Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The voice of the Tigers has broadcast more big-league games than anyone else. His retirement breaks one of the last links to an age when fans knew the home team through one man's words.
Aug 27, 2002 | This is the last Michigan summer that will sound like a Michigan summer. Ernie Harwell is retiring.
It's possible that no one has ever broadcast more baseball games than the Detroit Tigers' 84-year-old announcer. He began calling his hometown Atlanta Crackers in 1946, moved up to the big leagues in 1948 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was already an established veteran when he came to Detroit 43 years ago. Since then Michiganders have taken him everywhere, to the beach and the backyard, the picnic in the park and that spot beneath the pillow where he can only be heard by a kid who's supposed to be asleep. You could probably fill a ballpark with people who hear Ernie Harwell's voice and think of their father.
He's an author and a songwriter, with four books of baseball recollections and dozens of published songs to his credit. He nearly caused a riot when he hired Jose Feliciano to sing the national anthem in his not-quite Kate Smith style at the World Series in 1968, a year in which the Tigers' pennant run had helped bring a riot-torn city together a little. There were nearly riots in 1991 when he was -- and this is as hard to believe now as it was then -- fired.
He's among the last of a fading breed, the old-time radio announcer who comes to personify a team. Vin Scully is still doing Los Angeles Dodgers games a half century after replacing Harwell in the Brooklyn booth -- "My claim to fame," Harwell says. Herb Carneal, once Harwell's junior partner in Baltimore, has been broadcasting the Minnesota Twins since 1962. There are others. Joe Nuxhall and Marty Brennaman in Cincinnati, Harry Kalas in Philadelphia. But most of the old radio men, the great voices like Harry Caray, Jack Buck and Bob Prince, and before them Red Barber and Mel Allen, are gone, long gone. There will be others who spend many years with a team, but with most games on television now, they won't have the same kind of intimate relationship with fans that the great radio voices did.
Harwell's voice has become as much a part of Detroit baseball as the Old English "D" on the Tigers' jerseys. And he's a joy to listen to. He gives the score often, he tells great stories, he rarely spouts meaningless stats the way some announcers do, and he never whines. He has his trademark sayings, but he never seems to be doing Ernie Harwell shtick. His mission, successfully completed 162 times a year, is to report what's in front of him. "The bones of it," he's fond of saying, "is ball one, strike one."
And now he's leaving, retiring after 55 years in major-league baseball. Hard as it will be for Tigers fans to say goodbye to Harwell after carrying his voice with them for more than four decades, rough as it is for them to see him off after another last-place finish by Detroit, even worse is the possibility that a baseball strike will deprive them of the chance.
The players have set a Thursday deadline for a strike that would wipe out Harwell's swan song, cancel Ernie Harwell Day at Comerica Park, deprive his listeners of that final sign-off.
"I wouldn't worry about it because I've got no control over it," he says in typically sunny fashion. "People are going to forget me anyway, so it doesn't make much difference."
People are not going to forget him. If Ty Cobb was the greatest Tiger of all time, Al Kaline, a Hall of Fame outfielder who played from 1953 to 1974, is the most beloved. But Kaline defers to Harwell. "If I have a statue at the ballpark," he's said, "Ernie should have two."
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Welcome to summertime in Michigan: "Hi, everybody, baseball greetings from Comerica Park in downtown Detroit, the Tigers against the Kansas City Royals."
Harwell's announcement in March that he would retire after this season came as a surprise. He's healthy and fit. His voice is still strong, his descriptions are sharp, and he loves his job.
"Ernie's personality to me is like a 20-year-old kid," says Jim Price, a former backup catcher for the Tigers and now Harwell's broadcast partner. "I'll come to the ballpark in a bad mood some day because I had a long day. I get here, I see Ernie, he's always in a good mood."
Ask Harwell why he's quitting and he'll recite an old radio joke: "'I heard your last show, and it should have been.' I didn't want somebody saying that."
He started in old radio, as the sports director at WSB in Atlanta in 1940. It was in that capacity that he once knocked unannounced on the door of Cobb, the cantankerous Georgia legend, and asked for an interview. The old outfielder invited him in, and not only did Harwell become friendly with Cobb, which was no mean feat, but he also used a story Cobb told him to sell his first magazine piece, to the Saturday Evening Post.
After serving in the Marines in World War II, mostly as a correspondent for Leatherneck magazine, Harwell began announcing for the Crackers, a minor-league team for which he'd been a batboy, in 1946. He was hired by the Dodgers in 1948, in the process becoming the only announcer ever to be traded for a player, moved over to the New York Giants in 1950, then became the first announcer for the Baltimore Orioles in 1954. He was behind the microphone for Jackie Robinson's second season and Willie Mays' first. He came to Detroit in 1960 and became part of the landscape. The giant picture over the main gate at Comerica Park is not of Tigers greats Cobb, Hank Greenberg or Kaline. It's a photo of Ernie Harwell.
"He's one of the voices of Detroit," says Elmore Leonard, a pretty good Detroit wordsmith himself and an occasional guest of Harwell's at the ballpark. "He's a fixture. I hate to see him go."
Ernie Harwell still sounds like old radio. He projects his voice, rather than caressing the microphone with it, the way younger announcers do. His style is conversational, sure, but he's not just talking. He's broadcasting. Speak with him off the air and that great, resonant, distinctive voice is a little deeper, a little quieter, a little more Dixie. People talk about his Southern lilt, and you can hear it on the air if you're listening for it, but more noticeable is the precise, clipped diction of a 1940s radio man who has to make himself understood through the static and noise of a distant Philco.
At this year's All-Star Game he was invited into the Fox Television booth with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. As soon as he opened his mouth, Buck, whose father, the late Jack Buck, broadcast St. Louis Cardinals games for 48 years, said, "Listen to that voice, man. That's baseball." Invited to do a little play-by-play, Harwell demurred for a moment, then clicked right in: "This is Mr. Winn at the bat now with two out ..."
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