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The New Stats Explained
by Ryan T. Campbell
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Johanna quoted in the Chicago Tribune about Fan Safety.
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This Month
Michael Street reviews
Ernie Harwell's Diamond Gems
Monday, October 19, 2009 1:30pm
When I was writing my Ty Cobb novel, one of the books I picked up was Diamond Gems, largely because I noticed some good Cobb anecdotes in it from the Tigers' venerable announcer. But instead of skimming through the Cobb stories, I quickly found myself absorbed in all of the tales spun by this amazing baseball storyteller, and it's a book that remains nearly as good today as it was the day it was published.
Ernie Harwell is the now-former Detroit Tiger announcer, the man behind the MLB microphone from 1948 through 2002, the last 42 of those years with Detroit. He began with the Brooklyn Dodgers, substituting for the famous Red Barber, putting him in a proud lineage back to the earliest days of baseball on the radio.
Harwell began his career with the Atlanta Crackers, the same team he'd served on as a batboy at the age of five. He announced for the team from 1943 to 1948, at that point, he became the first (and only) announcer to be traded for- Brooklyn's Branch Rickey gave the Crackers a catcher so that they would allow Harwell to break his contract.
After just two seasons with the Dodgers, Harwell moved crosstown to the Giants, working TV. He broadcast Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" on TV, although it's Russ Hodges, the Giants' radio man, whom we remember for repeatedly shouting "The Giants win the pennant!" But Harwell had made a name for himself nonetheless and after the Dodgers, he went to the Orioles, then ended up with the Tigers, where most of us know him.
Harwell retired in 2002, but has continued to make appearances now and again, and his indelible imprint on the game will remain. Sadly, the 91-year-old recently announced that he has inoperable cancer of the bile duct, which means this legendary voice will soon be gone forever, a long with his deep knowledge of the Golden Age of baseball.
Fortunately, he's written several books-his first, Tuned to Baseball, came out in 1985, and was largely autobiographical. His second book, Diamond Gems, is a collection of stories organized simply around baseball themes. Although it's over twenty-five years old, the book makes fantastic reading even today.
Having such a long lineage in the game is what makes Diamond Gems such a pleasure. Harwell is known for his storytelling ability, that lost art practiced by announcers who had to fill time on radio or on TV before the advent of the color man. And this book is packed with those stories, some of them jokes, a few rather well known, but most of them are marvelous, even for a grizzled old historian like me.
Harwell's thematic chapters range from "Throwing Smoke," about the great pitchers he's seen or heard about, to "A Walk on The Wild Side," about the crazy pitchers he's known. He gives rookie stories in "New Kids on the Block," or his opinions on the batsmen he's known through the years in "The Hits Keep on Coming." When you consider how long Harwell was in the game, he's someone who can actually compare Ted Williams with Pete Rose and George Brett, or Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver.
The mix of serious and lighthearted is what made Harwell great on the air, and it makes him great in print, too. It's the kind of book that can be read all at once or in bits and pieces- it's not hard to imagine him offering these same tales in between batters or during a managerial mound visit.
A few of my personal favorites include the hitter whose home run landed just in front of home plate (it was so muddy that nobody could see it), the story about Babe Ruth's near-miss of the Detroit managership (he went on vacation to Hawaii and they gave the job to Mickey Cochrane) and anything about Germany Schaefer. Schaefer was the wacky Tigers second baseman from the early part of the century who once stole first base from second (leading to a rule forbidding running the bases in reverse) and called his own home run shot to the audience, then slid into every base on the way around, calling his circuit of the bases like a horse race at each bag.
Possibly the only moment in Diamond Gems that didn't hold up since its publication also has personal resonance for me. In his discussion of great hitters, Harwell mentions one record he feels will never be broken: George Sisler's 257 hits in 1920. As he points out, only Wade Boggs has come close since 1930, when Boggs collected 240 in 1985.
Harwell wrote the book in 1991, and it only took another thirteen years for him to be proven wrong. Ichiro Suzuki broke Sisler's record in 2004 with 262 hits, not three years after breaking Boggs' modern-day record in his rookie season, which Darin Erstad had tied the year before.
But really, that's about the only criticism I can make of Harwell's book, which gives a fine flavor of the early days of the game as well as its development into the game we know today. Tigers fans will find plenty to read about here, but so will every other baseball fan, as tales abound of players from every team. It's a fitting tribute to this great announcer Ernie Harwell, oral baseball historian and voice of a bygone era.
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