Longtime Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell passed away yesterday. Harwell revealed in September that he had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the bile duct. He was 92 years old.
In what can only be described as “news of the weird” or “only in baseball”, Harwell was once acquired by the Brooklyn Dodgers for a catcher in 1948.
On August 2, 1981, Ernie Harwell was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Here is this legendary announcer’s description of the game that he loved and covered for 55 years…
Baseball is the President tossing out the first ball of the season and a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. A tall, thin old man waving a scorecard from the corner of his dugout. That’s baseball. And so is the big, fat guy with a bulbous nose running home one of his (Babe Ruth’s) 714 home runs.
There’s a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh forty-six years ago. That’s baseball. So is the scout reporting that a sixteen year old pitcher in Cheyenne is a coming Walter Johnson. Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.
In baseball democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rulebook. Color merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another.
Baseball is a rookie. His experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream. It’s a veteran too, a tired old man of thirty-five hoping that those aching muscles can pull him through another sweltering August and September. Nicknames are baseball, names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy.
Baseball is the cool, clear eyes of Rogers Hornsby. The flashing spikes of Ty Cobb, an over aged pixie named Rabbit Maranville.
Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion.
Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World’s Series catch. And then dashing off to play stick ball in the street with his teenage pals. That’s baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying., “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
Baseball is cigar smoke, hot roasted peanuts, The Sporting News, ladies day, “Down in Front”, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and the Star Spangled Banner.
Baseball is a tongue tied kid from Georgia growing up to be an announcer and praising the Lord for showing him the way to Cooperstown. This is a game for America. Still a game for America, this baseball! Thank you.
I am a big Los Angeles Dodgers fan. But I am a bigger fan of the game of baseball. And the game of baseball lost a great personality and a great man. My thoughts and prayers goes out to the entire Harwell family.
After hearing the cancer diagnosis, Harwell told The Associated Press on September 4, 2009, “Whatever happens, I’m ready to face it. I have a great faith in God and Jesus.”
I can’t wait to meet Ernie Harwell and talk baseball in Heaven.
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