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Since the passing of Harry Kalas, one of the questions I’ve asked myself over and over is why the great voices of baseball are a vanishing breed. To understand the question, you should know one of my great obsessions as a kid growing up in 1950s’ America was listening to the great play-by-play men of the summer game.
My parents bought me a huge AM radio — an RCA Globetrotter — so I could pull in faraway stations and listen to the great baseball announcers around the league — and there were a lot of them. Harry Caray and Jack Buck doing the Cardinals games on KMOX; Bob Prince of the Pirates on KDKA; Ernie Harwell and Chuck Thompson of the Orioles; and my personal favorite, Vin Scully of the Dodgers on WMGM.
There were so many great ones, all of them with different styles and unique voices. I would tune in, often late at night when the reception was best, and out of the static would emerge the narrators of the greatest sports dramas of my time. For me, Kalas became the latest member of the exclusive club. And now, other than Scully, his magnificent baritone on the West Coast these days, they have all vanished from the scene.
It was my great privilege to hear Prince call the Harvey Haddix perfect game that ended in heartbeaking defeat for Pittsburgh in the 13th inning. Prince — nicknamed "the Gunner" — set the scene. The skies were threatening in Milwaukee that night in which lightning bolts occasionally lit up the sky, and Haddix dueled Lew Burdette of the Braves in the most stunning pitchers’ duel of my lifetime. I can still feel the electricity, though I was no closer to Milwaukee than my living room in South Philly.
As a college student majoring in communications at Temple, I wrote a term paper on the great voices of the game. It was a labor of love. In later years, I was lucky enough to land a weekend job as a sports talk host on WIP. I made it my business to look up those great voices of my youth and interviewed them in a continuing series I called "The Voices of the Game" after a book of the same title by Curt Smith.
The station’s program director at the time was no fan of baseball, but I didn’t care because every Saturday morning I found another one of the wonderful voices of summer to regale my listening audience with tales of days gone by. There were Caray, Jack Brickhouse, Buck; and old Jimmy Dudley who did the Indians games in their glory days; and the magical Red Barber, Harwell, and the new kid on the block, Kalas.
My saddest moments came when I contacted Lindsey Nelson, the original voice of the Mets and the incomparable Mel Allen of the Yankees, and both were too ill to come on the air with me. I got to meet Scully in the dining room at Veterans Stadium before a Phils/Dodgers game and chatted a few times with Harry the K. It was a glorious way, in a small way, to keep alive the grand tradition of baseball.
It brings me back to my original question, where have all the great baseball voices gone? Why is it generally acknowledged that the ones who replaced the originals (with the exception of Kalas) no longer capture our imagination? Why is it they all sound like recent graduates of some broadcasting school? Why is there no new Harry the K with a great home run call? Why do I still remember Russ Hodges of the old Giants shouting "Bye, bye baby" when one flew out of the Polo Grounds? I can still hear the great Mel Allen’s "Going, going, gone!" I still laugh at the thought of Prince’s pretending a Pirates home run had broken a pane of glass in some lady’s front window. (His home run call always ended with the joyous sound of the glass shattering.)
The new guys are all competent. They all have nice voices. They all sound the same. Nobody calls their announcers "Gunner" and "Possum" anymore like they did in Pittsburgh. Nobody sings like old Caray during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley. Maybe it’s because we have been homogenized into one people in America in our quest for assimilation. Maybe it’s because most of the guys hiring today’s baseball announcers are more intent on not offending anybody than having a rebel like Prince in the booth, or someone like Nelson wearing those garish sports jackets. Maybe it’s because most of the guys doing the programming today are straight out of the sales department, whose mind-set is ignorant of the game’s magical traditions.
The fans know what they have lost. That’s why we felt an overwhelming sadness when first Richie Ashburn and then Harry the K died. We sense what we have lost is not only that good part of ourselves, that little boy wonder who hides deep within us, but we sense that America has lost part of what made us unique. We lost more than a couple of baseball announcers with the deaths of Ashburn and Kalas. We lost that thing which keeps us young.
