Just Keep Talking: Filling the Air in a Post-Harwell World

I was standing in the hallway outside my work study job when somebody leaned out the door and casually mentioned, “Harry Kalas died.”

I didn’t work with any baseball fans, so the impact was all but lost on everybody.  You might as well have told a roomful of squirrels that your voicemail’s been spotty lately.  Just… zero effect.

On the other hand, I stopped halfway through explaining our far too complicated video camera loaning system to a googly-eyed freshman to absorb the news.  It was terrible.  He wasn’t even clinging to life in a hospital bed somewhere, he was gone. Cut the summer months out of your calendar, folks.  Harry’s not around to talk it in anymore.

While I didn’t have the same familiarity with Ernie Harwell, Harry’s death gave me a perspective of what they must have been going through in Detroit.  They played a sampling of Ernie’s best calls on TV, one of them being his signature “… he just stood there like a house on the side of the road” as somebody struck out looking.

Later that week, as Joe Morgan mentioned in the middle of a pitch that he had been on a train last week, I realized “Nobody talks like Harwell anymore.”

The world of broadcasting baseball, with each passing old-timer, weakens the foundations of our summer narration.  All you have to do is look at who we’re left with.

Most of these guys are spouting a tangled mess of words more akin to the wires behind my computer desk than anything human beings say to each other on a daily basis.  Sometimes, it’d be hard to convince viewers that the guys calling the game were even aware that there was a game being played, that their microphones were on, or that it was their job to explain to the audience what was happening.

But its easy to make fun of Tim McCarver.  At this point, it seems like that’s what he’s there for; like a clown at a birthday party, handing out balloon animals while trying to explain the biological impact of each species to a gang of yammering, impatient children.  The mute button’s just a coffee table away.

Think about how hard of a job this is.  Sure, on the outside, it looks like there’s just two ex-players and a media specialist with a sultry voice watching a baseball game and saying what’s happening as they do.  But baseball, as we all know, moves at the speed of a cow grazing.  And, when compared to another more manic game like hockey (which, being loud, messy, bloody, and frantic, is more like a cow giving birth) it looks even slower.

So imagine you are given the task of filling the silence leftover by a game that hasn’t really changed a whole lot fundamentally in over 200 years.  You can’t look up at the game clock and determine just how much time is left to tick away, you can only look at the actual clock and try to predict just when somebody’s going to break this tie.  Will it be the first pitch in the bottom of the 10th?  Or are you going to be watching the sun come up with Joe Buck?  It is impossible to tell.

It is less like they are offering their thoughts and more like they are saving us from silence.  I mean… could you imagine if we had to sit there and watch the game without Johnny Miller and Joe Morgan talking about the differences between doves and pigeons?  If we the audience became privy to the organic audio of the sport, we’d hear the players screaming “FUCK” after a close play, the jeers and taunts of the fans, and whatever crazy shit’s coming out Ozzie Guillen’s mouth.

If all we had were the sounds created by the ball; when it hit the bat, when it smacked a glove, as it skitted up the infield at 110 MPH on its way toward some poor rookie shortstop’s front teeth–would it be more akin to a first row seat, or uncomfortably silent?

It would be such a purist’s take on the game we could forget about all the horrific cheating that has gone on during our generation, if only for the three to 6 hours and 53 minutes it takes to complete a game of baseball.

If that sounds nice, it’s because it is.  You’d be amazed at how serene the game can be without ESPN’s “exploding stadium lights” opening graphic.  So serene, in fact, that you’d be asleep in seconds.

There’s got to be a middle ground here.  The game needs narration to avoid being a televised nap, but it does not need Orel Hershiser sending a production assistant to look up his own stats just so he can remind us that he was a pretty good pitcher once, too.

That’s what died with Kalas and Harry Caray, and what was lost even further with the recent passing of Ernie Harwell: Broadcasters who you would actually want to listen to.  When one of these guys told a story, it wasn’t manufactured banter handed to them on a card from an ESPN producer.  It was a story about baseball, that took into account what was happening in the game that was being played in front of them.  They weren’t wasting half their air time trying to convince us how quirky and fun they were, they were just genuinely fascinating, introspective gents with a platform to explain the game through the filter of their expertise.

They were the “knowledgeable grandpas” to our “fascinated youngsters.”  And on the other side of the ball, if Joe Buck was my grandfather, I’d spend a lot of holidays making questionable glances at grandma.

Not only are they not good at it, guys like Buck don’t even like it.  He does, however, like “The Bachelorette.”

It isn’t a question of “where have all the great announcers gone?”  We know where they are.  They’re dead.  I can’t sit here and generalize that all baseball broadcasters are network puppets or just a voice with a face, because you’ve still got some classics out there.  Like the slow process of replacing all the landmark stadiums with corporately-named home field advantages, we can look around the baseball landscape and still see a few monuments to summers past.

In a time of PEDs and emotional breakdowns, I guess this is what deserve:  to be announced at by guys who don’t care or just clog the airwaves with egos and stories with no point.  In a world without Harwell, do we really want anybody calling the game?

Spend ten minutes with FOX’s A-Team.  You’ll have your answer.

You can stay current on all the Call to the Pen content and news by following us on Twitter, Facebook, or by way of our RSS feed.