving NBC for CBS.  On September 30, 1989, he aired the Peacocks’ 981^st and last Game from SkyDome, having manned Canada’s The Sports Network since 1977.  “Kubek educated a whole generation of Canadian baseball fans without being condescending or simplistic,” said the Toronto Star.  In 1990, he joined the Yanks’ Madison Square Garden Network. Steinbrenner’s ode spurned joy.

 

“Kubek’s style is not cuddly,” wrote The New York Times‘ Richard Sandomir.”  His intensity costs popularity.”  Ask Ken Burns and David Halberstam.  “I wouldn’t talk with them,” said Tony.  “Interlopers coming in to take over our game.”  Ex-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth:  “To say that baseball’s drug-free [as he had], the big-lie theory lives.”  Steinbrenner, firing skipper Bucky Dent:  “If you are really a winner,” Kubek told MSG, “you should not have handled this like a loser.”

 

In 1994, “the last honest broadcaster” picked up a scorebook, scrapped a final $525,000 MSG year, and simply walked away.  “I hated what the game’s become – the greed, the nastiness.  You can be married to baseball, give you heart to it, but when it starts taking over your soul, it’s time to say whoa.”

 

The moved stunned industry brass.  What could he be thinking?  Actually, priorities that sanity might cheer.  “I want to go home [Menosha, near Appleton] and spend more time with my family” – also, in his new life, teach refugees English.  “I don’t need that ego stuff.  I feel sorry for those who do.”  He had made enemies – and a name.

 

For 15 years, arguably baseball’s best-ever analyst spurned détente, “not watching a single baseball game.”  Better late than never.  This year Kubek will visit baseball’s birthplace.  His choice is worthy of the place, and man.

 

Recently, Lanny Frattare announced his retirement after 33 years as the Pirates radio and
television prosopopoeia. If a baseball broadcaster is good enough and lasts long enough, he becomes an extended member of the family.   Frattare was, and did. 

“The decision to retire … was something I have been thinking about and have discussed for some time,” Lanny said.  In the end, it became time, shocking Pittsburgh’s diaspora of the curious and the crazed.

Greg Brown will become Pirates’ senior radio/TV partner, joining Bob Walk, Steve Blass, and John Wehner.  An “exhaustive search will begin” to succeed Frattare, 60, said team president Frank Coonelly:  succeed, not replace.

From There To Here

Segue to, say, April 2009.  A Bucs’ fan retrieves Lanny’s 1976-2008 daybook: eight managers, nine general managers, two no-hitters, five batting champions, 10 colleagues, 1979 World Series, 1979 and 1990-92 Division Series, and 2,499-2,714 record:  also, two-headed ghost — Bob Prince and Three Rivers Stadium.  Ultimately, outliving meant outlasting them.

Frattare grew up 250 miles north and west of the then-Steel City.  “Look at big-league guys from Rochester [New York],” he said.  “Hank Greenwald, Pete Van Wieren, Josh Lewin.”  Each watched the Cardinals’, then Orioles’, Triple-A affiliate.  Lanny wasn’t picky:  Any bigs aviary would do.

“I’d look at the booth and think, ‘This must be the best seat in the house.’”  His hero ruled the
Yanks’.  “Everywhere you’d hear Mel Allen.  I got a tape recorder and imitated him,.” Mel’s voice was rich, clear, and urgent.  Lanny’s was deep, stout, and calm.

At 20, the Ithaca College student met two announcers “who got me in the market.”  In 1974, airing Triple-A Charleston, he overnighted at pitcher Blass’s home in Pittsburgh.  Prince, the Bucs’ 1948- paladin, asked Frattare — dirty, hair askew, having blacktopped Steve’s driveway — to do an inning. 

“If I never get to the majors’ again,” Lanny said, “they can’t take this away.”  In October 1975, the Pirates shockingly took Prince’s job.  From 65 applicants, Lanny and Milo Hamilton succeeded Bob and Nellie King.  Their problem was Pittsburgh’s psyche.  The Gunner filled its core.

Finding An Identity

Prince’s ghost was a real as any relative’s.  “Ironically, Bob’d buck me up, say to get involved in the community,” said Lanny.  A second specter, 1909-1970 Forbes Field, shrouded the Bucs’ new home.  “At Three Rivers Stadium, charm had to come from the team, not park.”  In Pittsburgh, both meant Pops.  Where Willie the Starge led, even umpires went.

In 1977, manager Chuck Tanner put Stargell’s name in the fourth and sixth lineup spots.  Alvin Dark waited till Willie doubled and the second Stargell hit.  “We got two Wilver Stargells!” San Diego’s skipper told Doug Harvey.

The ump eyed his scorecard.  “Mr. Dark, I know who Wilver Stargell is and he’s not at home plate now.  No matter what the card says, Stargell’s hitting fourth and this man up for the second time is hitting sixth — and I don’t care who he is!”

Next season ended in Philadelphia.  “We’re trailing the Phils,” said Frattare, “but sweep a twin-bill”: two games left, 1 1/2 behind.  A day later radios tuned to Bucs then-flagship KDKA at a University of Pittsburgh football game shook on Pops’ first-inning slam.  “That’s what baseball is about — a whole city riding on each pitch.”

Pops headed the Pirates family.  In 1979, southwest Pennsylvania’s melting pot — Slavs, Poles, blacks, Germans — sang Sister Sledge’s “We Are Fam-i-Lee.”  Pittsburgh won the Series v. Baltimore.  Sadly, the Classic, ensuring network exclusivity, banned local-team radio till 1981.

“We came from 3 to 1 [games] behind,” said Lanny.  “It’d have been great to call it.”  Next week another kind of call cleared his line.

Persisting, Persuading 

“Even during the Series, I knew Milo wasn’t going to extend his contract,” said Lanny.  “He was done trying to replace the Gunner.”  Up:  Frattare replaced Hamilton, not Prince.  Down:  In 1982, the Gunner began local cable-TV.

The ’84ers finished last.  Next year a flailing franchise rehired an ailing god.  “I never call myself the ‘Voice of the Pirates,’” Lanny said on Prince’s return, “because Bob always will be,” even after his death that June.  Frattare still heard pleas to sound, well, like, the Gunner.

Bob roared, “We had ‘em allll the way!”  Lanny wagged: “There was noooo doubt about it!”  Prince:  “You can kiss it [homer] good-bye!”  Frattare:  “Go ball, get outta’ here, it’s gone!”  George H.W. Bush once told me, “I’m not Ronald Reagan.  I couldn’t be if I wanted to.”  Gradually, Lanny gentled skepticism.

The 1990 Bucs rallied on Memorial Day to beat Los Angeles. A year later to the day they edged the Cubs.  “It’s Memorial Day all over again!” Frattare whooped.  Assets:  Pittsburgh made three straight L.C.S.  Twice Barry Bonds became MVP.  Debits:  The late-’90ers lost audience and attendance.

In 2000, Stargell threw out the confluence’s last first pitch.  Sister Sledge sang two Anthems — America’s, and “We Are Fam-i-Lee.”  Three Rivers imploded in 2001.  Lanny took its digital-timer box to 38,365-seat PNC Park.  Light towers, corner pens, and a flat-green roof conjured Forbes.  Downtown rose across the Allegheny River.  Behind right field homers flowed slowly to the Mississippi.

“I’ve waited all my career for a real baseball park,” Frattare marveled.  In 2004, passing Prince, he became the Pirates’ longest-running Voice.  The Pirates flunked .500 in 2007 for the 15th straight year.  Scorecards told the tale.  “I’ve kept them from the beginning. I have almost 4,500″:  like their owner, encyclopedic, clear, and crisp.

Increasingly, Lanny tired of baseball’s intinerance:  leave a plane, find the hotel, and migrate to the park.  Dugout tale precedes the game.  Tedium succeeds it.  The collector and student of the U.S. Presidency will fill retirement.  The Bucs’ task is to fill Frattare’s void.  “It won’t be easy,” said ex-reliever Kent Tekulve.  “He’s the history of Pirates baseball for the last 33 years.”