Ernie Harwell

Though it was not a surprise, I was still saddened to hear late last night of the death of Ernie Harwell, the long-time broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers. He was, to me, the consummate baseball announcer, and was the voice of baseball for much of my life.

Harwell began broadcasting Tigers' games on radio in 1960, a year before I was born, and except for a short interruption in the early nineties remained that way until 2002, so there are millions of Tigers' fans who associate him with baseball. In many ways he was a throwback to a different time, when all games weren't televised, and people listened to them on their transistor radios. I know I did, and remember sitting on my grandfather's porch listening. Then, a little older, I would listen to games (especially from the West Coast) after going to bed at night, the radio tucked into my pillow.

Like Vin Scully, Mel Allen, and that whole generation of broadcasters, Harwell had a no-nonsense, objective style. I was shocked upon moving to New York in the late seventies to hear the rampant homerism of the Yankees' broadcast crew. Harwell did not openly root for the Tigers, although you could hear a bit of excitement when they did well. He also did not criticize or analyze the action--he just called it. In those days on the radio, there were no color men. He called the action by himself.

Also unlike the broadcasters of today, especially the ESPN crowd, he did not spend half of his time trying to dream up catch-phrases. But he did have a few. For home runs he would say, "that ball is loooong gone," which seems almost minimalist today. When a batter took a called third strike he would say, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road," and at home games when a foul ball would head into the stands he would provide a bit of extra commentary by saying "a man from (insert name of nearby city) caught that one." It was all a mystery how he knew that, of course he was just adding a bit of license.

Before being hired by the Tigers, Harwell worked for the Dodgers and Giants. In fact, he was doing the TV call on the fateful day of October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit the "shot heard round the world." Russ Hodges, who was doing radio, will be forever remembered for his call--"The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" Harwell's call was not recorded for posterity.

Harwell was a god in our family. My grandmother, who never missed a game, frequently would turn the sound on the TV down and listen to Harwell's radio call, her transistor pressed against her ear. He was a gentleman, with no one that I know of ever saying a bad word about him, and he had no bad words about anybody else, except for Bo Schembechler, who during a short and unpleasant stint as team president canned him. Schembechler was soon gone, and Harwell returned for another decade of play-by-play.

I inherited my Tiger fan status from my family, and though I haven't always lived there I have never wavered. We moved away from Michigan before I started school, but then moved back and I lived there from the age of 11 to 16, prime baseball-crazy years, when baseball cards were kept in shoeboxes and I spent my free time playing the board game All-Star baseball. Those years are narrated by the honeyed Southern accent of Ernie Harwell.