Baseball

Harwell – A Voice of the Boys of Summer

It was a cold, wet night at Safeco Field in Seattle on Tuesday and the Mariners played like they would rather have been sitting by a fire sipping a toddy. Their shortstop made three errors, their clean up hitter proved again he is an expensive mistake and, like I said, the raw wind off Elliott Bay was cold.

It was cold for another reason. Ernie Harwell’s mellifluous, calming baseball voice has been silenced. What little bit of warmth I felt on Tuesday at Safeco was the moment of silence baseball fans observed before the first pitch in memory of the 42 summers Ernie called Detroit Tigers games. Harwell died on Tuesday after a battle with cancer. He was a very young 92.

Harwell once said of baseball, “I love the game because it’s so simple, yet it can be so complex. There’s a lot of layers to it, but they aren’t hard to peel back.”

I’ve been a Tiger fan since 1968 when the boys from the Motor City beat the great Bob Gibson to become one of the few teams to recover from being down 3-1 in the World Series. Harwell said his greatest thrill in those 42 seasons behind the mike was Jim Northrup’s two-run triple in Game Seven of that series. That’s a good memory, but even better is sense of place that Harwell could create in even the most routine baseball game, sort of like Tuesday’s game in Seattle.

“On radio,” says Jon Miller, my choice for the best of the new breed of broadcasters,”we could tell a story about a player’s house in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the listener goes to that house. On television, you tell that story and you don’t go anywhere, because you see things that don’t match the story–the third base coach flashing signs, the pitcher getting ready. On TV, I caption what’s being shown. On the radio, it’s my story. As Ernie Harwell says, on TV, you get the movie version. The game on the radio is the novel.”

The New York Times obit for Ernie is a gem and reminded me that the guy could write, too. His Hall of Fame induction speech in 1981 is classic Harwell.

“Baseball is Tradition in flannel knickerbockers,” Harwell once wrote. “And Chagrin in being picked off base. It is Dignity in the blue serge of an umpire running the game by rule of thumb. It is Humor, holding its sides when an errant puppy eludes two groundskeepers and the fastest outfielder. And Pathos, dragging itself off the field after being knocked from the box.”

I only saw Harwell once in the flesh. It was the last season of old Tiger Stadium. When I showed up at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull to see a game on that piece of hallowed baseball ground there he was. Seated just outside the stadium, signing autographs and copies of his book and talking baseball with the fans – his fans. You couldn’t talk to Ernie Harwell, or listen to him, and not smile and think of the complexity of life and baseball and how marvelous he could make a simple game on a summer afternoon.

Good call, Ernie.

Hideous Baseball Uniforms

When it comes to baseball, I’m a traditionalist. Some of the most appealing aspects of the great game are its traditions. It’s been said that if a veteran of the Civil War could return for a day, go to Wrigley Field or Fenway and watch a game, he would immediately know what was going on. The game doesn’t change much, but when it does it is usually change for the worse.

I have never liked the designated hitter rule. Pitchers ought to go to bat. I’d be happy bringing back a 154 game season. With all the playoffs games that are needed now, the current season is too long and besides a return to a shorter season would make all the older records more relevant. I don’t like the trend of players wearing their pants so long they drag in the dirt. Whatever happened to stirrup socks, anyway? And while we’re at it, put a gentle but unmistakable bend in the bill of that cap young man. What gives with these young players that don’t shape the bill of a baseball cap?

Tradition = baseball.

The regard for tradition and history really took a beating in the 1970’s and early ’80’s when most teams went in the bag for truly hideous uniforms in gaudy colors. It amounted to a nationwide outbreak of polyester. The picture above is of Indians’ pitcher Jackie Brown – remember him – in the 1977 Cleveland uniform. It almost hurts to look at that thing. Brown’s career record in seven seasons was 47-55, but, hey, he got to wear that great uniform in whatever color that is.

A friend sent me the link to pictures and commentary on “10 pleasingly hideous baseball cards from the 1970’s.” Check it out…but not if you have a queasy stomach!

If you can look at the Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers or Oscar Gamble cards without a snicker, you’re a stronger person that me. Now that I think of it, bring back flannel.

Have a good weekend.

Anything to Say, Dear?

My all-time favorite cartoon appeared in the New Yorker several years ago.

In the cartoon, a fellow is settling into his big, comfortable chair with the TV remote control in hand. He says to his wife standing nearby: “Anything you’d like to say, dear, before the baseball season begins?”

While every team is in first place, before the post mortem begins on President Obama’s fastball – he’s throwing out the first pitch at the National’s home opener – and while you still have one ear tuned to the spouse it might be an appropriate moment to soak up some baseball trivia.

For example, did you know that Bullet Bob Feller, as a 21 year old fireballer with the Cleveland Indians, threw baseball’s only complete game opening day no hitter? It happened in 1940. You can look it up.

Play ball!…and, what was that dear?

The Great Rivalry Launches a New Season

The forecast for Fenway tomorrow night is fair and unseasonably warm. Good enough. It has been a long winter.

Josh Beckett vs. C.C. Sabathia as the best rivalry in baseball tees up the season.

This time of year – just before a new season unfolds – I always recall the classic comment of the great Rogers Hornsby. He holds the record for the all-time highest batting average by a right handed hitter. His .358 lifetime average is the record for the National League. He hit .424 in 1924. The guy could hit. He also loved the great game.

“People ask me,” Hornsby said, “what I do in the winter time when there is no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

The wait is almost over.

Cloudy and Cool…

Major league baseball in Tucson ended yesterday with a routine ground out. Score it an Owners Choice. Tradition flies out to the almighty dollar. Loyalty strikes out to a bus ride. Some of the joy went out of spring with that ground ball.

The Rockies are gone for good from historic Hi Corbett Stadium and they take with them six decades of spring baseball in the Old Pueblo.

Some of the old timers didn’t take it well. The Kleenex boxes came out and the crowd of 6,817 was more subdued than feels right at a ballpark. The wake began when they laid down the foul lines.

Ted Robbins on NPR did a fine piece over the weekend that captures what the old ball yard means to spring baseball fans in Tucson. There is some talk – maybe just to ease the reality of what has been lost – that Japanese or Mexican professional teams might spend some of the spring in Tucson in the future making use of the stadiums that now risk becoming relics in the desert. We’ll see.

The city fathers in Tucson didn’t exactly distinquish themselves in securing a strategy to keep baseball where it’s been since 1947. Then again, with greedy suits ruling the game, there is little room for sentiment or history or something different. Baseball is a business. Ask Tucson.

Oh, yes. The Rockies won 4-3 on the last day. Their opening day starter Ubaldo Jimenez got a nice tuneup for his first season start. When it was over the crowd filed out – quietly. They knew they had just seen something important, something fun and affirming, something historic, end.

Appropriately, with baseball gone not just for a season but likely forever, it dawned couldy and cool in Tucson today.

Some how that feels about right.

Bye, Bye Baseball…

It’s going to be a sad day at the ballpark today in Tucson, Arizona.

Since 1947, a major league team has conducted spring training at wonderful old Hi Corbett Stadium not far from downtown. Today’s Colorado Rockies – Arizona Diamondback spring training game will be the last at the old ballpark – probably forever.

Spring training in Tucson has fallen victim to the increasingly pernicious economics of the great game. The owners of the Rockies and D-backs could no longer resist the lure of the big city – Phoenix – and will move spring training next year to a brand spanking new $100 million field of dreams south of Scottsdale. The teams are following in the wake of the Chicago White Sox who left Tucson two years ago.

All 15 Cactus League teams are now concentrated in the sprawling Valley of the Sun, in part because that’s where the money is for the new, modern ballparks and because the juvenile millionaires who play the game just couldn’t tolerate the 90 minute bus ride from Tucson to Phoenix. In fact, most of the big egos rarely make the trip south. Now they can quit their whining and battle the freeway traffic in Maricopa County. But, I digress.

I first came to spring training at Hi Corbett in 1992 and immediately fell in love with the place. It’s always been like watching a major league game in a minor league park. You sit in the sun, close to the field and inevitably strike up a conversation with folks from Denver, or Montana or Tucson. The crowds at spring training games tend to be different than regular season baseball crowds. Most spring training fans really know the game. They follow their teams and know the players.

When I first came south in ’92, the Cleveland Indians were in residence and had been since 1947 when the legendary Bill Veeck, then the Indian’s owner, concluded that his new star, Larry Doby, the first African-American player in the American League, would find Arizona more welcoming than Florida. Veeck, the great promoter who once sent a midget up to bat in a regular season game, enjoyed a friendship with a Tucson political and business leader – Hi Corbett – and they made the deal to make Tucson a major league city.

The Rockies have made Hi Corbett their spring training home since their first season in ’93.

Now that its all coming to an end – 63 years of spring training in Tucson – the locals feel like they’ve been hit by a pitch. Spring training means millions of dollars of lost economic activity for local hotels, restaurants and merchants. Pima County built the fine Tuscon Electric Park in 1996 for the D-backs and ChiSox – it was state of the art then – and the county is now left holding a $22 million bag as ticket revenue leaves with the teams, while the bond payments remain.

Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen says there is blame to go around for the loss of baseball in Tucson, including the obvious fact that the city didn’t wake up to the loss of spring training until it was too late. Hansen wrote today:

“It’s more realistic to say that baseball changed and we didn’t. No one in City Hall had the vision, or moxie, as Hi Corbett did in 1955, to establish a “Keep Cleveland in Tucson Project” thereby giving Tucson its only link to the big-leagues until Lute Olson came along.

“The last person who could have saved spring training in Tucson was Jerry Colangelo, the czar of Phoenix sports, who was forced out of office in 2004. Once the Diamondbacks dumped Colangelo, Tucson lost its most powerful advocate.

“The business people who run the White Sox, Rockies and Diamondbacks have no allegiance to anything but the bottom line. Colangelo, who worked on credit, was an idealistic, old-school baseball guy who liked the idea of training in a remote location, thereby whetting the appetite of his hometown fans for the regular season. That’s the way it had been done for 100 years.”

Meanwhile, up north, the man who allegedly leads Major League Baseball is sticking his nose into the next major spring training controversy. Mesa wants to keep the Cubs, who are the spring’s biggest draw, while a bunch of high rollers in Florida seek to lure them there with offers of a new, free stadium. Like I said, pernicious economics of baseball. At least Bud Selig has ruled out a tax on all the other Cactus League teams in order to help Mesa build yet another new park in the Phoenix area.

I’ll feel like I have lost something when I walk out of Hi Corbett for the last time today. The place reeks of spring training history. More than 70 of the 292 members of the baseball Hall of Fame laced up their cleats here. Joe DiMaggio played his last spring training game at Hi Corbett. Mickey Mantle played his first there. Mays was here and the Williams boys – Billy, Dick and Ted. Satchell Paige threw from that mound and Juan Marichal made his high leg kick at Hi Corbett. Duke and Casey, McCovey and Catfish all played in the sun in Tucson.

The great Veeck once said “the most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.” No more of that in Tucson.

Today, a little baseball history – the greatest thing about the great game – dies in the desert. I hate it.