Legendary Tigers manager Sparky Anderson dies at 76

The Detroit Free Press

 

Sparky Anderson, the all-time leader among Tigers managers in victories, visibility and inimitable quotations, died today at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 76.

Anderson’s death came one day after the family announced that he was receiving hospice care at his home because of complications from dementia. The family said that at Anderson’s request, there will be no funeral or memorial service.

Anderson managed the Tigers from the middle of the 1979 season through 1995. His 17 seasons are most in club history. The runner-up is Hughie Jennings, who managed Ty Cobb’s Tigers for 14 seasons in the first part of the 20th Century. Anderson beat Jennings’ record for most victories by a Tigers manager by 200 (1,331-1,131).

Throughout his years near or at the top of baseball through his 2000 election to the Hall of Fame, Anderson rejected the airs of celebrity, no matter how prominent he became. He forever seemed as happy to see people he knew — and didn’t know — as they did to see him.

On trips to New York, he didn’t eat breakfast at the Tigers’ fancy hotel. He’d go across the street to Howard Johnson, where he would address his waiter by name as a friend. In countless such gestures, he succeeded in a mission he once imparted to his Hall of Fame catcher in Cincinnati, Johnny Bench: “As long as you remember where you are from, you will always know where you are going.”

Anderson, born in South Dakota during the Great Depression, said “thank you” to people for whom he signed autographs. He often quoted his father’s words to him: “Being nice to people is the only thing in life that will never cost you a dime. Treat them nice and they’ll treat you the same.”

A sign hung in Anderson’s mostly unadorned office at Tiger Stadium: “Every 24 hours the world turns over on someone who was sitting on top of it.”

Anderson’s run with the Tigers was the second act of a two-act managing career. In nine seasons with the Reds (1970-78), Anderson produced five National League West championships, four NL pennants and two World Series championships.

The Reds stunned the baseball world when they fired Anderson after the 1978 season, and the Tigers produced a coup the next June when they signed him to a five-year contract. Several other clubs had courted Anderson, and he later wrote that he had decided to manage the Chicago Cubs when the Tigers snagged him.

Anderson strongly implied upon his arrival in Detroit that the Tigers would win the World Series within five years. And in 1984 they did, starting 35-5 en route to a five-game victory over San Diego in the Series.
 

A sterling reputation

As with most of baseball’s foremost managers, Anderson didn’t go out on top. The Tigers didn’t finish first in his final eight seasons, and they contended for first place in only a few of those years. In his final season, as the club rebuilt with youth, it finished fourth at 60-84 in a strike-shortened season.

Despite these fruitless seasons, Anderson’s reputation remained virtually undiminished. He had had so much success and became such a spoken authority on success that the Tigers’ decline was widely attributed to a lack of a talent, not to Anderson having lost his touch. Late in Anderson’s career, he received the highest compliment of all from baseball writer and columnist Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Reusse saluted Anderson by using the manager’s famous fractured vernacular: “Ain’t never been no better manager.”

There was a case for this. When Anderson resigned following the 1995 season, he stood third all-time in victories with 2,194. The only managers ahead of him were figures of long ago — Connie Mack and John McGraw.

Mack owned the club he managed, the Philadelphia A’s, and wasn’t in jeopardy of being fired despite a long string of losing seasons.

McGraw, who died three days after Anderson was born, didn’t deal with many of the variables that made Anderson’s job tough: players on rich, long-term contracts, coast-to-coast travel, late-game maneuvering of a bullpen and a scrutinizing media.

In 2005, Anderson surrendered third place on the victories list to Tony La Russa. As a young manager with the Chicago White Sox, La Russa frequently sought out Anderson and absorbed his wisdom before their teams played.

Anderson’s advice to La Russa was typical of his boil-it-down, common-sense approach. It included the recommendation to use position players according to their strengths and to avoid putting them in spots that would expose their weaknesses. “Those tips he gave me saved my baseball life,” La Russa said in 2005.

In 2006, La Russa’s Cardinals beat the Tigers in the World Series. That made La Russa the only manager besides Anderson to win the World Series in the American League and National League. “It’s such a great honor — he really should have this alone,” La Russa said the night the Cardinals won the ’06 Series. In the same answer, La Russa said, “I have such a respect and affection for Sparky that I believe he’s one of the greatest, not just managers, but baseball men, ambassadors for the game.”

In 2007, another of Anderson’s favorites, Bobby Cox, also passed him on the managerial list. Cox did the bulk of his work with Atlanta, but managed the Toronto club that gave the ’84 Tigers a midseason run for first place and then displaced them as East champs in ’85. In 2006, Anderson said La Russa or Cox was the best manager of all time.
 

The two sides of Sparky

Anderson was an extrovert wrapped around an introvert. With his unceasing flow of wisdom and humor, he dominated news conferences as few could. He loved doing interviews, and he was the Tigers’ foremost personality throughout his tenure. “The one member of the Detroit Tigers you would recognize if he came walking up your driveway,” wrote Jayson Stark of the Philadelphia Inquirer as the Tigers blazed through the 1984 playoffs.

Yet Anderson continually claimed he was shy. It wasn’t a contradiction. When he wasn’t filling his role as manager-spokesman, he didn’t seek attention. By the time he reached Detroit, he probably could have made a fortune on the off-season banquet and speaking circuit. Yet in the off-season, he retreated to his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. — the same home he lived in throughout his rise in the majors. He could have afforded a far more lavish place, but he never sought one.

Throughout those off-seasons in California, his mind apparently never strayed far from baseball. Reporters who called him in the off-season would instantly find him at full blast, dispensing quotes as if it were July. Except for Yogi Berra, perhaps no other Hall of Famer is so well known for his one-liners. A sampling of Anderson’s best:

• On the chiseled physique of Oakland’s Jose Canseco: “He looks like a Greek goddess.”

• On a struggling player: “He wants to do so good so bad.”

• On his fondness for issuing intentional walks: “Don’t let Superman beat you.”

• On his theology: “I believe in the Big Guy.”

• On how any team could survive the loss of a star player or two: “You can go to the cemetery and see where Babe Ruth is buried.”

• On an unheralded pitcher for whom Anderson incorrectly predicted stardom: “If you don’t like him, you don’t like ice cream.”

Like many managers, Anderson was better at his immediate duties — running the game, the pitching staff and the clubhouse — than he was at projecting how good players could become. In his most memorable miss, he rushed minor-leaguer Torey Lovullo into the starting lineup for the 1989 season. Lovullo was back in the minors within weeks and never made an impact in the majors.

The Lovullo episode was a reminder that Anderson deserved the same assessment a friend once gave Winston Churchill: “You’re usually right, but when you’re wrong, well, my God.”

Earning his nickname

Anderson was known throughout baseball as Sparky. Some longtime friends and acquaintances might not have known his real first name. He was born George Lee Anderson in Bridgewater, S.D., on Feb. 22, 1934. He was one of five children who lived in a house without an indoor toilet or sufficient heat. In the winter, Anderson’s father put cardboard over the windows to block the cold.

By the time Anderson was 10, his family moved to Los Angeles, but he always seemed more rooted in the humble soil of South Dakota. As Anderson consistently declined the perks and privileges of celebrity, it was as if he remembered that small, cold house in Bridgewater and remained grateful for how baseball had given him a life of unimaginable blessings. He remembered where he was from and thus knew where he was going, and thereby he kept his common touch no matter how often fame gave him the chance to abandon it.

Anderson signed as an infielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The only notable thing about his playing career was that it produced the name by which everyone came to know George Anderson.

“The name ‘Sparky’ started simply as a joke,” Anderson said in 1990 in his book titled, of course, “Sparky.” He continued: “Sparky was created in 1955 when I played at Ft. Worth, Texas, in my third year of pro ball. I didn’t have a lot of talent, so I tried to make up for it with spit and vinegar. I spent more time arguing with umpires than I spent on the bases.

“There was an old radio announcer whose name I don’t remember. ‘The sparks are flying tonight,’ he’d say after I charged another umpire. Then I’d do it the next night. And the next. Finally he got to saying, ‘And here comes Sparky racing toward the umpire again.’

“The name stuck. At first I was embarrassed. Eventually I got used to it.”

As he kept the victories, quotes and charisma coming, he became one of those rare baseball figures known by his nickname. It became such universal currency that it provided the title for both of his books. The second was “They Call Me Sparky” in 1998, and like its forerunner “Sparky,” it was co-written by Dan Ewald, the club’s longtime director of public relations.

Anderson played in the majors in one season, 1959. He was the starting second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies. He hit .218 and never hit a home run. Well into his managing career, he said, “I like when they took my playing record off my baseball card and put on my managing record.”
 

The Tigers' coup

When 1978 ended, Anderson’s Reds had gone back-to-back years without finishing first. Management wanted Anderson to fire one or more coaches, and he refused. Several weeks later, he was fired.

Anderson decided to sit out the 1979 season and return in 1980. He later wrote that of the six clubs that showed interest in him to manage in ’80, he had picked the Cubs. Then Tigers president and general manager Jim Campbell contacted Anderson in June 1979, and offered him the manager’s job if he would take it immediately.

Anderson did. Campbell fired first-year manager Les Moss to hire Anderson. On the day the Tigers announced his hiring, Anderson told the Free Press: “I began to wonder if I would ever get the opportunity to work with as good a group of people as they have in Detroit, if I would ever get the opportunity to work with talent that good, and if I would ever get a five-year contract.”

Years later, he wrote: “I don’t know exactly why the Detroit offer seemed so right. The Tigers met my conditions, but it wasn’t just the money.

“I remembered the Tigers from spring training. I remembered all those fine young players. Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker were just coming up. So were Jack Morris and Lance Parrish. And I remembered Kirk Gibson hitting a ball over the scoreboard that must have gone nine miles. He followed that with a routine ground ball that he beat out for a hit.

“I think the real thing that convinced me was the Tiger organization. The Tigers are tradition. The Tigers are baseball history.”

Anderson received the five-year contract he sought from the Tigers. At his introductory news conference in Detroit, he said he had promised Campbell and owner John Fetzer that the Tigers would win the World Series on his watch, and he strongly implied they would do it by the final year of his contract, 1984.

As in Cincinnati, Anderson inherited a young core of talent. Starting with 1979, the Tigers posted a winning record for 10 straight seasons, and by 1983 they climbed to a second-place finish in the American League East. As the 1984 season was about to begin, Anderson told a visitor in spring training, “We’re not good. We’re great.”

The Tigers team that won the World Series in 1984 could not deliver Anderson a dynasty like he had in Cincinnati. The Tigers had one more first-place finish under Anderson after ’84. It came in ’87, and it was the reverse of 1984 — the team started poorly but passed Toronto at season’s end.

As in ’84, the Tigers led the majors in victories, and as in ’84, Anderson was voted AL manager of the year. The ’87 Tigers lost decisively to Minnesota in the playoffs.

By 1989, the farm system had failed, and the Tigers were in last place May 19 when Anderson left the club with what it announced was exhaustion. For the first time in 18 years, Anderson was faced with a team that would finish with a losing record. “A nosedive crash into reality,” he called it.

“Physically, I could not have made it through another day,” Anderson wrote. “My nerves were shot.”

He spent the next 2 1/2 weeks recovering at home in California. He returned to the Tigers and said he would try to enjoy baseball more and not let his mood be so tied to wins and losses. Yet losses robbed him of his joy of conversation. His news conferences in his office after defeats tended to be filled with short, uninformative answers. Late in his career, he said he regretted that he always took losses too hard.
 

His big regret

Anderson had tremendous job security because he had the respect and friendship of Campbell, who was the club’s chief executive for Anderson’s first 14 seasons in Detroit. Campbell’s reign ended during the 1992 season when owner Tom Monaghan fired him and president Bo Schembechler. Monaghan did so as he was in the process of selling the club to Mike Ilitch, the Little Caesars magnate and owner of the Red Wings.

Anderson, who rarely admitted error, wrote in his memoir that he made a mistake that he didn’t voluntarily leave the Tigers with Campbell and Schembechler.

“I’ve always felt guilty that I stuck around after what happened to them,” Anderson wrote. “I have always maintained that when the people who were so close to you were ever mistreated, you go with them.

“I truly believe the only reason I stayed with the Tigers was because … I allowed my high salary to keep me there. For that, I am probably more ashamed of myself than for anything I have ever done in baseball.”

The Tigers finished with a winning record in 1993, the first season Ilitch owned the club. But despite a high payroll and many veterans, the Tigers were last in the AL East in 1994 when a players’ strike hit in mid-August and canceled the season.

The strike was still going when spring training was due to start in 1995. Teams hired replacement players, opened spring training and implicitly threatened to begin the regular season with the substitutes. Anderson wouldn’t go along with the idea. He refused to manage the replacement team in spring training, and thus he ruptured his relationship with Ilitch. The two apparently never repaired the rift, and many observers believe it is why the Tigers haven’t retired Anderson’s No. 11.

Anderson seldom mentioned the names of people he didn’t like. If he had to refer to them, he would do so vaguely. He wrote of life under Ilitch: “I really didn’t have a job no more, anyway. It was totally different.” And in his 1998 memoir, Anderson said this about the immediate aftermath of his announcement that he wouldn’t manage the replacement players: “I already heard the rumors about the owner wanting me fired.”

But nowhere in the book does Anderson mention Ilitch by name.

Anderson sensed that his refusal to manage the replacement players ended any chance he would be rehired for 1996. The real major leaguers came back in time for an almost full-length 1995 season, and Anderson resigned after the Tigers finished that year 60-84, in fourth place, 26 games behind Boston.

No other manager dared to walk out away from managing the replacement players. Yet Anderson’s abdication that spring wasn’t a shock. He’d long before established that he had the courage to do what he felt was right regardless of the reaction.

“For Sparky, this was not a political matter,” wrote co-author Ewald in Anderson’s 1998 book. “His decision was based on something much simpler. It was integrity.

“He believed the use of make-believe major-leaguers threatened the moral conscience of the game.”
 

Words of a master

Anderson might have picked the right time to leave. Life in the majors was coming to include heavy doses of statistical analysis and video study, and Anderson never showed fondness for either. He trusted his experience, instinct and guts.

Those same methods led to the idea he got in 1987 in his hotel room on a Tigers trip to Seattle. He would start a children’s charity at two Detroit hospitals. He immediately had the name: CATCH (Caring Athletes Team for Children’s and Henry Ford Hospital). In his memoir, the chapter on the charity is titled, “Sparky’s Greatest Gift.”

As Ilitch continued to own the Tigers throughout Anderson’s retirement, Detroit saw little of its most famous manager. The club asked Anderson to a game at Comerica Park in 2000 to salute his Hall of Fame induction.

He returned to Detroit for the 2006 World Series, the Tigers’ first since his team won it in 1984.

He also returned in September 2009 for the 25th reunion of the ’84 champs. Twenty-four members gathered together for a few days, even posed for a team photo with the World Series trophy. Trammell. Parish. Gibson. Darrell Evans. Jack Morris. But it was their 75-year-old manager who received the biggest ovation from the fans in Comerica Park.

“It was great to see Sparky so excited,” Gibson said. “That was the one thing that struck us all at the dinner.”

Typical of his shyness, during his 2006 World Series visit, Anderson refused manager Jim Leyland’s invitation to visit the clubhouse. But typical of his showmanship, Anderson gave a rousing pregame news conference that reminded many sportswriters how much they missed him. A few highlights:

• On his career: “I managed 26 years and found out when I retired I didn’t own the game. I thought I owned it when I was managing all those years. You can climb to the top of the mountain, get down on your knees and kiss the ground, because you’ll never own that mountain. That mountain is only owned by one single person, and he’ll never give it up. That’s the way baseball is.”

• On the popularity of baseball: “The commissioner needs a tremendous bouquet for what he’s done. He stepped in there now, and they’re drawing all over. … I got a kick out of them when they used to say baseball is dying, and football is No. 1. I hate to break the sad news to football, but nothing will ever take the place of baseball. When it goes bad, call me, because I won’t be around, but I can be reached under the ground.”

• On his life: “I was so lucky that I almost at times … feel ashamed that you could be that lucky, all the things that happened for me.”

No Perfect Game, but GM Gives Galarraga Corvette

USA Today

 

Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was robbed of a perfect game against the Cleveland Indians Wednesday night, but GM found his performance impressive enough in the Tigers' 3-0 shutout to hand him the keys to a 2010 Chevy Corvette convertible.

That's some consolation prize. But it couldn't be more deserved:

Galarraga retired 26 straight Indians' batters before the 27th and final batter, Jason Donald, stepped to the plate. Donald hit a ground ball between first and second base, which was fielded by Tiger's first baseman Miguel Cabrera. Cabrera threw to Galarraga, who stepped on first base, but umpire Jim Joyce blew the call and said Donald was safe. Galarraga had to settle for a 3-0 shutout.

Shortly after the game ended, Joyce admitted to missing the call at the base, saying, "I just cost that kid a perfect game. I thought he beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw, until I saw the replay. It was the biggest call of my career." The umpire apologized to Galarraga last night.

GM North American President Mark Reuss found the performance impressive enough anyway. No matter what the record books say, Reuss decided Galarraga deserved recognition for his achievement.

One has to wonder what kind of car Galarraga would have gotten for a perfect game.

Ernie Harwell, Detroit Tigers Broadcaster, Dies at 92

The Detroit Free Press

Ernie Harwell, the acclaimed Tigers broadcaster whose eloquence and kindness made him a beloved Michigan institution, died tonight after a nearly yearlong bout with cancer. He was 92.

He died in his apartment at Fox Run Village, a retirement center in Novi, with Lulu, his wife of 68 years, at his side. His death came eight months to the day after he revealed to his fans, in an interview with the Free Press, that he had a cancerous tumor in the area of his bile duct and that in late July he had been given only a few months to live.

“I’m ready to face what comes,” he said at the time. “Whether it’s a long time or a short time is all right with me because it’s up to my Lord and savior.”

In the ensuing months, in an emotional farewell ceremony at Comerica Park, in his columns for the Free Press and in interviews with national media, Harwell referred to death as his next great adventure, a gift handed down by God.

“I’ve had so many great ones,” he said. “It’s been a terrific life.”

Harwell had one of the longest runs by a broadcaster with one major league club, calling Tigers games for 42 seasons. For the first 32 of those seasons, he made and cemented his legacy by doing play-by-play on the radio. His Southern voice — rich and authoritative but not overbearing — became as distinctive to Michigan listeners as baseball itself.

Unlike some announcers in recent decades, Harwell didn’t litter his broadcasts with shouting, excessive talking or all-knowing pronouncements about players and managers. Listening to him was as pleasant as being at Tiger Stadium in the summertime. As he fell silent between pitches, listeners got to hear the sounds of the ballpark — the crowd’s buzz, the vendor’s cry — and absorb the rhythm of the game. Harwell thus became an ideal companion for a listener anywhere: the couch, the yard, the car or the boat.

“He’s a master craftsman,” former Tigers broadcaster Josh Lewin, now with the Texas Rangers, said in 2002. “He’s always kept it simple, which I think is part of his charm and staying power.”

In 2005, author and historian Curt Smith ranked Harwell as the third-greatest baseball announcer ever, only placing him behind Dodgers legend Vin Scully and Yankees stalwart Mel Allen. Just behind Harwell were St. Louis’ Jack Buck and New York’s Red Barber. Smith, a student of baseball broadcasting, had 10 criteria for his rankings, ranging from longevity and acclaim to voice and personality.
No last name needed

Beyond his consummate broadcasting skills, Harwell’s cheerfulness and friendliness made him a local treasure.

“He always had that warmth, that inviting lilt to his voice that always made you feel welcome,” Lewin said. “No one can do that like Ernie can.”

At home games, Harwell would report that a foul ball had been caught by “a man from Ypsilanti” or “a lady from Muskegon.” Of course he couldn’t know where the fan lived, but pretending that he did added a distinct local feel to his broadcasts.

On the day of his career-ending broadcast in 2002, he said, “I look on life as a joyous adventure.” He had lived by that ideal. He constantly conducted himself with joy, on and off the air. “Howdy, howdy,” he would greet friends and strangers, smiling and extending his hand.

Harwell was in his 80s when he returned to the radio in 1999 for four final years of broadcasting every Tigers game, home and away. He didn’t sound tired, old-fashioned or nostalgic, even as the Tigers in those years stacked one losing season on top of another. During Harwell’s final season, Boston Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione said, “Ernie is the most contemporary octogenarian I know.”

He became so well-known and so liked that about the only place in Michigan he would be referred to as “Harwell” would be in newspaper stories. Fans, friends and coworkers called him “Ernie.” He didn’t carry himself with any haughtiness or fussiness.

When Detroit hosted the Super Bowl in 2006, Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe wrote a column in which he extolled Michigan’s best citizens and strongest assets. He listed many people. But the first one was Ernie Harwell.

Harwell’s popularity never became more evident than when Tigers management and flagship radio station WJR-AM (760) fired him after the 1990 season. It immediately became the most unpopular move in club history. In one local poll, 97% disagreed with the firing.

After a so-called farewell season with the club in 1991, Harwell was off Tigers broadcasts in 1992. During that season, Mike Ilitch bought the club from Tom Monaghan and quickly arranged for Harwell to return to the air the next season. Harwell would remain on radio or television until his self-declared retirement following the ’02 season. In 55 seasons of broadcasting big-league baseball, he missed two games, neither because of his health. One was for his brother’s funeral in 1968 and the other was for his induction into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 1989.
The love of the game

Harwell was past 40 and had been a big-league announcer for more than 10 years when he joined the Tigers broadcast team in 1960. But it was then that he began the kind of long run with one team that a baseball announcer typically needs to establish a lasting identity.

Harwell had the folksiness to present the game’s local sandlot feel, and the knowledge and respect to convey its history and grandeur. That made him a friendly, informed neighbor — the most interesting kind of company to have on the radio every night of the baseball season.

He emblazoned his compelling dual sense of the game into the written record in 1955, when he penned these words for the Sporting News:

“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. …

“There’s a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago — that’s baseball. And so is the scout reporting that a 16-year-old sandlot pitcher in Cheyenne is the coming Walter Johnson.

“In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color, merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another’s.

“Baseball? Just a game — as simple as a ball and bat. And yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes.”

Harwell touched many of the game’s deepest and earliest roots. As a young broadcaster in Atlanta, he interviewed Ted Williams, Boston’s spectacular young hitter. And when the Yankees visited Atlanta for an exhibition game in 1930, the 12-year-old Harwell had an encounter with the most famous baseball player of them all. He asked George Herman Ruth for an autograph, and Ruth pointed out to Harwell that he didn’t have any paper with him. Harwell’s spontaneous reaction became the title of one of his books: “The Babe Signed My Shoe.”

In 2006, Harwell released a four-CD retrospective on his life and work. It included an interview he did in 1940 with Connie Mack, the longtime owner-manager of the Philadelphia Athletics. Mack was born during the Civil War. He became directly linked to the 21st Century by Ernie Harwell.

Despite his lengthy and immense recognition as a baseball announcer, Harwell was many things. His wife, Lulu, detailed them in her introduction to his 1985 memoir, “Tuned to Baseball.” Among the entries she made about Ernie:

“Inventor. He holds a U.S. patent on a bottle-can opener and also invented a World Series Fact Wheel.…

“Songwriter. Forty-six of his songs have been recorded. He has collaborated with such songwriting greats as Sammy Fain, Johnny Mercer, Jose Feliciano and Mitch Ryder. …

“Writer. His articles have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, American Legion, Collier’s and Reader’s Digest.”

Then, in the final paragraph of the book’s introduction, Lulu Harwell wrote that Ernie “had a racehorse named after him, sang a duet with Pearl Bailey, gave his Christian testimony on a Billy Graham TV special and was baptized in the Jordan River.”

Harwell at first wanted to tell about games through the written word. “I’m just a failed sports writer,” he would say with a chuckle. But he was being typically humble — he was more like a detoured sports writer.

He began to write for the Sporting News, then the national voice of baseball, when he was 16. That was in 1934, the same year that the Tigers and Cardinals met in the World Series for the first time. The second time they met, in 1968, Harwell was the Tigers’ top radio announcer and worked the World Series games on NBC.

And when the Tigers and Cardinals met in the 2006 World Series, Harwell used his weekly column in the Free Press to write a recollection of the first World Series he witnessed: the one in 1935 between the Tigers and Cubs. He got to go to Chicago for that series, thanks to an uncle who lived there. That also was the first World Series the Tigers won.
Coming of age in the South

William Earnest Harwell was older than the profession that made him famous. When he was born on Jan. 25, 1918, commercial radio was a few years from its launch. If fans in those days wanted to know about baseball games, they either attended them or read about them in newspapers. The written word was, by far, the dominant means of communication.

Harwell was born in Washington, Ga., a rural town where his father ran a furniture store. When Harwell was 5, the store failed, and the family moved to Atlanta.

Young Ernie Harwell had a speech impediment. He corrected it by taking weekly lessons with an elocution teacher named Margaret Lackland. Among the works she had him read aloud was a poem called “The House by the Side of the Road.” Harwell didn’t forget that poem. In his broadcasts, he often said that a batter who took a third strike had “stood there like the house by the side of the road.”

Harwell got his first broadcasting job in 1940, when he was 22 and a student at Emory University in Atlanta. He became the lone sportscaster for local station WSB, and he did 15-minute reports twice a night.

“All the time I was at WSB, I dreamed of doing baseball play-by-play,” Harwell wrote. “That was my first love.”

The same year that he began broadcasting, Harwell met Lulu Tankersley, a Kentucky native attending college in Georgia. They were married in that now-romanticized time just before America’s entry into World War II: the summer of 1941.

In that December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. In 1942, Harwell enlisted in the Marines. The next year, he got a brief first chance at baseball broadcasting. He was stationed in Atlanta, doing public relations work for the Marines, when Atlanta Crackers president Earl Mann retained him to do the club’s games. Harwell recalled that he did no more than a handful because of his obligations to the Marines.

Later in the war, Harwell went to the Pacific and wrote for the Marines publication “Leatherneck.” He traveled as far as China.

The war ended in the late summer of 1945, and on Opening Day in 1946, Harwell learned he had gotten the job as the Crackers’ full-time play-by-play announcer. More than 50 years later, he called it “the most important day of my career.” Ernie Harwell was in baseball broadcasting to stay.
The road to the majors

By Harwell’s third season in Atlanta, 1948, he had attracted the interest of Branch Rickey, the renowned executive who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers. To get Harwell’s services, Rickey traded minor league catcher Cliff Dapper to Atlanta.

Mann wanted Dapper to be his club’s manager, and he was willing to give up his broadcaster to get him.

Thus, thanks to perhaps the only broadcaster-player trade in baseball history, Ernie Harwell broke into the majors as a broadcaster in August 1948 with the Dodgers. Harwell and Dapper finally met 54 years later, on Ernie Harwell Day at Comerica Park in 2002.

Harwell was the No. 3 announcer on the Dodgers’ broadcasts. After he spent a year in that role in 1949, he became the No. 2 announcer with the crosstown New York Giants. To replace Harwell, the Dodgers hired a young announcer recently out of Fordham University, Vin Scully.

Fifty years later, as the 21st Century arrived, Harwell and Scully were still on the air. Scully never left the Dodgers. Harwell spent four seasons with the Giants, then, after the 1953 season, was sacked without explanation (a foreshadowing of his brief Tigers demise in 1990-91).

For the next season, he found work when the bedraggled St. Louis Browns of the American League moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles. Harwell became one of the team’s inaugural announcers.

Harwell figured he would be fired by the Orioles after the 1956 season because the team had changed local beer sponsors. As Harwell reported in his memoir, the new beer sponsor “stated that the announcers would not be retained” because of their strong identity with the old sponsor.

The new sponsor, Gunther, sent a representative from its New York agency to Baltimore to speak with Harwell and his agent over lunch. Harwell considered it a kind but empty gesture; he didn’t expect to be kept by the Orioles.

The agency representative arrived late, said he didn’t have much time, and asked whether there was a Chinese restaurant nearby. There was, a block away. Harwell had never been to it.

“A waiter seated us,” Harwell wrote, “and, in several minutes, came back to the table. Before he even asked about a drink or luncheon order, he said, ‘I’ve got a petition here you’ve got to sign. We can’t lose Ernie Harwell. We’ve got to keep him here. Gunther has to hire him to do the Orioles games.’”

Harwell added: “You could have knocked me over with a chopstick. I’d never been in this restaurant and certainly didn’t know the waiter. It would have seemed like a set-up to the Gunther agency man, except that he was the one who asked about Chinese food. We didn’t sign the petition, but I’m sure the request by the waiter made a lasting impression on the agency man. He talked about it all through lunch. He returned to New York and recommended that Gunther keep me as their Oriole announcer.”

Keep him they did. Harwell considered the episode a miracle. And it helped lead him to Detroit.

Had Harwell been fired by the Orioles after 1956, he wouldn’t have been around George Kell in 1957 as the distinguished third baseman was playing with the Orioles in the final year of his career. Late in the season, Kell hurt his ankle and spent time in the broadcast booth with Harwell, who put him to work as a color commentator. Kell later said he learned a lot about broadcasting from Harwell during their 10 days together on the air.

Two years later, with the help of a recommendation from Kell, another change in beer sponsors landed Harwell in Detroit.
A home in Motown

Kell had joined veteran announcer Van Patrick on the Tigers radio team in 1959. After that season, the Tigers’ beer sponsor changed from Goebel to Stroh’s.

The brewery fired Patrick, whom it felt had become too identified with Goebel through the years. But Kell had been around only one season, so Stroh’s kept him. The brewery asked Kell to recommend a successor for Patrick, and Kell suggested Harwell. The Tigers offered him a job, and when the Orioles wouldn’t match it, Ernie Harwell was en route to Detroit to stay.

Harwell’s first regular-season Tigers broadcast came on Opening Day of 1960 in Cleveland, and it was extraordinary for three reasons. First, the game pitted the teams who had made one of the most distinctive trades in baseball history two days before: the Tigers sent the league’s reigning batting champion, Harvey Kuenn, to the Indians for the league’s home run champion of the previous season, Rocky Colavito.

Second, the Indians had no room for Kell and Harwell in the main press box, and so they broadcast the game from a table in the upper deck at the lakefront ballpark. In his 2002 biography with Tom Keegan, Harwell recalled that day’s conditions:

“A biting wind was coming off Lake Erie, and it was about 35 degrees. All I wanted to do, and all George wanted to do, from the first pitch was get back to the hotel.”

Instead, they got the day’s third dose of the extraordinary: The game lasted almost five hours. It was scoreless until the 11th, when both teams scored twice. The Tigers finally won in the 15th inning, 4-2;, on a two-run single by Al Kaline.

Long before Harwell’s final season, the Indians (like all clubs) had a broadcast booth for visiting radio announcers. And in 2002, on Harwell’s final visit to Cleveland as an announcer, the Indians named their visiting radio booth for him.
The many years in the booth

By 1963, his fourth year in Detroit, Harwell had become prominent enough that NBC radio assigned him to the World Series. A snippet of his call from that Series is heard in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson.

Kell and Harwell worked together on Tigers radio and television broadcasts for four seasons. Kell left after the 1963 season (he returned a year later to work television games, which weren’t as frequent then as they are now). Harwell’s partners after Kell were former Tigers manager Bob Scheffing in 1964, Gene Osborn in 1965-66, and Ray Lane, starting in 1967.

Harwell and Lane called perhaps the most epic back-to-back seasons in Tigers history: the 1967 final-day miss at the pennant, and the 1968 pennant, when, in that last season before divisional play, the Tigers ran away from all other AL teams behind Denny McLain’s 31 victories.

In 1973, veteran broadcaster Paul Carey replaced Lane. Harwell said Carey had the best voice of any of his partners. Carey’s baritone mixed beautifully with Harwell’s sweet Southern tones, and the two became a memorable combination.

Harwell and Carey shared the broadcasts for the next 19 seasons, through 1991. Carey had decided he would retire following the ’91 season. Then Tigers management decided not to retain Harwell, either. So in that season, Harwell and Carey seemingly ended their Tigers careers together.

During his wilderness year of ’92, Harwell called CBS Radio’s game of the week and made some guest appearances on California Angels broadcasts. On Tigers broadcasts that season, Rick Rizzs and Bob Rathbun replaced Harwell and Carey. The newcomers constantly felt the backlash of the fans angered about Harwell’s firing. In ’93, the rehired Harwell joined them, and for one season on the radio, they were a threesome.

In ’94, Harwell left radio and began a five-year run on Tigers telecasts. Although his presence on TV might have seemed strange after all of his years on the radio, it was worth remembering that Harwell was the television announcer for perhaps the most famous homer in baseball history: Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning blow against the Dodgers; that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant.

Harwell returned to the radio in 1999 to take over the play-by-play job from Frank Beckmann, who had stepped down. At 81, Harwell was again broadcasting the full 162-game schedule. He called the last game at Tiger Stadium in 1999 and the first game at Comerica Park in 2000. On one Opening Day at Comerica, he danced in the clubhouse. His career was coming to a healthy and triumphant conclusion.

Forty-two years after he faced Cleveland’s Lake Erie winds in his first Tigers broadcast, Harwell had a more comfortable seat on the Great Lakes for his final broadcast. It came in Toronto’s luxurious SkyDome, near Lake Ontario, on Sept. 29, 2002. The New York Times assigned a man to Harwell’s booth for the historical event.
Life after baseball

Harwell had announced months before that 2002 would be his last season. In that final broadcast, he was true to the style that made him beloved. He didn’t gush or ramble. He still made every word count. It was a method he had learned more than 60 years before from his sports editor with the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill.

At times during that final broadcast, he reminisced. One story involved a Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher named Hugh Casey. “One of my large regrets is that I never got to Cuba,” he said. “The Dodgers trained in Cuba one year. Hugh Casey got in a fight with Ernest Hemingway.”

A few innings later, Harwell called the final pitch of his broadcasting career: “Two down, a man on, Mr. Escobar trying to get that final out. Pena digging in, waiting. Here’s the set, the pitch. Swing and a miss, and the Toronto Blue Jays win the final game of 2002. The final score, the Blue Jays one and the Tigers nothing.”

A commercial followed, and then Harwell spoke for one minute and 15 seconds. They were his final words as a Tigers broadcaster. He read from a script he’d written, and near the end of it, he felt emotion overtake him for the only time that day. It came when he told the audience, “I might have been a small part of your life, but you’ve been a large part of mine.”

He wrapped up the address and 55 years as a major league broadcaster by saying, “I thank you very much, and God bless all of you.”

Earlier in the farewell, he had said, “I’m not leaving, folks. I’ll still be with you, living my life in Michigan, my home state, surrounded by family and friends.”

And so he was. He and Lulu continued to live in the Detroit area. As Harwell approached 90, a caller to his home might hear Lulu say, “Ernie is working out. He does that every day.”

After he retired from the Tigers broadcasts, Harwell did a radio commercial in Detroit in which he never identified himself. The people in charge of the advertisement had made an assumption that was probably correct. Almost anyone hearing that voice would know it was Ernie Harwell.