9001140083 DETROIT FREE PRESS 900409 Monday, April 09, 1990 METRO FINAL

SPT

1E Photo and Photo Color MARY SCHROEDER;Photo : The Tigers have a new president, many new players and an unfamiliar goal: rebounding from a 103-loss season. But not all is new in a year of transition. Sparky Anderson still calls the shots, and Ernie Harwell's voice offers a clear signal of spring. But will the Tigers become winners again? The voices of spring in the booth at Lakeland: Ernie Harwell (left) and long-time partner Paul Carey. Ernie Harwell in 1967 Ernie Harwell in 1982 MITCH ALBOM SPECIAL SECTION: BASEBALL '90 Copyright (c) 1990, Detroit Free Press THE TIGERS IN TRANSITION ERNIE: A VOICE OF STABILITY IN BASEBALL'S SEA OF CHANGE LAKELAND, Fla. -- Year after year, winter after winter, the voice stirs from under the snow. It heats up, it melts free, it crosses your lawn and taps the frost from your window. "Time to wake up," it seems to say. "It's spring. I'm back." You yawn. You smile. It is a voice you trust, an easy pitch, not too shrill, not too deep, a sprinkle of Southern accent -- genteel, that's probably a good word, a voice that would sing you a lullaby or tell you bedtime stories. It asks for nothing, this voice. It never scolds. It never whines. It wants only to live inside your transistor radio, to narrate from your car speakers as you drive on a summer night. It is the human lyric of the double play and the single up the middle. It is the call of a rookie with a smoking fastball. It is the game the way the game would sound if only the game could talk. It is the voice of baseball. It belongs to Ernie Harwell. "He's the best," people say, as if stating a law of nature. And he is still here, behind the mike in that little booth at Tiger Stadium. Amidst all the turmoil, all the change, all the money and lawyers and lockouts and strikes, Ernie's voice remains as much real baseball as green grass and orange dirt. We're talking transition? He has seen transition. He has outlasted owners and outlasted managers and watched rookies turn to old-timers and old-timers turn to the grave. He was bellowing into that microphone before his new boss was in high school. He sold his first story to The Sporting News the year Sparky Anderson was born. He used to shag fly balls with Jackie Robinson and ride the train with Gil Hodges. He had a fight with Leo Durocher and called Denny McLain's 30th victory. You name it, he's seen it. And he is still here. That voice. On your worst days, it can make you feel good. On your good days, it can make you feel better. Bag of potato chips, Ernie on the radio. Window rolled down, Ernie on the radio. Suntan oil, Ernie on the radio. A Tigers game without him would be like playing with a purple baseball. In 30 years with the Detroit club, this is how many broadcasts he has missed: two. One in 1968, for his brother's funeral. One last year, to receive a major award. Oh, yeah. There was this night in the mid-'70s, at Tiger Stadium, against the California Angels, when it began to rain. After a while, an announcement came to the broadcast booth: "Game canceled, doubleheader tomorrow." Harwell, as he had been doing for years, relayed the message over the air -- never knowing it was a practical joke. Then he packed up and left. Ten minutes later, on the freeway, he turned on the radio to hear the postgame program. "Wait a minute folks," said Ray Lane, "apparently, the game has not been canceled. They're going to start back up . . . "Ernie! Ernie! Wherever you are! Come back!" Harwell got off the next exit, returned to the park, and finished the broadcast. See? Even when he tries to leave, the game calls him home. Ding how!" The cook looks at him. He doesn't understand. "Ding how?" Harwell repeats. "Oh, meestah. You speak Chinese?" "Well, ha ha . . . just that word. I learned it when I was over there." He smiles. The cook smiles. Everybody smiles. We are in a Chinese restaurant, where baseball is hardly a dominant subject, but people still react to Harwell as if he is an honored guest. His voice does it. It sings of hospitality. He takes a seat next to his wife, Lulu, whom he met almost 50 years ago at a fraternity dance at Emory College. They talked about books. She thought he was "cute." He proposed in a letter. They still hold hands today. At 72, Harwell seems more frail now. His face shows the lines of experience, his hair is whitish-blond and often tucked under a beret. He wears glasses, he has for years. Now and then he will dig his fists in his pockets and stiffen while he sucks in a deep breath, as if trying to realign his bones. Breathing is important for the voice, he will tell you, and to this day, he takes a morning walk and holds in air for 10 paces and lets it out for 10 more, a trick he was shown by a Russian violinist back in the 1940s, at his first job, WSB in Atlanta, "The Voice of the South." Those were the days when radio stations used orchestras, not compact disc players. Ernie Harwell does not have a compact disc player. He does not have an answering machine. He has radios. One in the living room, one in the kitchen, one in the office, one in the family room, one in every bedroom, and one little portable that Lulu takes on her nightly walk around the neighborhood, so she can listen to her husband broadcast the games. He seems as dedicated to radios as he is to his subject, which has always been baseball, as long as we can remember. Oh, he broadcast some football, some golf, some tennis, some bowling. He wrote articles for Esquire, Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. He covered the Japanese surrender at Wake Island. While in the Marines, as a correspondent, he had this idea for a story about the president's mail -- how much he gets, how much he answers. He contacted the White House. They set up an appointment. Eleanor Roosevelt met him in the Green Room. Alone. They talked for 90 minutes. "She was very accommodating," he says. Eleanor Roosevelt? Still, the ballpark is Harwell's natural stage. It has been since his first major league season in 1948, working for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His first road game was at Braves Field in Boston. They didn't have a booth. So he and his engineer sat in in the rightfield stands with their equipment on their laps. Can you picture that? "The fans were all around us," Harwell recalls. "Looking over our shoulder, looking over our heads. You had to try to block them out." You need a hell of a focus. But then, that always has been the strength of a Harwell broadcast. Focus. Oh, he can tell you almost anything about baseball history. He just won't. Not unless it's pertinent. He does not chew fat. He does not drop names. He will talk about the rookie left-hander, tell you which way the wind is blowing, set the bases, shift the outfield, call the pitch, bring you right in -- and let you float above the action. Silence. The magic is in the pauses. Dizzy Gillespie, the famous jazz trumpeter, once said: "It took me my whole life to learn what not to play." So, too, does Harwell know when to leave it alone, when to let the crowd noise or the beer man or your own imagination take the mike from his hands. This is radio. This is play-by-play artistry. What separates him from those other pretenders trying to become famous with their mouths is this: Ernie Harwell respects the game. Sure, there are flashier names in media. Guys like Harry Caray, who scream "HOLY COW!" every five minutes. Guys like Al Michaels, who give sports a slick, corporate feel. Guys like John Madden, who are hired to go "BOOM!" Somewhere along the line, something was lost. Except at Tiger Stadium. Except in that little booth. Baseball nuts in Pennsylvania and Virginia and Indiana still sit in their cars, late at night, fiddling with the knobs, until the signal from WJR wafts in across the skies, and they can hear that voice with the touch of Georgia accent. ("Hello evrahbody, welcome to Tigah baseball . . .") Make us young again, Ernie. Make it fun again, Ernie. Year after year, in the first game of spring, he opens with the same sentence: "For lo, the winter is past, and the song of the turtle is heard across the land . . ." He's quoting the bible. Song of Solomon. That's Ernie's idea of flash. You know, the game hasn't changed all that much," Harwell says now, after returning home from the restaurant and taking a chair in his hotel room. "A lot of people think the players are more money-minded than before. They say, 'This guy is making $3 million so he won't hustle.' "But it's all relative. I read a book not too long ago that went back to the 1934 season. It reprinted baseball stories from the top sports writers of the day. And one of those guys wrote 'It's no wonder the players of today don't hustle! They're making $3,000 a year and have two-year contracts!' " Harwell laughs, perhaps for the irony, perhaps because he can still remember 1934. And 1944. And 1954. Those were the days you rode trains with the players, you played cards, you passed the beer. You glorified their heroics, and shut your eyes to their antics. Harwell was with the Brooklyn Dodgers for much of that time. He rode the trains. He shagged fly balls in the outfield, right alongside the players. He was not afraid to call men such as Robinson, Hodges and Campanella his "friends" -- a faux pas amongst today's more hard-bitten journalists. "I guess I've never really gotten comfortable with the whole antagonistic relationship, especially the drugs and alcohol thing," he says. "You know, I've never seen a person use drugs. I never have. In the old days, you might see a player get on the train a little tipsy from too many drinks after the game. But things were a lot different. The feeling was much more paternalistic, between the reporters and the players -- and between the owners and the players. Back then, the owners were former baseball men themselves, or baseball families. If a guy got drunk, the owner would bail him out of jail, give him an advance, never say anything about it. "Nowadays, they don't do that. They're at odds with each other. And besides, the owners aren't the same kind of people. They're corporations, guys who made a lot of money and want to buy into the game." Harwell has endured his share of owners. And general managers. He has worked for the Dodgers, the Giants, the Orioles. He has done more than 4,500 Tigers games. He has witnessed the strikes and lockouts and walkouts and players coming from jail and players going to rehab centers. He is asked whether the participants could ever do something so terrible, so revolting, that the fans would give up on the game? "I honestly don't think so," he says. "They've gone through just about everything there is. To me, baseball is sort of like the church. The church has always taken all kinds of abuse. People in it have made terrible mistakes in the name of religion. And yet it survives. "Besides, I really believe if a guy is a jerk, but he gets up there in the bottom of the ninth and hits a three-run homer, the fans are going to cheer, no matter what. That's baseball. It goes on and on." And so does Harwell. Once upon a time, he dreamed of the cheers himself. As a child in Georgia, he spent hours on the sandlots. Second base. Fielding grounders. Broadcasting was probably the last career anyone would have predicted; after all, young Harwell's tongue did not move properly when he spoke -- they call it tongue-tied -- and for years, everything came out with an "f." The word sister, he pronounced "fifter." Christmas was "fifmaf." Once a month, in school, he would have to stand up and "debate or declare." The other kids would laugh. "Ernie can't talk right. Ha ha ha . . . " That he survived that trauma and prospered from it (with the help of an elocution teacher) is credit to his quiet strength. And the fact that he had bigger things to worry about. When Ernie was 6, his father, Gray, who owned a furniture store, was afflicted with multiple sclerosis. Paralyzed and home-bound, he would live another 36 years and never move his limbs. The store was lost. Money was scarce. In the mornings, Ernie and his two brothers would help lift their father from the bed to the wheelchair. Then they would gather up cakes and sandwiches their mother had been making since 4 a.m., and deliver them via streetcar to drugstores and society functions. It was the Depression. A nickel here. A dime there. He wrote. He loved writing. He even considered music (and has written nearly 50 songs that have been recorded). But, in time, he fell in love with radio. His first broadcasting job was in 1946, with the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern League, Ponce De Leon Field. When they played at home, he called it all. When they went on the road, he "recreated" the game in a studio. A telegrapher would send the play-by-play by morse code, and Harwell, in a small, smoky room with another telegrapher, would take the message and let his imagination take over: "Let's say the morse code read: 'Jones grounds out to short.' I'd say "Smith on the mound, the infield in a bit, winds blowing out to right, Smith looks into his catcher, Brown, he's got his sign, here's the windup, here's the pitch . . . ground ball to short, Morton over to Morgan, he's out, one away . . .' "Then I'd go on to the next batter. I'd have a little piece of wood that I banged on the table whenever the batter was supposed to hit the ball.' "Sometimes, the telegraph machines would break down for 20 or 30 minutes. Then you'd really have to stretch. You'd have the guy foul off about 25 pitches, go in for a new bat, get in an argument with the umpire, anything you could think of." Harwell laughs at the fuss people make over those old days. Recreate? Twenty minutes of make-believe? He shrugs and says that "anyone with a voice could do it." Sure. And Picasso painted by numbers. Harwell did, however, learn two golden rules of radio on those long, black-coffee nights. One was that -- no matter what your imagination -- you must be true to the box score. People will check. This was the other: "On radio, nothing happens," he says, smiling like a leprechaun, "until the announcer says it does." And what a fitting way to end the story, because many people already believe that about Harwell and the Tigers. Nothing happens until he says it does. It seems remarkable that in 30 years, he has never had a run-in with Detroit player. Or that his long-time partner, Paul Carey, cannot remember a single cross word between them. "I guess I run away and hide if there's trouble," Harwell demurs. A better explanation is what Susan Sarandon says at the start of the baseball film "Bull Durham:" It's a long season. You've got to trust it. So today, in Boston -- the same city where 42 years ago he broadcast from the rightfield bleachers -- Ernie Harwell kicks off another season. The voice will carry the familiar drawl ("Thank-ya, Mistah Carey," "Here come the Tigahs" or his first line today, as always on Opening Day "Happa New Year!") and those listening in offices and cars and on transistor radios will instantly be transformed, shaken from hibernation. If the game is great, his voice will rise with excitement. ("High and outside, that's my pitch" he jokes of his tone.) And if the game is a downer, if the month is a loser, even if the whole season goes south -- well, you won't know it from Harwell. It is a lesson he learned from his father. "After he got sick, he couldn't read. The disease affected his eyesight. But he loved to listen to baseball games. Sometimes it was all he had. We forget that when the team is in last place, not going anywhere. We tend to say, 'Aw, what's the difference?' But there are a lot of people out there who still really care about it, kids, older people, shut-ins like my dad. It means something to them." And so it means something to Harwell. His father never heard him do a Tigers game. He died in 1960, the year Ernie got the job. He missed the magic. For 30 years, we have not. It doesn't seem fair. It probably isn't. What was it Ray Lane yelled over the air that night? "Come back Ernie! Wherever you are!" The mikes are on. The snow has melted. And today, shortly after lunchtime, which is when all baseball games should be played, you will hear that familiar tap on your now frost-free windows. The voice is back. Spring has come again. TUNED TO . . . Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell speaks out on: * THE TIGERS' WOES: "They probably had a tendency to fall in love too much with players they had for too long. They won the World Series in 1984 and stuck with those guys, but, meanwhile, the farm system wasn't developing. "The great dynasties, like the Yankees, always had a few new faces come up each year. A Whitey Ford, a Tony Kubek. The Tigers weren't doing that. They didn't go on the free agent market, either. "I think they made the same mistake after 1968. They won the pennant with guys they brought from the farm system -- Northrup, Stanley, Horton, all those guys -- but they sort of wore out all at once. It cost them probably four or five years of developing other players. They really didn't recover until the next wave of guys, like Trammell, Whitaker, Morris, Petry. * HAS MONEY REALLY CHANGED BASEBALL: "I don't think so. Maybe just in people's minds. Let's face it, even back in the '30s guys were in it for the money. But the fans were under the impression that it was maybe 90 percent sport and 10 percent business. Now the percentages have changed. Fans are probably more realistic." * IS BASEBALL COMPETING MORE WITH OTHER SPORTS: "I think so. Other sports have taken away from baseball's audience. The Pistons have captured a lot of attention in Detroit. But there are just so many more sports now, period. "When I was in New York in the late '40s, baseball was the biggest story in the paper, not only in the summer but in the winter, too. During the off-season months, we'd have a baseball story on the front page almost every day. Pro basketball was really nothing, pro football wasn't really great, and they had no college football to speak of. It's not that way anymore. Not there and not in Detroit." * PROLIFERATION OF HOT-SHOT ANNOUNCERS: "I don't know. I always felt the game should be paramount. The announcer should sublimate himself to the action. I hate to see an announcer become a celebrity and get bigger than the game. Then people are just tuning in to hear what he has to say instead of the event. Howard Cosell did that for a while, he had a good shtick and he worked it. But in the end, he became very mean to people, very bitter." * WILL BO BE ABLE TO BE A GOOD PRESIDENT: "I think he will. I don't worry about the fact that he hasn't been in baseball. I've seen guys come in and do great things from the outside. Maybe sometime even better than the inside guys. How about Charley Finley? He didn't know anything about baseball, but he practically built a dynasty. It made a lot of establishment people mad, because he did it by himself." * WILL THE TIGERS TURN IT AROUND AND BECOME WINNERS THIS YEAR? "Not yet, to be honest with you. I think this season will be a long haul. If they move up a rung or two, it's probably as good as we have a right to expect. But you never know. That's why we play the season." BIOGRAPHY; QUOTE; ANECDOTE; ERNIE HARWELL; ANNOUNCER; DTIGERS;BASEBALL;Detroit Tigers