Time to take a moment to pay homage to one of the last of a dying breed, literally. Last week marked the passing of Detroit Tiger’s broadcaster Ernie Harwell. He died very shortly after announcing his retirement last fall due to an inoperable cancer. The fans in Detroit lost a familiar voice. But all of broadcasting may have lost even more.
William Ernest “Ernie” Harwell broadcast baseball games for 55 years. At the end of his career he was ranked among the top 20 of all time. To get to that point his career took some interesting twists and turns. At the very beginning he had the distinction of being the only broadcaster ever traded for player. The Brooklyn Dodgers needed someone to do their radio broadcasts while the regular announcer Red Barber was in the hospital. Branch Rickey sent a catcher to the minor league team that held Ernie’s contract. Harwell is represented in no less than four Halls of Fame including Cooperstown. Because Tiger’s games were broadcast on on of the old clear channel AM stations his voice was well known all over the country.
The loss of a great announcer is something worthy of note. The real loss is of a style of broadcaster. Today’s baseball play by play guys come from a television background. Their approach to the game is more technical and spare. Harwell is one of the last of the radio generation, announcers who were trained to tell the story of the game. Very often a game that they weren’t even seeing but reconstructing from news wire reports. They developed a love of language that seems to have faded with the years. Their broadcasts were distinctive and could even be beautiful. Harwell wrote poetry and songs about the game he loved. I can’t imagine the current generation feeling comfortable doing that. Some of the old timers hung on too long. By the end of his career in Pittsburgh “The Gunner” Bob Prince was painful to hear. Ernie kept the story of the game beautiful right to the end.
Ernie Harwell began the first spring training broadcast of the season with a section of Song of Solomon : "For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
For a moment let the birds cease their singing and let the voice of the turtle fall silent. Ernie Harwell died at his home in Michigan at the age of 92.
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Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010
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