Ernie Harwell: One Helluva Season

I heard the news last night, just prior to the Tigers-Rays game in Tampa: Ernie Harwell was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As cancers go, I understand this is one of nastiest. Inoperable.

I was in the kitchen pouring myself a beer when I heard Tigers play-by-play announcer Mario Impemba announce the news. I stopped in disbelief, fighting back tears. No, not Ernie.

Ernie Harwell was a childhood buddy of mine. Not really, but I grew up listening to him call Tigers games on my transistor radio. Quite simply, Ernie was the best.

Late at night, my earplug nestled into my ear so my parents wouldn’t know I was awake, I’d listen to those west coast games when the Angels played for the entire state of California and not just Anaheim. I rarely made it past the second inning before falling asleep, but listening to Ernie call a Tigers game is one of the fonder memories of my youth.

No one calls a strikeout the way Ernie did: “Strike three called, he stood there like the house by the side of the road.”

Ernie hasn’t called a game for the Tigers in eighteen years ─ former Tigers owner Tom Monaghan fired him and I haven’t had a Dominoes pizza since. I learned much later that WJR radio boss Jim Long claimed it was his decision to let Ernie go. But I had other reasons for disliking Monaghan, who once called Tigers fans the worst in baseball. You don’t fire a hall of fame announcer, a legend of the game.

I still occasionally see Ernie on baseball telecasts, usually during the post season when he sits in the booth talking, what else but baseball? It always warms my heart to hear his voice, easily one of the most recognizable in sports, that soft, Georgian accent.

Ernie Harwell once interviewed Ty Cobb shortly before Cobb’s death.

He tells the story of meeting Ruth when he was just a boy, asking the mighty Babe for an autograph. “Well, son,” the Babe said, “you don’t have anything for me to sign.” With that, Ernie handed him one of his shoes to sign.

Regrettably, today Ernie has no idea what happened to that shoe. I suspect it no longer exists, but Ernie holds on to the youthful belief that someone someplace has that shoe in their possession.

Ernie didn’t just call a game, he called baseball history. He made the game more than a game, more than just players with names and numbers on their backs pitching, hitting and chasing a little white ball around in a park.

My dad taught me to throw and swing a bat, took me, age seven, to my first Tigers game at what Ernie used to call “the corner of Michigan and Trumbull,” but it should come as no revelation today that Ernie taught me to love the game of baseball, even as I had no idea at the time that that was what he was doing.

I attended Ernie Harwell day at Comerica Park a few years ago. The Tigers were losing 100 games a year and I’d stopped paying to see their product, but I laid down my money that day, to honor Ernie. The Tigers lost that day, playing abysmally. But it was a rush to see Ernie down on the field, being honored.

The Tigers are planning a celebration for the 25^th anniversary of the 1984 Detroit Tigers championship team. Ernie was to attend the September 28 event, but it looks as if he won’t be able to.

“Each day that goes by, I get weaker and weaker,” Harwell said. “And so there is less chance of going. But I think that night belongs to the players, and it might be too much attention on me. I don’t want to take away from the glory those players deserve.” And he finished by saying, with a laugh, “I want them to remember me the way I was when I was in better shape ─ when I had hair.”

It’s rare in today’s modern era to see a player play the game of baseball the way it was meant to be played, with adolescent joy. Ernie lived his life with adolescent joy.

At 91 years of age, he’s too young to be taken from us, the generations of baseball fans who grew up listening to him.

Frankly, I always thought he would outlive me.