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The Last Broadcasts of Ernie Harwell
Retirement Looms for Veteran Baseball Play-by-Play Man
 Listen to Don Gonyea's report.
 View a gallery of Harwell photos.
Read a chapter from the new biography, Ernie Harwell: My 60 Years in Baseball.
Aug. 29, 2002 -- Sportscaster Ernie Harwell left the microphone once before, in what has been called "the most ridiculed firing in broadcasting history." After more than 30 years doing play-by-play for Detroit Tigers baseball, he was replaced with younger broadcasters in 1992 -- then brought back the next year on a wave of popular demand.
This time, though, Harwell's going for good. Baseball's only six-decade broadcaster, Harwell announced at spring training that he would retire at the end of the 2002 baseball season. And with the Aug. 30 players strike deadline looming, Harwell's broadcast of Wednesday night's Tigers-Indians game could wind up being his last.
For Morning Edition, lifelong Tigers fan (and NPR White House Correspondent) Don Gonyea looks back at Harwell's history-making career.
A Georgia native who struggled with a speech impediment as a child, Ernie Harwell was 16 when he started writing about the minor league Atlanta Crackers for The Sporting News. In college, he broke into broadcasting, and was later hired to call Crackers games on the radio. In 1948, Harwell told Gonyea, he got his big break: A call from the Brooklyn Dodgers, to replace their now-legendary announcer Red Barber.
"Red Barber was on a trip to Pittsburgh and he had an ulcer perforate and they sent him to a hospital," Harwell recalls. "And his boss Branch Rickey called the owner of the Crackers, Earle Mann, and said, 'I'd like to have Ernie Harwell come up and replace Red as my announcer.' And Earle Mann said, 'Well that's fine, but he's under contract to me, and if you really want him, you send me your catcher from Montreal, Cliff Daper.' So I got to the big league traded for a minor league player." (Harwell, renowned for his command of baseball history, believes the transaction was unprecedented: "There have been a lot of goofy trades that I've heard about -- a fellow from Chattanooga was traded for a Thanksgiving turkey, a pitcher was traded for a barrel of oysters… But that's the first announcer trade.")
After the Dodgers, Harwell worked for the New York Giants and the Baltimore Orioles. Then in 1960 he moved to Detroit. Dale Petrosky, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., first heard Harwell in his youth in the Detroit suburbs. Today, he says of Harwell, "If you took the great icons of baseball, Ernie Harwell is perhaps the most talented, thoughtful and well-rounded of all of them… He is an artist who paints pictures with his words and his voice."
Harwell's style, Gonyea says, is to "keep it simple. He's not afraid to sit silently at the mic for 10 or 15 seconds, letting the game breathe a bit, as the sounds of the ballpark around him fill the airwaves. And he says you can't get overly excited -- you have to save it for when something really exciting happens."
Though Harwell says he feels like he could work another five years, he decided that now was a good time to retire. As he tells Gonyea, "The old gag in radio is, 'I heard your last show -- and it should have been.' And I didn't want everybody saying that about me. I wanted to go out when I could still do the job."
In Depth
 Hear Don Gonyea's 1993 report on Harwell's rehiring as Tigers play-by-play man.
Hear a Morning Edition report on a 1993 Smithsonian Institution tribute to Harwell and other baseball broadcasters.
Hear Gonyea's 1999 report - including some vintage Harwell play-by-play - about the final season played in the old Tiger Stadium.
Read a chapter from the new biography, Ernie Harwell: My 60 Years in Baseball.
View a gallery of Harwell photos.
Other Resources
• Visit a Harwell fan Web site.
• Visit a Detroit Tigers Web site where fans can leave farewell wishes for Harwell.
• Hear audio clips of some of Harwell's famous calls, at a fan Web site.
• Browse the baseball Hall of Fame Web site for Harwell, who in 1981 won the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting contributions to baseball.
• Read a Detroit News story intertwining Harwell's history with Tiger Stadium's.
• Hear early sounds clips of Harwell, before he joined the Tigers, calling Atlanta Crackers games.
• Read a Detroit Free Press column in which Harwell speculates on who will replace Ted Williams as baseball's living icon.
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