“his boom box of a voice” – Curt Smith
“that wonderful, unmistakable voice” – Dick Young
“the venerable Voice of Summer” – Sports Illustrated

He was the voice of the Yankees from 1939 through 1964 and became the most prominent sports broadcaster in America. His credits include twenty World Series, twenty-four All-Star Games, fourteen Rose Bowls, five Orange Bowls and two Sugar Bowls. During his prime years, it seemed that Allen was on the air for every major sports event; the presence of The Voice signified that the game was a major event.

He was born Melvin Israel in Birmingham, Alabama, on St. Valentine’s Day, 1913, the first of three children of Russian immigrants Julius and Anna (Leibowitz) Israel. (The family was living in Johns, Alabama, but the nearest hospital was in Birmingham.) Julius sold dry goods in several small Southern towns before settling his family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Allen told broadcast historian Curt Smith he got his first exposure to baseball while sitting in an outhouse looking at pictures of bats and gloves in catalogs from Sears or Montgomery Ward. He saw his first Major League games when he visited an aunt in Detroit; Babe Ruth hit a home run in one of them.

Melvin advanced quickly through small-town schools and entered the University of Alabama at the age of fifteen. He tried out for football, but didn’t make the team; instead, he became an equipment manager.

He also served as public-address announcer for the Crimson Tide’s home games. When a Birmingham radio station asked coach Frank Thomas to recommend a play-by-play announcer, Thomas—apparently figuring play-by-play was just like PA announcing—named Melvin Israel. His radio career began on station WBRC in 1935. In addition to doing play-by-play for the Tide, Israel received both an undergraduate degree and a law degree from Alabama and passed the bar exam.

On vacation in New York in 1937, he auditioned for the CBS radio network. In later years he made it seem like a lark, as if he had just wandered in off the street. In fact, his Alabama football broadcasts had been noticed by Ted Husing, CBS’s top sports announcer, and by the entertainment newspaper Variety. Whether it was lark or design, he was offered a job at $45 a week.

Mel’s father was not pleased, thinking his son was wasting a good education. He was even less pleased when Melvin explained that CBS wanted to change his “Jewish” surname. Trying to placate his father, Mel took Julius’s middle name as his new last name. At CBS Allen announced variety shows starring Perry Como, Jo Stafford, and Harry James. He interrupted Kate Smith’s afternoon program with a news bulletin reporting the crash of the airship Hindenburg. He worked some college football games.

Allen particularly impressed his bosses with a long ad-lib description of the Vanderbilt Cup yacht race, broadcasting from an airplane overhead. That led to his first baseball assignment, as a color commentator on the 1938 World Series. (In those days there was no exclusive Series broadcast; all the major networks carried the games.)

When Allen arrived in New York, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers were the last holdouts against radio. Since all the other teams were broadcasting some of their games, the fear that radio would hurt attendance had been buried. But at least one of the New York clubs was always at home, so the teams agreed to a blackout to avoid competing with each other. Opening Day games were broadcast, along with an occasional important series. Local stations re-created highlights of some afternoon games in the evenings, and the Yankees permitted a New York station to carry the night games of their farm team in nearby Newark, New Jersey.

In 1938 the pioneering executive Larry MacPhail became general manager at Brooklyn. He notified the other teams that the Dodgers were going on the air in 1939, and he brought Red Barber from Cincinnati to handle the broadcasts. The Yankees and Giants decided to broadcast their home games, since they never played at home on the same day. Arch McDonald, an established play-by-play man in Washington, was hired as the principal announcer for both teams.

Wheaties, baseball’s primary sponsor, chose Allen to replace McDonald on the Washington Senators’ broadcasts. But Washington owner Clark Griffith signed his former pitcher, the Hall of Famer Walter Johnson, to go behind the mike, so Allen never became the voice of the Senators.

McDonald’s assistant, Garnett Marks, didn’t last long. He wasn’t fired when he delivered a commercial for Ivory Soap, and the words came out “Ovary Soap.” But when he did it again, he was gone. Allen replaced him in June.

Arch McDonald didn’t last long, either. His down-home style—low-key, with long pauses between pitches—didn’t play in New York. After one season he returned to Washington.

In 1940 Allen began his reign as Voice of the Yankees. He continued doing only home games of the Yanks and Giants. Allen often told of an encounter with Lou Gehrig during that season, when Gehrig was dying of the disease that now bears his name. On a rare visit to the Stadium, the Yankee legend said, “Mel, I never got a chance to listen to your games before because I was playing every day. But I want you to know they’re the only thing that keeps me going.” Allen said he left the dugout in tears.

The Yankees and Giants couldn’t find a sponsor for their broadcasts in 1941, so the teams were off the air. Accordingly, Allen never got a chance to chronicle Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, although he later recorded a re-creation of the end of the streak.

Allen entered the Army in 1943 and was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. According to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, Sergeant Allen kept his hand in by calling a few Alabama football games while in the service.

When Allen was discharged early in 1946, both the Giants and Yankees wanted him, but the Yankees had an edge. MacPhail had taken over the Yankees by then, with co-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb. He announced another innovation: Yankees broadcasters would travel with the team. Until then, road games were re-created in a studio from a telegraphed play-by-play summary. Allen went with the Yankees. (Barber said MacPhail had offered him the Yankees’ job but he chose to stay in Brooklyn, where he was a civic institution.)

It was a marriage of The Voice and The Dynasty. Beginning in 1947, the Yanks played in fifteen of the next eighteen World Series. Broadcasters from the two league champions customarily handled network coverage of the Series, so Allen claimed the fall classic as his own stage.

His signature phrases entered the American language: A home run was “going, going, gone!” He punctuated any remarkable play with “How about that?” Although he is often credited with coining Joe DiMaggio’s nickname, the Yankee Clipper, David Halberstam says Arch McDonald deserves credit for that. Allen was the first to call DiMag Joltin’ Joe. He labeled Tommy Henrich Ol’ Reliable.

Allen’s style was exuberant; his rich voice conveyed excitement. He was constantly compared with Red Barber—inevitably, they became the first broadcasters honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978. Curt Smith described them this way: “The Ol’ Redhead was white wine, crepes suzette and bluegrass music; Mel, beer, hot dogs, and the United States Marine Band.” Jim Woods, who worked with both men, said, “One was a machine gun, the other a violin.” Nobody who heard them would have any difficulty discerning which was which.

In radio days a team’s principal broadcaster—usually hired by the sponsors—ruled the booth. He assigned innings to his assistants, decided who would read the commercials and parceled out pregame and postgame duties. Several of Allen’s assistants agreed with Curt Gowdy’s assessment: “It wasn’t very easy to work for him, but when it was all over, you were glad you did.” Gowdy and Jim Woods said they learned from his polish and professionalism but chafed under his high-handedness. As Woods put it, “Whatever Allen wanted, Allen got.”

Red Barber joined the Yankees’ broadcast team in 1954, after leaving Brooklyn over a dispute with owner Walter O’Malley. It was quite a comedown for a man who had commanded his own booth as principal broadcaster for twenty seasons. At first Barber worked only televised home games, handling pregame and postgame shows and two and one-half innings of play-by-play on TV.

Barber insisted in his autobiography that there was no friction between this pair of giant egos—”Mel accepted me as an equal”—but others said their relationship was cool. They were opposites: Barber was married, a homebody who disliked traveling, and a devout Christian; Allen, single, gregarious, a man-about-town, and a Jew. Barber’s career was going downhill; Allen was king of the hill. According to Jim Woods, who was dumped from the Yankees broadcasts in 1957 to make room for former shortstop Phil Rizzuto, Allen and Barber were united in their mutual loathing of the jock-in-the-booth. Allen and Barber resolved their differences enough that Allen, nearly eighty years old, traveled from New York to Florida in 1992 to attend Barber’s funeral.

Allen’s fame grew as television replaced radio as the primary mass entertainment. He switched to TV coverage of the World Series in 1951, the first time the Series was televised coast-to-coast.

Like most radio broadcasters who attempted that transition, Allen never fully mastered the new medium. Echoing a common complaint, Ben Gross of the New York Daily News wrote in 1954 that Mel “has frequently been castigated for talking too much during his baseball telecasts. Like so many others, he often seems unwilling to permit the camera to tell the story and, at times, attempts to gild the picture on the tube with excessive verbiage.”

Some accounts say Allen was the first to suggest the center-field camera shot that is now standard on baseball telecasts. Yankees General Manager George Weiss limited the use of the shot for fear that opposing teams, watching TV, would steal the catcher’s signs.

Since Allen was the Voice of the Yankees, he was accused of partisanship on the Series broadcasts. Allen acknowledged he was partisan, but also declared, “I never rooted.”

He was renowned, too, as a skillful pitchman for the sponsors. A home run was “a Ballantine blast,” after the beer sponsor, or “a White Owl wallop,” after the cigar sponsor. In addition to his work on network college-football broadcasts, Allen was the sports voice of Movietone newsreels and hosted boxing matches.

Allen moved his parents, brother, and sister to the New York area and continued living with his sister after their parents died. His brother, Larry, who also adopted the name Allen, became his statistician and assistant.

Allen was six-foot-one, slim, and dark-haired in his youth, but began balding at an early age. By the 1950s he usually wore a hat during his TV broadcasts. He never married, but was often seen in the company of beautiful Broadway showgirls. Red Barber wrote in The Broadcasters, “His job was his life … the wife and children he never had.”

“I never saw anyone love his work more than he did,” said Lindsey Nelson, a prominent football broadcaster of the 1950s and later the voice of the New York Mets.

In the fourth game of the 1963 World Series, the Dodgers were on their way to an unprecedented sweep of the Yankees. In midgame, Allen was suddenly unable to speak. He blamed a flareup of a “nasal condition,” but many commentators said he was struck speechless by the Yanks’ humiliation. Sportswriter Dick Young called it “psychosomatic laryngitis.”

As the 1964 season ended, Allen’s world came crashing down. The Yankees’ president, Dan Topping, summarily fired him. Rizzuto represented the team on World Series telecasts. Joe Garagiola replaced Allen on the 1965 broadcasts.

The Yankees never explained his dismissal, so the rumor mill percolated. “They said I was a lush or that I beat my relatives or that I’d had a breakdown or that I was taking so many medicines for my voice that I turned numb,” he told Curt Smith years later. None of the rumors appeared in print, so Allen never publicly denied them. He said Topping gave him no explanation, saying only, “It wasn’t anything you did, Mel, and it wasn’t CBS.” CBS had just bought the team; as soon as Allen was gone, the network brought in one of its executives to supervise the Yankee broadcasts. There would be no more principal broadcaster. Allen believed the Yankees’ primary sponsor, Ballantine Beer, wanted to shed his high salary.

Topping told Red Barber, “I’m tired of him popping off.” But Allen said, “If they had objected to my talking a lot, I’d have been fired long ago.” Larger issues were at play; Ballantine beer was losing market share and the Yankees, despite winning the 1964 pennant, had drawn fewer fans than the last-place Mets. CBS wanted to promote a new, friendlier image for the regal Bronx Bombers.

The true story of Allen’s sudden fall from the pinnacle remains a mystery. “He gave the Yankees his life,” Barber said, “and they broke his heart.” Adding insult to injury, NBC dropped him from its college football telecasts.

Only fifty-one years old, he wasn’t out of work for long. The Braves played their final season in Milwaukee in 1965, held hostage by a court order although they had already announced that they intended to move to Atlanta. An Atlanta TV station hired Mel to broadcast some of the team’s games to their soon-to-be home.

Allen and Atlanta seemed a natural match: the biggest of big league voices for the new big league city, and a Southerner, to boot. But he didn’t join the Braves in Atlanta. In 1968 he went to Cleveland to televise Indians’ games. During one dull evening in a losing season, he stunned his broadcast partner–and, no doubt, the audience–by reciting Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” He turned down an offer to broadcast the Athletics’ games when they moved to Oakland. Allen said his business interests, including a Canada Dry soft-drink dealership, kept him on the East Coast, but his sister, Esther Kaufman, told biographer Stephen Borelli he would not leave New York because that would be admitting defeat.

Allen made public appearances for Canada Dry, broadcast University of Miami football, and hosted local and network radio sports shows. One of his few baseball assignments was the 1966 Little League World Series for a Sacramento radio station. While other broadcasters routinely jumped from team to team, Allen vanished from big-time sports for eight years. “It was as if he had leprosy,” Sports Illustrated’s William Taafe wrote in a 1985 profile.

Allen returned to Yankee Stadium on June 8, 1969, to serve as master of ceremonies on Mickey Mantle Day. In 1976 WPIX, the Yankees’ flagship TV station, hired him to narrate a special program celebrating the opening of the refurbished Yankee Stadium.

By then CBS and Dan Topping were long gone; George Steinbrenner owned the franchise. When Steinbrenner was a young assistant football coach, he had sought Allen’s advice about getting into broadcasting and Allen spent forty-five minutes with him. Steinbrenner never forgot that kindness. On Opening Day in the new-old stadium, the Yankees recognized Allen’s place in their history. He stood on the field during pregame ceremonies alongside other symbols of the Yankee legacy: Bob Shawkey, who had thrown the first pitch in the Stadium in 1923; Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse manager since 1927; restaurant owner Toots Shor; and former Postmaster General James Farley, who was said to be “the longest-running season-ticket holder.”

The next year Allen was back on Yankee broadcasts, calling a few dozen games for the SportsChannel cable network. He continued in that role until 1985. Beginning in 1977, Allen said, “How about that?” to a new generation of fans across the country as narrator of Major League Baseball’s weekly highlight show, This Week in Baseball (known as TWIB). Joe Reichler, a former sportswriter working in the commissioner’s office, gave him the job. He was the program’s signature voice even after his death: TWIB created an animated figure, complete with microphone and fedora, to introduce each week’s show with his trademark greeting, “Hello, everybody. This is Mel Allen.”

In 1978 the Baseball Hall of Fame established the Ford C. Frick Award to honor broadcasters for “major contributions to baseball.” Allen and Barber were the first to be recognized. (Broadcasters are not considered members of the Hall of Fame; there is no “broadcasters’ wing,” either. The winners are honored in an exhibit near the Hall’s library.)

Marty Appel, a former Yankees publicist who was producing the team’s broadcasts on WPIX, brought Allen back one last time in 1990 so he could be the answer to a trivia question: the first man to broadcast a major league game in seven decades. His Yankee career stretched from Lou Gehrig to Don Mattingly.

Allen died on June 16, 1996, at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He had suffered from heart trouble for years. He was buried in Temple Beth El Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut. His gravestone reads: “Mel Allen Beloved son brother – uncle.” More than a thousand people attended a memorial service in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral sponsored by the Committee for Christian-Jewish Understanding. On July 25, 1998, a plaque commemorating his career was unveiled in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.

Only two sports broadcasters have equaled Mel Allen’s fame: the pioneer radio announcer Graham McNamee and Howard Cosell, the man so many fans loved to hate. Like Allen, both dominated the big events of their time. In Allen’s time, more than half of the television sets in the United States would be tuned in to the World Series. There were just three national TV networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – and no regional sports networks.

With fewer games on television and fewer sports competing for attention, the leading broadcasters – Allen on baseball, Lindsey Nelson on college football – were the voices and faces of American sports. As Allen acknowledged, his renown was partly an accident of time and place: in New York, when the Yankees were giants. His success was also a product of his unique, vibrant voice and the craftsmanship and showmanship that he achieved by hard work.

Later generations of broadcasters—Gowdy, Brent Musburger, and Joe Buck—enjoyed similar wide exposure on showcase events. None was ever called The Voice.

Sources

Appel, Marty. Now Pitching for the Yankees. Toronto: Sport Classic Books, 2001.

Barber, Red. The Broadcasters. New York: The Dial Press, 1970.

Barber, Red, and Robert Creamer. Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968.

Borelli, Stephen. How About That! The Life of Mel Allen. Champaign, IL: Sports Publishing, 2005.

Gross, Ben. I Looked and I Listened. New York: Random House, 1954.

Halberstam, David. Summer of ’49. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989.

Halberstam, David J. Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History. Lincolnwood, Illinois: Masters Press, 1999.

Patterson, Ted. The Golden Voices of Baseball. Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing LLC, 2002.

Smith, Curt. The Storytellers. New York: Macmillan, 1995. 

_________. Voices of the Game. South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1987.

(Author unknown), Mel Allen obituary, The Associated Press, June 16, 1996. Hoffman, Roy. “The Late Mel Allen: Alabama’s Voice of the Yankees.” Mobile Register, July 6, 2003. Smith, Curt, “Buck known for effortless style, class.”

Websites

www.espn.com, June 21, 2002.
www.americansportscasters.com
www.anecdotage.com

Walter Lanier “Red” Barber—Red for the color of his hair—was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on February 17, 1908. Seventy years later he was one of the first two broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with his rival and sometime partner Mel Allen. Curt Smith, who chronicled the history of baseball broadcasting in two books, wrote in The Storytellers, “The Ol’ Redhead was white wine, crepes Suzette and bluegrass music; Mel, beer, hot dogs and the United States Marine Band.” 

Red’s father, William Lanier Barber, was a locomotive engineer from Brown’s Creek, North Carolina. His mother, Selena Martin, was an English teacher and school principal from an old Mississippi family. She insisted that her children practice what she taught. “My mother gave me an ear for language. . . . She gave me my interest in religion, too,” he wrote. “My father didn’t have the education my mother did, but he was a wonderful raconteur, a natural storyteller. He’d sit out on the front porch and tell stories by the hour.” The Barbers later had a second son, William Martin, and a daughter, Effie Virginia. 

The Barbers moved to Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, when Walter was ten years old. He was a high school football halfback and kicker at five feet eight and 165 pounds. He graduated first in his class and was rewarded with a $20 gold piece. His first ambition was to be an end-man (the lead comedian) in a minstrel show, and he performed in blackface during high school and college. While he was working his way through the University of Florida as a waiter and boarding-house manager, one of his housemates, Ralph Fulghum, asked him to read a research paper on the university radio station. As Red put it, “Then came the great turning point of my life. I know that Satan took Christ up on a mountain and showed him the world and said, ‘If you bow down to me I’ll give it all to you.’ Christ wasn’t tempted, but I was. Fulghum tempted me out of all proportion. He said, ‘If you come out and read this paper I’ll buy you dinner tonight.’” Barber made his radio debut reading a paper on “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics.”

That led to a job with the station, WRUF, and to his first sports assignment: Florida’s opening football game in 1930. He called his debut “undoubtedly the worst broadcast ever perpetrated on an innocent and unsuspecting radio audience.” He was so bad that he was pulled off the air and other announcers tried their hands at the next two games. During those weeks, Barber began attending football practice and picking the brains of an assistant coach. He learned how to prepare for a broadcast. He talked his boss into giving him another chance, and the sportscaster’s career began.

Barber encountered the other passion of his life in Gainesville: Lylah Murray Scarborough, a nurse who treated him when he was taken into the infirmary one night after an accident. They were married in 1931. On September 17, 1937, Red and Lylah’s daughter, Sarah, was born. Sarah, their only child, later became a professor of English.

Ambitious for a better job, Red took time off from WRUF and rode buses to Atlanta, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Chicago for auditions, but stations were not hiring during the Depression. In 1934 the Cincinnati Reds’ new general manager, Larry MacPhail, persuaded owner Powel Crosley Jr. to put the team’s games on the air. An executive at WLW, a station owned by Crosley, remembered the young man from Florida, and hired him as the club’s first play-by-play announcer at $25 a week, less than he was paid in Gainesville. On Opening Day he broadcast the first major-league game he had ever seen. “That was the most joyous day of my life, next to my wedding day,” he remembered.

In 1935 Red called the first of thirteen World Series, over the Mutual network. What he remembered most vividly was the pregame briefing by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis summoned the announcers from all the networks (there were no exclusive rights deals then) and in his customary Sermon-on-the-Mount style, lectured them, “Don’t editorialize. Report.” Landis’s admonition was prompted by Ted Husing’s 1934 Series broadcasts, when Husing criticized the umpires. Husing was banned from the Series forever after.

Many of Barber’s successors in the booth have called him the first reporter to broadcast baseball. “I’ve heard tapes of Red Barber in the 1930s and ’40s,” Bob Costas told the Los Angeles Times, “where he tells you there’s a line single to left-center and he tells you how many times it bounced before the center fielder picked it up. You needed that then. Today, even the very good announcers will very rarely describe a guy’s stance or the peculiarities of a guy’s windup, because they’ve been subconsciously influenced by television even though they’re on the radio.” 

Allan Barra, in the online magazine Salon, described listening to tapes of Barber’s broadcasts: “There were no complex statistics, no hype, and, of course, no visuals. Just poetry. When the wind was blowing the flag. A description of how the fielders were set. An anecdote or two about each player. With nothing to work with but words, Barber painted a picture of the game that kick-started my own imagination in a way that technology never could.”

Barber’s best-known innovation for broadcasters was a simple device to remind him to repeat the score frequently for listeners who had just tuned in: He kept a three-minute egg timer, an hourglass, on his desk in the booth. Every time the sand ran down, he repeated the score and flipped his timer over. Dozens if not hundreds of later announcers adopted this prop.

An important part of the early play-by-play man’s job was the re-creation of out-of-town games. Broadcasters didn’t begin traveling with teams until after World War II. The announcer in a studio hundreds of miles from the ballpark used Western Union’s telegraphic pitch-by-pitch accounts to simulate a live broadcast. Most broadcasters tried to make the re-creation seem as realistic as possible: using sound effects of recorded crowd noise, cranking up the volume for an exciting play; two pieces of wood banged together to simulate the crack of the bat; recorded organ music. “My reaction was just the opposite. I wanted the audience to know at all times that I was doing a re-creation,” Barber said in a 1985 appearance on KCMO radio in Kansas City, Missouri. He used no sound effects and placed his microphone close to the telegraph key, so listeners heard the beeps of Morse code.

“You did that broadcast from a series of mental pictures,” Barber said. “I made it my business to mentally photograph every player—how he looked, how big he was. . . . I memorized the idiosyncrasies, the habits. . . . I memorized how each pitcher pitched. So as I stood in the studio I saw the game.”

When Larry MacPhail left Cincinnati for Brooklyn in 1939, he took Barber with him to the nation’s media capital. Red brought the down-home idiom of his Southern roots to the borough whose residents were ridiculed for speaking of “dem” and “dose.” Many people who lived in Brooklyn in the 1940s have insisted that they could walk down any street in the borough and never miss a pitch, because Barber’s voice was wafting out of every window and every passing car. During World War II, he became a civic institution as chairman of Brooklyn’s Red Cross blood drive and host of radio War Bonds sales. 

New York offered Barber unmatched opportunities. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he called the first National Football League championship game to be broadcast nationwide, in 1940, when the Chicago Bears buried the Washington Redskins, 73-0. He regularly broadcast football games of the professional Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, as well as Princeton University. He also hosted entertainment programs with bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Woody Herman and singers Lena Horne and Mario Lanza. For nine years after World War II, he was the director of sports for CBS, where he first heard Fordham University student Vince Scully.

During the war, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey was signing as many promising young players as his scouts could find, laying the groundwork for a decade of success. He was also laying the groundwork for an even more important move. Months before he signed Jackie Robinson, Rickey confided his plan to Barber. Red said he was the first one outside Rickey’s family to hear that Rickey intended to break organized baseball’s sixty-year-old color line: “I believe he told me about it so far in advance so that I could have time to wrestle with the problem, live with it, solve it.”

Barber never admitted any racist feelings. In his history of Robinson’s rookie year, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, he declared, “I was not a racist.” He wrote in his autobiography, “The Negroes who came and went through our lives were always treated with the utmost respect and with a great deal of warmth and a great deal of affection.” At the same time, he acknowledged, “[T]here was a line drawn, and that was that.” Southerners of Barber’s generation never encountered a black person in a situation of social or economic equality until they reached middle age. That was that.

After Rickey’s revelation, Barber told Lylah, “I’m going to quit.” She suggested they have a martini and sleep on it. His wife’s cooler head prevailed, but Barber said, “It really tortured me.” Eventually he concluded, “[A]ll I had to do when he came was treat him as a fellow man, treat him as a ballplayer, broadcast the ball.” In his 1991 interview with Bob Costas, Barber recalled, “I don’t think I ever said he was a Negro. I didn’t have to. Everybody knew who he was.” He also owned up to his self-interest: “Economics has a way of being the hidden persuader. I valued the job at Brooklyn.”

The rookie Robinson led the Dodgers to the 1947 World Series. That classic included two of Barber’s most famous games. In Game Four, Yankees right-hander Bill Bevens took a no-hitter into the ninth inning, while walking ten. Brooklyn pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto came to bat with the Dodgers trailing by one run and two runners on base: “Two men out, last of the ninth. The pitch. Swung on. There’s a drive hit out toward the right-field corner. Henrich going back. He can’t get it. It’s off the wall for a base hit. Here comes the tying run— and—here’s—the winning run.” 

On National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” on April 23, 1982, Barb er told host Bob Edwards, “When all of the excitement was over for a little bit, I just sort of caught my breath and without thinking about it, Bob, I said, ‘Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule.’ ”

Edwards asked why he said that. Barber replied, “When you’re doing something such as you and I are doing, live radio without any preparation, no script, you are just concentrating on your work and something just comes out. . . . When you realize that things suddenly come out of your subconscious or your unconscious when you’re talking to an open microphone, sometimes it frightens you. 

In the sixth game, Brooklyn had a three-run lead when Joe DiMaggio came to bat. In Barber’s words: “Here’s the pitch. Swung on, belted. It’s a long one deep to the left center. Back goes Gionfriddo. Back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh, doctor. [Pause for crowd noise.] He went exactly against the railing in front of the bullpen and reached up with one hand and took a home run away from DiMaggio.” Barber said those calls demonstrated an important rule for a play-by-play broadcaster: On a long drive, watch the outfielder; he’ll be the first to know whether it’s catchable. Thus, “Back goes Gionfriddo.” “Henrich going back. He can’t get it.”

More than thirty years later, a young broadcaster named Chris Berman on the upstart cable network ESPN adopted “back, back, back,” he said, as a tribute to Barber.

Barber was celebrated for his vivid imagery, all the more memorable because he brought the country sayings of his Southern upbringing to urban Brooklyn. Cincinnati public radio station WVXU assembled this Red Barber sampler:

The game “is just as tight as a brand-new pair of shoes on a rainy day.”
“They’ll tear up the pea patch before the day is over.”
“The bases are FOB — they’re full of Brooklyns”—he acknowledged he made up after seeing the term, which meant “free on board” in the shipping industry, and turning it over in his mind. His most enduring coinage was “sitting in the catbird seat.” In Barber’s lexicon, that meant a batter with a three-ball, no-strike count or a team with a comfortable lead. 

Ernie Harwell, who broke into big-league broadcasting under Barber in 1948 and lasted for fifty-five seasons, told WVXU, “The ironic thing was, he was a very cultured man, and on the air he sounded like some guy from the backwoods, you know . . . And he really wasn’t. He loved the opera and he loved the classics and all that kind of stuff. He lived on Park Avenue in New York.”

Vin Scully, who inherited Red’s mantle as “Voice of the Dodgers,” joined the broadcasts in 1950 as a twenty-two-year-old. “His work ethics were so strong that he imbued me with that spirit,” Scully told WVXU. “Get to the ballpark early. Check, check, recheck. Talk to players, managers constantly. And that rubbed off on me.”

In 1950 attorney Walter O’Malley bought Rickey’s 25 percent interest in the Dodgers and took control of the franchise. Red’s relationship with the new owner was touchy. “O’Malley wanted to cut me down to size,” he wrote in his autobiography. “He is a devious man, about the most devious man I ever met.” Barber broadcast his thirteenth World Series in 1952, again sharing the NBC radio and television microphones with Mel Allen. It would be his last.

Ever since the Gillette Company bought exclusive rights to the Series in 1939, Barber had chafed at the company’s cavalier treatment of announcers. By 1953 Gillette paid the broadcasters just $200 a game “for the biggest sports event on coast-to-coast television,” he fumed. Barber declined to broadcast the ’53 Series when the company refused to negotiate his fee. When Red told O’Malley what had happened, O’Malley’s reply—“That’s your problem”—ended Barber’s relationship with the Dodgers. His contract for the Brooklyn broadcasts had expired, and the sponsors had made no move to renew it.

A few days after he left the Dodgers, Red was hired by the Yankees. The new job was quite a comedown. For twenty years in Cincinnati and Brooklyn, he had been the principal broadcaster, handing out assignments to his assistants. He decided how many innings they would call, who would do which commercials, who would handle pregame and postgame shows. 

The Yankees’ principal broadcaster, Mel Allen, was the most famous sports announcer in the country. Red was hired to handle pregame and postgame shows on televised home games and to work a few innings of play-by-play. He traveled with the team only occasionally. “Mel accepted me as an equal,” he insisted.” . . . he could not have been nicer to me either then or all through the years we worked together”

Red was forced to adjust, grudgingly, to fundamental changes in the broadcasting industry. In 1939 he had broadcast the first major-league game on television over NBC’s experimental station W2XBS, when only a few dozen homes had TV sets. In the 1950s television became the dominant medium. Like many other radio veterans, Barber never accepted television. He endured it. He explained why in Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat: “On TV it’s the director’s show, and the broadcaster is an instrument of his, like a camera. On radio, it’s my show, where my knowledge and experience and taste and judgment decide what goes and what doesn’t. On radio, you’re an artist. On TV, you’re a servant.”

Barber deplored the invasion of the broadcast booth by retired ballplayers—he dismissed them as “former-great-star-expert(s).” By 1965, after the Yankees fired Allen for “popping off,” Barber was sharing the booth with three of those “experts:” ex-shortstop Phil Rizzuto, ex-second baseman Jerry Coleman, and Joe Garagiola, a onetime backup catcher who had parlayed a quick wit and a trove of real and invented anecdotes about his boyhood pal Yogi Berra into a broadcasting career. Garagiola committed what Barber considered the unforgivable sin: “He cut in on me in the middle of sentences . . . He ran over fellows.”

CBS had bought the Yankees, and network executive Michael Burke took over as the team’s president in September 1966. He curtly informed Barber, “We have decided not to seek to renew your contract.” Barber thought he knew why. On a chilly, rainy day near the end of the 1966 season when baseball’s marquee franchise fell to last place, the Yankees played a home game before 413 fans. Barber wrote in The Broadcasters, “This was the smallest crowd, by far, in the history of the massive ballpark built by Babe Ruth, Ed Barrow, and Colonel Jake Ruppert.” He asked the television director for a shot of the empty seats. The director refused, and Barber was told that the order came from the CBS executive who supervised Yankee broadcasts. But Barber was still a reporter. As he recalled it, he said, “I don’t know what the paid attendance is today—but whatever it is, it is the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium . . . and this smallest crowd is the story, not the ballgame.”

According to the University of Florida’s Smathers Library, where Red’s papers are housed, he broadcast play-by-play on thirteen World Series, four baseball All-Star Games, five Army-Navy games, one Sugar Bowl, two Rose Bowls, eight Orange Bowls, and four National Football League championship games. That career was over. 

At age fifty-eight Barber began what he called his retirement at his home in Key Biscayne, Florida, near Miami. But it was an active retirement. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column and four books, and did sportscasts for Miami radio and TV stations. Cable television impresario Ted Turner hired Barber and Mel Allen to call the 1978 Little League World Series, one of the most bizarre anachronisms in broadcasting history.

That same year, he and Allen—forever linked—became the first broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. They received the Ford C. Frick Award for “major contributions to baseball,” an award named for the commissioner Barber despised. 

Red would take one more star turn on a national stage, introducing himself to a generation of listeners who knew only the Los Angeles Dodgers and who, if they followed baseball at all, followed it primarily on television. In 1981 he joined National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as a regular commentator, appearing for four minutes every Friday at 7:35 a.m. Eastern time.

The host of Morning Edition, Bob Edwards, lovingly captured those years in Fridays With Red published after Barber’s death. The Barbers had left the fast-growing Miami area for the smaller city of Tallahassee, where Lylah had attended Florida State College for Women, the predecessor of Florida State University. Tallahassee station WFSU-FM ran an audio line to their home, and Red broadcast from a desk in his office. Nominally the spot was a sports commentary. In reality, it was a free-form conversation about just about anything, often including his flower garden and the adventures of his cats. He talked about opera, quoted Victor Hugo and Kahlil Gibran, and delivered condensed versions of some of the sermons he had preached as a lay reader in the Episcopal Church. 

To the buttoned-down Edwards—who had every word of his broadcasts scripted, even “I’m Bob Edwards”—it was both a nightmare and a delight. Red insisted that his segment be live. He made it unpredictable. A producer would call him on Thursday to discuss topics for the next morning’s broadcast. By Friday, Red had often changed his mind and took off in a totally unexpected direction. Edwards described himself as Barber’s straight man. Because Red talked about his camellias so often, Edwards’s wife planted one in their back yard. Red wanted to know what variety it was. Edwards replied, “Pink.”

“Red’s spot on ‘Morning Edition’ was the most popular feature of any program on public radio,” Edwards wrote.” . . . And for many listeners, Red was a reminder of a father, a grandfather, or a favorite uncle they had—or wished they had.” Barber was as much a perfectionist as ever: Edwards said he could hear the click of Red’s stopwatch at the beginning and end of his allotted four minutes. His career had come full circle: from noncommercial station WRUF in 1930 to noncommercial National Public Radio more than fifty years later. In his first NPR broadcast he said, “I’m a child of radio.”

In the 1980s Lylah developed Alzheimer’s disease, and much of the rest of Red’s life was devoted to caring for her. “By the time I met him in the early ‘80s, he was so frail it seemed a gust of wind might take him away,” Edwards wrote. Barber had suffered various physical ailments since the 1940s, going deaf in his left ear and surviving a heart attack and surgery for ulcers that removed much of his stomach. On October 8, 1992, he begged off the next day’s broadcast, blaming a sore throat. On that Friday he drove himself and Lylah to a hospital. He underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage and fell into a coma. 

Red Barber died at eighty-four on October 22, 1992, at the Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. The New York Times reported that the cause of death was pneumonia and other complications from surgery. His ashes were buried in his yard, beneath five camellias. In his Morning Edition tribute, Bob Edwards said, “One of the great voices of America will speak to us no more, and the camellias will never smell as sweet.” Red would not have liked that; camellias have no scent.

In Sanford, Florida, where Red grew up, a municipal park bears his name. In Tallahassee, where he lived his last years, Florida State University’s Center for Public Broadcasting sits at 1600 Red Barber Plaza. His alma mater, the University of Florida, annually awards the Red Barber Radio Scholarship—$700 to a junior or senior majoring in telecommunications, with a preference to students planning to pursue careers in sports broadcasting. In Los Angeles Red’s heir, Vin Scully, continued into the twenty-first century as the voice of the Dodgers.

Sources

Barber, Red. The Broadcasters. New York: The Dial Press, 1970.

Barber, Red, with Robert Creamer. Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968.

Barber, Red, Show Me the Way to Go Home. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971.

Barber, Red, Walk in the Spirit. New York: The Dial Press, 1969.

Barber, Red. 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball.Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1982.

Barber, Lylah, Lylah. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1985.

Edwards, Bob. Fridays With Red.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Smith, Curt. The Storytellers . New York: Macmillan, 1995.

Smith, Curt. Voices of the Game. South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications Inc., 1987.

Thurber, James, “The Catbird Seat,” The New Yorker, (n.d.) 1942, reprinted in The Thurber Carnival, New York: Modern Library, 1945

Salon, November 7, 2000.

Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2002.

From the Catbird Seat: Red Barber, a 1993 radio documentary written and produced by Greg Rhodes for public station WVXU in Cincinnati. It included excerpts from his play-by-play broadcasts and his later interviews.

No stranger to controversy, Brennaman had already indicated that in his acceptance speech he would make a statement in support of Pete Rose’s reinstatement to baseball. Bob Feller and Ralph Kiner had announced that if Brennaman made such comments in support of Rose, they and other Hall of Famers were prepared to walk out on his speech. As the assembled crowd listened anxiously, Brennaman thanked several of the players from the 1975 and 1976 World Champion Reds teams and then paid tribute to those “who should be here,” ending the list “and yes, by God, Peter Edward Rose.”1 None of the Hall of Famers left the stage. When he returned to his seat after his speech, Brennaman recalled that Feller turned to him and said, “I don’t agree with you but I respect the fact that you said what you had to say.”2 The incident was emblematic of a key facet of Brennaman’s career, which continued through the first two decades of the 21st century until his retirement at the end of the 2019 season: He has been known not only for his accurate and entertaining play-by-play, but also for being unafraid to express his opinions.

The longtime Reds broadcaster was born Franchester Martin Brennaman, Jr. in Portsmouth, Virginia, on July 28, 1942. He was the son of Franchester “Chet” Brennaman, Sr. and Lillian (Skipwith) Brennaman. Growing up in Portsmouth, Brennaman was a right fielder for his Little League team and played high-school basketball. Though Brennaman enjoyed baseball (growing up listening to broadcasts of Nat Allbright doing re-creations of Brooklyn Dodgers games), sports were not the primary focus of his early life. Attending Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Brennaman aspired to be an actor. After his high-school graduation, he studied at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia and at the University of North Carolina.

Though Brennaman participated in the University of North Carolina drama program and performed in summer stock, by the time of his graduation in 1965, he had put acting aside. By this time Brennaman had a wife (Brenda) and two children, Thom and Dawn. Shortly after graduation, Brennaman was hired by a High Point, North Carolina, television station to work on the morning news show and occasionally substitute for the sports anchor. Six months later Brennaman left the television station to work at radio station WSTP in Salisbury, North Carolina.

It was at WSTP that Brennaman got his first taste of sports play-by-play when he broadcast a high-school football game in Spencer, North Carolina. Broadcasting football games on Friday nights, Brennaman also became the voice of the Catawba College Indians football and basketball broadcasts. He also began his baseball broadcasting career, describing Rowan County American Legion games. “I did as much play-by-play as any human could conceivably do,” Brennaman said later. “I did 25 high-school and college football games, and I did over 80 basketball games a year and American Legion Baseball.”3 Brennaman credited the experience with helping to develop his talents: “Everything that’s happened for me happened because of Salisbury.”4

After five years of broadcasting in Salisbury, Brennaman was hired by radio station WTAR in Norfolk, Virginia. While there he provided play-by-play for the American Basketball Association Virginia Squires. Norfolk also provided Brennaman with his first opportunity to do minor-league baseball play-by-play as he became the voice of the Triple-A Tidewater Tides, beginning in 1971. “It was against my better judgment to give a guy a job at the Triple-A level who’d never worked a full season of baseball,” Tides general manager Dave Rosenfield said later of hiring Brennaman. However, “his approach and desire were top-notch.”5 After just three seasons of broadcasting at the minor-league level, Brennaman was recommended by Rosenfield for the major leagues.

The Cincinnati Reds were looking for a new play-by-play radio broadcaster as the 1974 season approached. Al Michaels, who had covered the team for three seasons, had taken a job broadcasting for the San Francisco Giants. During winter baseball meetings in Houston, Rosenfield approached Dick Wagner, then assistant to Reds general manager Bob Howsam. “I’d heard Dick was looking for an announcer,” Rosenfield said. “I said, ‘I’ve got the best damn broadcaster around. If there’s a tape on your desk when you get back, will you listen to it?’ He said he would. I called Marty and told him to get that tape on Dick’s desk.”6 One of 220 applicants for the job, Brennaman was hired as the voice of the Reds.

Brennaman took the job knowing “Al Michaels is a tough act to follow.”7 Years later he recalled, “I remember the situation then was not ideal. Number one, I was succeeding a guy who was eminently popular in Al Michaels. Number two, I was broadcasting for fans who knew more about team history than I’ll ever know.”8 Brennaman did his first spring-training game from Bradenton, Florida, against the Pirates and felt that it went well enough that “the ghost of Al Michaels had disappeared.”9 The second spring-training broadcast was from Al Lopez Field in Tampa and Brennaman inadvertently began the broadcast by welcoming listeners to “Al Michaels Field.”10 Brennaman recalled, “I was embarrassed almost to tears.”11 Broadcast partner Joe Nuxhall turned to him during the commercial break and said, “I’ll be damned—we haven’t even begun the regular season and I already have material for the banquet circuit next fall.”12

The chemistry between Marty and former Reds pitcher Joe Nuxhall was evident from the start. Meeting for the first time in a Dayton, Ohio, photo studio for publicity shots before the season began, Brennaman greeted Nuxhall saying, “I have your baseball card.” Brennaman later reflected, “From that moment on we developed a one-of-a-kind relationship.”13 Working together for the next three decades, “Marty and Joe” became an institution in Cincinnati. In between pitches, the pair might chat about their tomato plants, their golf games, or anything else that might come to mind. “I think our success has to do with two things,” Brennaman explained. “First, we genuinely like each other. Second, we talk about stuff outside of baseball that people can relate to. We make fun of ourselves and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I don’t know if our act would fly outside of Cincinnati.”14 The two became so closely linked in the minds of Reds fans that when Brennaman stopped into a grocery store near his home early one morning, a fan approached him to ask, “Where’s Joe?” Marty and Joe worked together until Joe’s retirement after the 2004 season. The two remained close friends until Nuxhall’s death in 2007.

In Brennaman’s first inning of regular-season play-by-play, Henry Aaron hit his 714th home run to tie Babe Ruth on the career list. During the commercial break, Nuxhall turned to him and said, “What the hell do you do for an encore?”15 Early that season, Brennaman would spontaneously utter what would become his signature call of a Reds win: “This one belongs to the Reds!” It was a phrase he said often during the early years, as the Reds won the World Series in 1975 and 1976. Assigned to cover the World Series each of those years for NBC radio and TV, Brennaman would not fully appreciate the team’s talent and accomplishments until years later: “I agree with what Bob Howsam said in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium after the fourth and final game of the 1976 World Series. He said that in our lifetime we’ll never see another team the equal of this one.”16

Brennaman’s style evolved over the years. At the beginning he was, in his own words, an “unmitigated homer.”17 In 2000 he admitted, “When I hear tapes from back then, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world.”18 Originally referring to the Reds as “we” and “our side,” Brennaman dropped the references to “we” after a player asked him how many hits he had had that day. Eventually Brennaman became known for his blunt assessments of the play in front of him. “I’m like a bull in a china shop. If a guy doesn’t run out a groundball or loafs going after a ball hit in the gap, I’ll say it,” he said.19 His candor wasn’t always appreciated by the players. In 1985 Dave Concepcion threatened to punch Brennaman in the nose for criticizing him. In 2000 Ken Griffey, Jr. took issue when Brennaman accused the outfielder of loafing during his first year with the Reds. “I am just not concerned about what they think,” Brennaman commented. “I know there are guys down there that don’t like me. That’s fine with me. There are a lot of guys down there I don’t like.”20 For Brennaman, maintaining his credibility with the fans was most important. “I’m probably more critical than any other baseball play-by-play announcer in the business, and I think that when I walk away from this job, the only thing I will have is a measure of credibility.”21

One person who didn’t appreciate the broadcaster’s candid approach was Reds general manager Dick Wagner. By the early 1980s, with the Big Red Machine largely dismantled, Wagner objected to Brennaman’s criticism of the team and added a third broadcaster to the radio booth. “In 1980, he put Dick Carlson with Joe and me for a few games to make it a three-man booth,” Brennaman said. “It was done because I was critical of the club and that was Wagner’s way of warning me.”22 Brennaman was so angered that he “spent three days trying to get fired” and “called Dick Wagner everything known to man to every writer who covered the club.”23 In early 1983 Brennaman asked Wagner for a contract extension and was refused. Brennaman was sure that he would be fired by the end of the season. Instead, Wagner was fired in July. Brennaman stayed with the team and never again had an issue with team management objecting to what he said on the air.

Though team management would no longer object to Brennaman’s criticism, commentary by Marty and Joe got the attention of National League President Bart Giamatti in 1988. On April 30, during a game against the Mets at Riverfront Stadium, manager Pete Rose argued with first base umpire Dave Pallone about a delayed call at the bag with two outs in the top of the ninth inning, which allowed New York to score the game’s winning run. After Rose was ejected, the heated exchange between the manager and umpire continued. Rose shoved Pallone twice, and subsequently earned a $10,000 fine along with a one month suspension for his part in the incident. On the air Brennaman called Pallone “incompetent” and a “horrible” umpire while Nuxhall, recalling Pallone’s work during a 1979 umpire strike, called him a “scab.”24 Fans, reacting to the umpire’s call and the ensuing altercation, threw radios, golf balls, and other objects onto the field. Pallone was forced to leave the game before it ended. Giamatti blamed Brennaman and Nuxhall for “inciting the unacceptable behavior of some fans.”25 Days later, the broadcasters met with Giamatti and Commissioner Peter Ueberroth for a meeting about the incident. “There was no indication they were trying to censure us. It was a discussion of what they felt was improper,” Brennaman said after the meeting.26 In retrospect he characterized some of their on-air statements during the game as “inappropriate,”27 but years later, he insisted, “They accused us of inciting a riot. I don’t think we did then and I don’t think we did now.”28

Admittedly a “college basketball freak,”29 by the late 1980s, Brennaman was spending his winters broadcasting college basketball. He provided play-by-play for Atlantic Coast Conference Games and covered NCAA tournaments for CBS radio. He partnered with Larry Conley to work on telecasts of University of Kentucky basketball from 1987 to 1990.

In the course of his career, Brennaman has covered many historic moments in Cincinnati baseball history, including the Reds’ 1990 World Series win, Tom Browning’s perfect game in 1988, no-hitters by Tom Seaver in 1977 and Homer Bailey in 2012, and Ken Griffey, Jr.’s 500th home run in 2004 and 600th home run in 2008. However, Brennaman’s “single most exciting moment” in the game came on September 11, 1985, when Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record to become the all-time base-hit leader. “Everybody knew it was just a matter of time. But when it happened it was just overwhelming,” Brennaman recalled.30 When Rose was banned from baseball for betting on games in 1989, Brennaman insisted that he still deserved recognition by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Brennaman’s support of Rose’s reinstatement never wavered. In 2011 Brennaman said, “He bet on baseball. There’s no question about that. He admitted it in a book a few years ago. But if they’re going to allow these guys who are either confirmed or alleged, druggies … steroid users … just to be on the Hall of Fame ballot, which they are … then damn it, Pete needs to be on there too.”31

Though Brennaman and his wife, Brenda, divorced shortly after his arrival in Cincinnati, their son Thom recalls having a “terrific childhood.”32 Unlike most children, when Thom went to visit his father at work, he also got to meet such stars as Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan. Marty later remarried. He and his second wife, Sherri, had a daughter, Ashley. Reflecting on it, Marty said he felt he was a “much better father” to Ashley than he had been able to be to Thom and Dawn during the more hectic early years of his career.33 Though Thom Brennaman understood how difficult the travel and long absences could be for a broadcaster and his family, he chose to follow his father’s career path.

Thom Brennaman made his major-league broadcasting debut in 1989 providing play-by-play on Reds telecasts. In 1990 he moved to the Chicago Cubs booth and eventually went on to provide play-by-play for the Arizona Diamondbacks and for Fox Sports. In 2007, Thom Brennaman returned to Cincinnati to work with his father on Reds radio. Thrilled with the working arrangement, Marty said that working with his son was “a dream fulfilled.”34 That year Thom and Marty worked about 90 games together on radio (with Thom moving to TV duties on Fox Sports Ohio for many of the remaining games.) They are the only father-and-son baseball broadcasters to have each broadcast a perfect game (Marty called Tom Browning’s, Thom broadcast Randy Johnson’s in 2004), a world-championship team (Thom broadcast for the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks), and a 20-strikeout game (both were broadcasting when Randy Johnson struck out 20 Reds batters in 2001).

“After three years I expected Marty to move on because of his expertise and the way he handled things,” Joe Nuxhall once admitted.35 Though Brennaman had several offers from other teams in larger markets over the years, he preferred to stay in Cincinnati and became just as identified with the team as Sparky Anderson, Johnny Bench, or Joe Nuxhall. Recognizing what an institution the broadcaster had become in Cincinnati, the Reds symbolically retired his microphone (similar to retiring a player’s uniform number) in a 2007 ceremony. By that year, Brennaman (at the advice of friend Vin Scully) cut back on his schedule, taking off 20 games during the season. In 2010 Brennaman said that he could “conceivably work indefinitely, as long as my health permits.”36  He continued calling games in Cincinnati for another decade, announcing that he would retire at the end of the 2019 season, his 46th year as the voice of the Reds.

Last revised: May 1, 2019

An earlier version of this biography is included in the book “The Great Eight: The 1975 Cincinnati Reds” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Mark Armour. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Silvia, Tony. Fathers and Sons in Baseball Broadcasting: The Carays, Brennamans, Bucks and Kalases (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2009).

Associated Press. “And this honor belongs to Marty.” Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail, February 4, 2000.

Associated Press. “Brennamans will team up in Cincinnati.” Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, October 5, 2006.

Associated Press. “Concepcion threatens broadcaster.” San Jose (California) Mercury News, September 8, 1985.

Associated Press. “Marty Brennaman signs 3-year contract extension.” Lima (Ohio) News, August 10, 2007.

Associated Press. “Reds’ broadcasters apologize for remarks about ump.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 4, 1988.

“Bench resigns from radio show with Brennaman.” Lexington Herald-Leader, July 28, 2000.

Bogaczyk, Jack. “Brennaman sees potential this season for the Reds; announcer says he has never been as optimistic about any other year.” Charleston Daily Mail, April 9, 2010.

Brennaman, Marty and Lonnie Wheeler. “Marty’s story.” Cincinnati Post, July 22, 2000.

Clay, John. “No identity crisis in Reds’ radio; duo wants to be called just Marty and Joe, and you can leave off Brennaman, Nuxhall.” Lexington Herald-Leader, July 7, 1990.

Fernandes, Doug. “Brennaman, McCoy covered Reds since early ’70s.” Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune, March 22, 2009.

“Brennaman, Franchester Sr.” (obituary). Norfolk (Virginia) Virginian-Pilot, March 29, 1993.

Goldblatt, Abe. “Reds’ Brennaman calls Bonds ‘a first-class jerk.’ ” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, November 9, 1993.

Horrigan, Jeff. “Running Gag.” Cincinnati Post, March 30, 1998.

Hunter, Bob. “Reds resolve TV woes.” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, January 9, 1987.

Jones, David. “Reds fans call ‘foul’ at announcers’ split.” Columbus Dispatch, April 10, 1986.

Katz, Marc. “Spat splits Marty, Johnny.” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, July 28, 2000.

Koch, Bill. “Brennaman emotional at Hall ceremonies.” Cincinnati Post, July 24, 2000.

Lancaster, Marc. “Marty ad-libbed call.” Cincinnati Post, June 21, 2004.

Leffler, Bill. “Announcer recalls that first major mistake; the Reds’ voice remembers that Al Michaels was always on his mind during a big game.” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, February 21, 1993.

“Lillian E. Brennaman.” (obituary). Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, May 16, 2003.

McCoy, Hal. “Brennamans a pair of ‘perfect’ announcers.” Dayton Daily News, May 21, 2004.

McCoy, Hal. “Marty on Joe: ‘People genuinely loved him’ – Brennaman says his longtime radio partner was the No. 1 figure in Cincinnati Reds history.” Dayton Daily News, November 17, 2007.

McCoy, Hal. “Nervous Marty signs on with his son.” Dayton Daily News, March 2, 2007.

“NSSA Weekend: Marty Brennaman comes back to Salisbury.” Salisbury (North Carolina) Post, May 1, 2005.

Paeth, Greg. “Brennaman may return to Reds’ TV broadcasts.” Cincinnati Post, November 30, 1993.

Paeth, Greg. “The Voices of the Reds—Baseball’s ‘odd couple’ Marty and Joe.” Cincinnati Post, October 2, 1990.

Peterson, Bill. “Twenty-five years of Marty and Joe.” Cincinnati Post, June 6, 1998.

Radford, Rich. “Brennaman named to Baseball Hall of Fame.” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, February 4, 2000.

Raissman, Bob. “From the booth to the Hall.” New York Daily News, July 18, 2000.

Reed, Billy. “Brennaman to become Cats’ TV play-by-play man.” Lexington Herald-Leader, July 28, 1987.

Reed, Billy. “Marty and Joe blend together like beer, brat.” Lexington Herald-Leader, March 31, 1998.

Robinson, Tom, “Brennaman appreciates life with the Reds.” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, October 13, 1990.

Robinson, Tom, “Brennaman talks his way into Fame; Reds radio announcer from Portsmouth goes into Baseball Hall of Fame today,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, July 23, 2000.

Rosecrans, C. Trent. “Father to son to fans—now it’s ‘Dad’ and Thom, and a new tradition.” Cincinnati Post, March 2, 2007.

Rosecrans, C. Trent. “Mike’s retired, but not Marty.” Cincinnati Post, June 11, 2007.

Schuman, Duane. “Marty and Joe keep livin’ on the air in Cincinnati.” Fort Wayne (Indiana) News-Sentinel, October 1, 1993.

Smith, Bill. “Brennaman, Reds’ ‘Voice,’ Young, Enthusiastic, Good.” Charleston Daily Mail, January 31, 1974.

Stein, Ray. “Brennaman’s first choice: Remain in Reds country.” Columbus Dispatch, March 11, 1988.

Stevens, Rich. “Brennaman not afraid to speak his mind.” Charleston Daily Mail online, February 7, 2011 ( http://www.dailymail.com/Sports/RichStevens/201102070063 ).

Strauss, Joe. “Duncan calls remarks classless; Notebook: Pitching coach was reacting to comments by Reds broadcaster Brennaman.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 18, 2011.

Tipton, Jerry. “ ‘This one belong to Cats’? Brennaman says it’s taken.” Lexington Herald-Leader, October 25, 1987.

Tolliver, Lee. “A hero’s welcome; Reds broadcaster Brennaman is deeply touched as he is honored at the Portsmouth Jamboree.” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, February 9, 2001.

Williams, Marty. “ ‘Understanding each other’ is the key—The two have broadcast more than 4,000 Reds games over the last 24 years.” Dayton Daily News, April 1, 1997.

Woody, Paul. “Game announcers can speak freely—up to a point.” Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, May 5, 1988.

Notes

“My father ran the gamut of the entertainment world,” wrote Jack Brickhouse, of his father John William “Will” Brickhouse. “He was a sideshow barker. He was buried alive. He was a carnival man’s carnival man.” He also was credited with originating “split-week vaudeville,” and was a booking agent for motion pictures. Jack’s mother, Daisy James Brickhouse, was a Welsh immigrant who worked as a hotel cashier and hostess. 

Jack was born January 24, 1916, in Peoria, Illinois. An only child, his father died when he was just three years old. Though his mother remarried, to Gilbert Schultze, Brickhouse grew up in a household where every penny was needed. After school at Lincoln Grammar School, Brickhouse would often help his grandmother deliver food trays at Proctor Hospital, in order to have access to a little extra food. Brickhouse also demonstrated his entrepreneurial streak as a newspaper vendor and golf caddie.

While attending Peoria Manual Training High School from 1929-33, the gregarious Brickhouse played basketball, served as a reporter and editor for the school paper, was elected senior-class vice president, qualified for the National Honor Society, and played the lead in the senior class play. In the fall of 1933, Brickhouse enrolled at Bradley Polytechnic Institute (now Bradley University) in Peoria, hoping to become a lawyer. The six-foot-three youngster played on the freshman basketball team, but he had to leave college late in 1933, due to a lack of funds.

While working at a distillery, Jack entered an announcing contest held by local radio station WMBD. Though he didn’t win, he accepted a job as a half-time switchboard operator, and the other half of his time was spent on the radio, announcing news, weather, barn dances, variety shows, and local sports. He became known for his “Man on the Street” interviews, approaching pedestrians for comment on issues of the day.

During the 1937-38 season, Brickhouse convinced WMBD to broadcast Bradley Braves basketball games. The Bradley team was a national contender, and compiled a 52-9 record from 1936-39. Brickhouse accompanied the Braves on the road and broadcast the first two National Invitational Tournaments from New York’s Madison Square Garden. He also covered Big Ten football, minor league baseball, boxing, and initiated shows of his own, such as “Here’s How They Did It,” a series of interviews with successful businessmen. On August 7, 1939, he married Nelda Teach of Avon, Illinois.

In the Spring of 1940, Brickhouse was hired by Chicago’s WGN as an assistant to legendary broadcaster Bob Elson. He helped out on Cubs and White Sox broadcasts, broadcast big band concerts, and continued his “Man on the Street” interviews. That fall he began broadcasting Notre Dame football.

Brickhouse caught a break in midsummer, 1942, when Bob Elson joined the Navy. Brickhouse finished out the baseball season doing both Cubs and White Sox games. When neither team was at home, Brickhouse would recreate the away games from ticker-tape accounts. Brickhouse himself joined the Marines after the 1943 baseball season but was discharged two months later due to complications of childhood tuberculosis.

In 1944, WGN took a pass on baseball, and Brickhouse found himself covering the first of many Republican and Democratic national conventions. The next January he was in Washington to cover President Roosevelt’s inauguration. He covered White Sox games for WJJD in 1945 until Elson returned from the Navy. In 1946, Brickhouse journeyed to New York to broadcast New York Giants baseball on WMCA.  

“Anybody who could see beyond his nose knew that television would be important someday,” Brickhouse reminisced, and so he returned to Chicago to experiment with baseball coverage on TV station WBKB in 1947. That same year he became the radio voice of the Chicago Cardinals professional football team.

He rejoined WGN in 1948 as sports service manager and broadcaster. The station covered all Cubs and Sox home games, with Brickhouse as the broadcaster. According to historian Curt Smith, Brickhouse and WGN “began a continuum–an intimacy between ball club and viewer–that decades later, in the wake of cable and thus, WGN’s intrusion into millions of American households, fostered for the Cubs an enormous national sect.” WGN had played a pioneering role in radio broadcasting of baseball, at a time when team owners worried that broadcasts of games would hurt attendance, and they took the same role with the new medium of television.

During the late 1940s, Brickhouse continued doing Cubs and White Sox baseball and professional and college football. Still a “Jack of all Trades,” he also originated a radio show called “Marriage License Romances,” in which he interviewed couples applying for marriage licenses at City Hall. On the Cubs opening day in 1949, his only child, Jeanne, was born. Starting in 1948, and continuing for nine years, he also broadcast professional wrestling, an assignment he initially disliked, but came to see as theatrical entertainment.

The 1950 season saw Brickhouse cover his first of five baseball All-Star Games, this time as the national announcer for the DuMont network. During that same year, he began publishing the annual Jack Brickhouse’s Major League Record Book, helped to pioneer televised golf, and was on the national broadcast team for the first of four World Series. From 1953 through 1976, a period of 24 years, Jack was the radio voice of the Chicago Bears NFL franchise.

In 1962, a portion of a Cubs-Phillies game with Brickhouse at the mike was included in the first satellite television broadcast to Europe. In 1963, Brickhouse began several years of writing the “Jack Brickhouse Says” column for the Chicago’s American newspaper. In 1964, he was elected to the Cubs board of directors, resigning in 1975 to forestall any concerns about his journalistic objectivity. Brickhouse broadcast his last White Sox game in 1967, when the team transferred to another station, and began doing all Cub games, both home and away. In 1971, he narrated the successful “Great Moments in Cubs Baseball” record album.

In 1975, with the White Sox in danger of leaving Chicago, Brickhouse helped assemble investors for an ownership group headed by Bill Veeck which kept the team in town. Jack and Nelda Brickhouse divorced in 1978. In 1979, he broadcast his 5000th baseball game, thought to be many more than any other announcer at the time. He married Patricia Ettelson on March 22, 1980. He retired from Cubs baseball in 1981, though he remained at WGN in a vice-presidential capacity. In 1982, the Wrigley Field broadcasting booth was named in his honor.

Though he was eventually named to ten Halls of Fame, his selection as the 1983 recipient of the Ford C Frick Award, given by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for career excellence in broadcasting, was a personal pinnacle. Brickhouse’s legacy in baseball broadcasting is of having carried the flag for WGN as it established itself as the first cable superstation and televised almost all Cubs games from the 1950s through the 1990s. His voice was well known in Midwestern households from the mid 1930s to the early 1980s, and his famous home run call of “Back, back, back…Hey Hey!” is still remembered fondly.

The only criticism of Brickhouse is that he was a bit too positive, cheerful, and optimistic for some viewers, sugar-coating a parade of terrible Cub teams throughout his career. “I like some Gee-Whiz enthusiasm in broadcasting sports,” Brickhouse said.

Brickhouse died on March 3, 1998, of cardiac arrest, following surgery to remove a tumor in his brain. He was 82 years old.

Note: A version of this biography originally appeared in Scribner’s Encyclopedia of American Lives.

Sources

Jack Brickhouse’s autobiography, Thanks for Listening!, was published by Diamond Communications of South Bend, Indiana, in 1986. The book is a substantial source of information on his career, though it can be critiqued in the same manner as his broadcasting style; there’s no “juicy stuff.” Brickhouse has nary an enemy and never seems to have had a bad day at work. Many disagree with that criticism, and laud his relentless good cheer and optimism. The title of his autobiography, and its exclamation point, underscore his personality. Janice Petterchak published a biography of Brickhouse in 1996 entitled Jack Brickhouse: A Voice For All Seasons. (Chicago: Contemporary Books). Well researched and written, the book serves not just as a biography, but also as a history of early Chicago broadcasting, which, with the later rise of Cable TV, essentially served as a template for sports broadcasting in general in later decades. As it does with most important baseball figures, the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Library maintains a biographical clipping file on Jack Brickhouse which is well worth consulting. Among other things it contains his New York Times, AP, and USA Today obituaries.

Five hundred firefighters and policemen from the St. Louis area stood on the white lines of the diamond. A huge American flag was unfurled, but all eyes were on the 77-year old-white-haired man, Jack Buck, the St. Louis Cardinals’ longtime, beloved play-by-play radio announcer. In recent years Buck had been assailed by numerous medical ailments, including Parkinson’s disease. That accounted for the shaking and the wobbly walk to the mike. When Buck started to speak, however, his voice was strong and determined. He ended his poem, entitled “For America,” with these words:

“Everyone is saying the same thing and praying
That we end these senseless moments we are living
As our fathers did before, we shall win this unwanted war
And our children will enjoy the future we’ll be giving.”

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said that Buck’s poem and his steadiness that night were what brought baseball back. ESPN rated the moment number 98 on its list of the hundred most memorable moments in sports of the past 25 years.

For those who were at Busch Stadium that night, it was an experience that would never be forgotten. Sadly, but perhaps fittingly for such a patriot, it turned out to be Jack Buck’s last major moment in the spotlight. Shortly after the Cardinals’ 2001 season ended with a loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game Five of the National League Division Series, Buck entered Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis for lung cancer surgery. He left the hospital for a period, but re-entered it during the winter for treatment of various conditions. He remained there until his death on June 18, 2002.

John Francis Buck was born on August 21, 1924, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the third of seven children born to Earle and Kathleen Buck. Earle was an accountant for the Erie Railroad and he commuted to his job in Hoboken, New Jersey, each week. The elder Buck was a good enough baseball player that he had a tryout with the New York Giants, but a dispute with manager John McGraw kept Earle from becoming a professional player. (In his autobiography, That’s a Winner!, Buck said that his father never told his family what the dispute was about. “He never told us exactly what happened, but he and manager John McGraw had some sort of disagreement and that was the end of his professional dream,” Buck said.)

Holyoke was 90 miles from the Red Sox in Boston and from Jack’s favorite player, Jimmie Foxx. Jack said that he learned about baseball from hanging out in the drugstore across the street from his home. Three men there assisted young Jack with writing a letter to the Red Sox manager, Joe Cronin, in which he suggested a lineup for the team. Cronin answered his letter and a few days after that used Buck’s lineup and the Red Sox won the game.

Like most boys during the 1930s, Buck and his friends lived baseball during the warmer months of the year. They listened to games on the radio, talked about it, and played it whenever and wherever they could. “We all played baseball every spring and summer day,” wrote Jack in That’s a Winner! “I bet I’ve played more baseball games than half the people I’m watching now in the major leagues. We settled everything among ourselves, and we did it through sports. That’s the essence of sports. You learn who you are, what you can do and where you belong.”

Also, like many boys during the Depression of the 1930s, Jack tried to help out his family financially in any way that he could. He hawked newspapers on street corners and said that that experience helped him develop the voice that would sustain him through his broadcasting career. (He also cited his time as a drill instructor in the Army and 40 years of smoking Camel cigarettes.)

Jack’s baseball loyalty switched to the Cleveland Indians when the family moved to the Cleveland area in 1939 for his father’s job. They bought their first house and relished being together. But Earle suffered from high blood pressure, and he died at the age of 49 not long after the move to Ohio. Jack was just 15.

Kathleen Buck went to work in a sewing-machine factory to support her seven children and each of them helped as they could. In addition to selling newspapers, Jack also become a soda jerk at the Franklin Ice Cream Shop, where he met his first major leaguer, Oscar Grimes, a utility player with the Indians.

The young Buck enjoyed listening to the Indians’ announcer, Jack Graney, who late in life would live in Bowling Green, Missouri, and listen to Buck’s broadcasts. Other favorites included Red Barber and Mel Allen in New York, Bob Elson in Chicago, and late-night Spanish broadcasts from Cuba. Jack had unthinkingly been calling games since his days in Holyoke, when he’d give play-by-play during games with his friends. He did the same when he and his brother, Earle Jr., attended Indians games. His brother would eventually tell Jack to “shut up” or Earle would move elsewhere in the stadium.

Buck graduated from Lakewood High School in January 1942. The month before, he had been working at the ice cream shop one Sunday afternoon when word came over the radio about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jack knew that meant his future was uncertain. After graduation he and a friend went to work on ore boats on the Great Lakes. He spent the next two years working on the boats as a porter, night cook, painter, and deckhand.

Buck was drafted into the Army in July 1943. He trained in anti-aircraft at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He stayed there as an instructor and was promoted to corporal. Buck said that this happened “because of my voice, and I was really good at close-order drill. You could hear me all over the area.”

Buck was transferred to Camp Stewart in Georgia, where he continued as an instructor. Then he shipped out for Europe on the liner-turned-troopship Mauretania in February 1945. The ship landed in Liverpool, England, and Buck was sent on to France and eventually Belgium. On March 7, 1945, he crossed the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, one of the few bridges remaining across the Rhine, and the site of a fierce battle a few weeks before.

Buck was wounded on March 15 when Germans started shelling his position. Shrapnel pierced his left arm and leg, but missed hitting the hand grenade hanging from his belt. A medic bandaged him. Years later he and the medic met again at a banquet in St. Louis. The medic was Frank Borghi, goaltender for the 1950 US World Cup team that defeated England 1-0 in Brazil in one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history.

When Buck was released from the hospital, after receiving the Purple Heart, he was given a two-day pass to Paris. That’s where he was on May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended. He remained in Europe until April 1946, spending much of his time either playing in or coordinating various sporting events for the soldiers.

The GI Bill allowed Buck to enter Ohio State University in Columbus in the fall of 1946. He planned to major in radio speech with a minor in Spanish. He did his first broadcast in 1948 on the campus radio station, WOSU. While still in college, he went to work for a commercial station, WCOL. With absolutely no experience, Buck did play-by-play of Ohio State’s basketball games.

“I didn’t know how to do these things, I just did them,” wrote Buck. “It was the ultimate example of learning by experience and I’m glad there were no tape recorders around to immortalize how bad some of those first shows and broadcasts must have been.”

After Buck did his first basketball game, his class was assigned to listen to him and critique his performance. The most devastating criticism came from his professor, who told him, “You’d better find something else to do for a living.” Buck ran into the professor in 1970 en route to New Orleans to broadcast the Super Bowl. Point made!

In 1948 Buck eloped to Kentucky with fellow student Alyce Larson. They would have six children – Beverly, Jack Jr., Christine, Bonnie, Betsy, and Danny – before divorcing in 1969. With his second wife, Carole Lintzenich, he had two more children – Joe and Julie.

Buck graduated from Ohio State in December 1949. He remained with WCOL, which started broadcasting the games of the Columbus Red Birds Triple-A farm team of the Cardinals. Buck had to audition for the Columbus general manager, Al Banister, to be allowed to do the games. His audition consisted of re-creating an entire baseball game from a play-by-play account in The Sporting News. He got the job and for the first time of many headed to Florida for spring training.

As Buck prepared to broadcast his first baseball game, he wondered how he should approach the job. He asked Rollie Hemsley, the Columbus manager and a former major-league catcher, for advice. Hemsley’s words stuck with Jack: “If somebody doesn’t catch the ball, and you couldn’t have caught it either, keep your mouth shut. If they didn’t catch it and you could have caught it, give ’em hell.”

Buck did manage a coup that spring back in Columbus when the Red Sox came through to play an exhibition game on their way home to Boston. He snagged a media-resistant Ted Williams for a 30-minute interview, which Buck termed more of a speech. He was glad to have it, however, as it pleased his bosses.

WCOL was sold in 1952 and the new owner wasn’t interested in sports. Buck was out of a job, but within three days was on television at WBNS. As a father with three young children, Buck was glad to have another job so quickly. However, he quickly realized “even in those early days of TV, I knew I was going to be the sort of broadcaster who would be better off on radio.”

Buck missed doing sports, but baseball re-entered his life in 1953 when he got the job of broadcasting the games of the Rochester Red Wings, the Cardinals’ International League farm team. Then the Anheuser-Busch Brewery bought the Cardinals, including its farm teams. “The timing was exquisite,” said Buck. D’Arcy, the advertising agency for Anheuser-Busch, hired the baseball announcers. Buck auditioned for the chance to join Harry Caray in the Cardinals booth by having him broadcast a game between St. Louis and the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. He waited for weeks to hear if the job was his, and finally the word came. In 1954 he would be broadcasting in the big leagues.

Buck felt that he might be doomed from the start when he received a tape of Caray’s work from the Cardinals and was told, “This is the way we want you to broadcast.” Any good broadcaster knows that he has to develop his own style and Buck’s and Caray’s were not at all alike. Their personalities didn’t blend real well either, especially since Caray had wanted someone else for the job.

The third man in the booth that first year was Milo Hamilton. He and Jack split road and home duties and did as many innings on the Cardinals broadcasts as Caray would allow. Almost 60 years later, Hamilton, still in the business with the Houston Astros, referred to Jack as “probably my best friend in the industry.”

The Cardinals broadcasts were on KMOX, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. At the time, St. Louis was the westernmost city with a major-league baseball team and the Cardinals’ fan base extended well beyond that of most teams.

All three men in the KMOX booth in 1954 would go on to receive the Ford Frick Award giving them a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame – Buck in 1987, Caray in 1989, and Hamilton in 1992. But 1954 was the only year all three worked together. Joe Garagiola, a St. Louis product who caught for the Cardinals, Pirates, Cubs, and Giants, replaced Hamilton in 1955 and become Caray’s protégé.

While Buck was excited to be doing major-league games, his situation was also frustrating as Caray pretty much controlled the booth and decided who did what. Harry didn’t like to have anyone else be on the mike when something exciting happened, and since that was impossible to predict, he did most of the innings.

With Garagiola traveling on all the road trips with Caray in 1955, Buck was left behind in the St. Louis studio to do commercials and update incoming baseball scores. However, the time allowed him to expand into other sports. He did bowling, soccer, and wrestling on the radio.

As the 1950s rolled along, the Cardinals were not winning any pennants and Buck was still the odd man out in the broadcast booth. After the 1959 season, when former Cardinals player Buddy Blattner was added to the team, Buck was out totally. He got the word that he was fired just before Christmas.

“We had just built a six-bedroom house with a swimming pool and had bought all new furniture, on credit of course,” wrote Buck in That’s a Winner! “I had to find a job quickly, or I’d have to sell the kids.” Enter Bob Hyland.

In St. Louis the name Bob Hyland is legendary for his masterful management of KMOX Radio, which was the king of the St. Louis airwaves and often the top-ranked station in the country. Hyland persuaded Buck not to go after a baseball job in another city, feeling certain that he would eventually get his job back with the Cardinals. In the meantime, he had plenty of ways to use the announcer’s talents.

Buck did a nightly show from Stan Musial and Biggie’s Restaurant, playing records and doing interviews. He did other sporting events and he did an interview show called “At Your Service” which became key in radio history. Hyland decided to do away with musical programming and go all-talk. KMOX was the first station to do this, creating a brand-new format that remains popular today.

Jack also started doing public appearances and became the most sought-after emcee in St. Louis for banquets and other events. Many of the events were for charity, such as the Cystic Fibrosis Association, one of Buck’s top priorities. One year he appeared at 385 events.

To satisfy his sports interest, Buck did baseball games for ABC-TV, as well as the Big Ten Basketball Game of the Week. He was one of the first announcers to do American Football League games and created the Pro Bowlers Tour with Chris Schenkel. He did minor-league hockey for the St. Louis Braves and then announced the first games for the National Hockey League St. Louis Blues in 1967.

Where Buck really wanted to be, of course, was back in the Cardinals’ broadcasting booth. Blattner had moved on to the expansion Los Angeles Angels, and Caray and Garagiola had had a falling-out. Joe moved on to NBC and Harry again needed a partner. While Caray was still the dominant figure, he and Buck got along better this time.

Buck wrote, “When Harry and I were doing the games together, we were as good a team as there ever was. His style and mine were so different, that it made for a balanced broadcast. The way we approached the job, with the interest and love both of us had for the game, made our work kind of special.”

It was an exciting time in St. Louis. Gussie Busch, owner of the brewery and the Cardinals, built a new stadium in downtown St. Louis that opened in 1966. The 1960s were also great years for the team. St. Louis played in three World Series during the decade, beating the Yankees in 1964 and the Red Sox in 1967, but losing in 1968 to the Tigers.

After the many years of being Caray’s unappreciated sidekick, however, Buck was ready to move on as the ’60s came to a close. His salary had been stuck at $20,000 a year and he felt stuck as well. Then Caray failed to follow an instruction from Busch and was fired. Buck was offered Caray’s contract. Finally, after 16 difficult years, the booth would be his.

Buck needed a partner for the 1970 season and his first choice was the retired Red Barber. Barber, the longtime Dodgers announcer, had been fired by the Yankees four years before and was interested in getting back in the game, “but my wife would kill me.” The job eventually went to Jim Woods, an uneasy fit, and Woods left after two years. In the spring of 1972 former Cardinals outfielder Mike Shannon, a novice at broadcasting, became Buck’s partner and would remain that for the rest of Buck’s baseball career. Shannon, a St. Louis native, had been a popular player but was forced to retire early because of a kidney ailment.

Talking about those early days, Shannon said, “I had absolutely no experience and I knew that I was going to walk into a situation where I needed to learn. But because of Jack, I knew I had a person that was the best in the business.”

Buck continued to do pro football for a number of years, including broadcasting the memorable Ice Bowl game in Green Bay in 1967. Although he did some TV work, most of his football coverage was also on radio. He and former coach Hank Stram did radio coverage of the Monday Night Football games for CBS for almost two decades.

As to why he fit better on radio than TV, Buck once said, “In television all they want you to do is shut up. I’m not very good at shutting up.” He also felt that television coverage of baseball and other sports was more centered on the analyst, not the play-by-play man.

Probably the greatest example of Buck’s discomfort with TV came in 1975, when he became host of a new studio sports show on NBC called Grandstand. It meant giving up his job with the Cardinals, at least in 1976. Grandstand was a failure pretty much from the beginning. It was badly produced, which made it difficult for Buck ever to get comfortable with the format. He was eventually fired and went back to broadcasting baseball.

The 1970s had been another bad time for the St. Louis Cardinals. The team had gotten sloppy and Buck was often embarrassed by how the players dressed for flights and by how they acted. Manager Red Schoendienst was fired after the 1976 season, but things didn’t improve – until Whitey Herzog came to town.

Buck wrote, “I was immediately impressed with Whitey and the way he went about his business. He is the smartest person I’ve ever met in baseball.” Herzog guided the Cardinals to three more World Series in the 1980s. They beat the Milwaukee Brewers (then in the American League) in 1982, but lost to the Kansas City Royals in 1985 and the Minnesota Twins in 1987.

One of Buck’s most famous calls came in 1985, when the Cardinals were playing the Dodgers in Game Five of the National League Championship Series in St. Louis. Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith, not exactly a power hitter, hit his first home run left-handed to win the game for the Cards. Buck’s call went like this: “Smith corks one into deep right field, down the line. It may go … Go crazy, folks! Go crazy! It’s a home run, and the Cardinals have won the game, 3-2, on a home run by the Wizard! Go crazy!”

Equally memorable was his call on CBS Radio during the 1988 World Series when Kirk Gibson, though hobbled by injuries, smashed a pinch-hit home run to win Game One. “Unbelievable! The Dodgers have won the game on a home run by Kirk Gibson! I don’t believe what I just saw!” Even though that was a radio call, it is often played when Gibson’s trot around the bases is shown on TV.

Buck made one more foray into television, in 1990 when CBS hired him to do the number-two game on its new Saturday baseball broadcast. Before the season even started, however, he was moved up to the number-one game when Brent Musburger was fired. Jack was teamed with Tim McCarver, whom he knew well from McCarver’s playing days with the Cardinals. As had happened before, Buck was relegated to second place and the duo never quite clicked. He was fired in 1992.

One of the greatest joys of Jack Buck’s life was the arrival in the broadcast booth of his youngest son, Joe. As a boy, Joe had spent a great deal of time with Jack in the booth, going on road trips, and he took it all in as a very proud son. On Joe’s 18th birthday, Jack and Mike Shannon felt the young man was “ready for prime time” and left him alone in the broadcast booth to do an inning of a Cardinals game. He didn’t let them down. As Jack’s health deteriorated in the 1990s, Joe became a regular part of the KMOX team on the Cardinals’ broadcasts. Starting in 1995, Jack cut back on the travel and Joe was Shannon’s partner on road games.

When Mark McGwire was vying for the home run record in 1998, it was Jack Buck who was at the microphone to call number 61, which tied McGwire with Roger Maris. As Busch Stadium went crazy on that Labor Day afternoon, September 7, Buck said, “Pardon me while I stand up and applaud. What a Cardinal moment this is. What a baseball moment this is.” It was Joe who delivered the national television call for number 62 one night later.

When the millennium came, Jack Buck had been a baseball broadcaster for 50 years, all but a few of those with the Cardinals. He had been dealing with Parkinson’s disease for several years. He was also diabetic, and had a Pacemaker, cataracts, and other ailments. Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly wrote, “Herking and jerking in his seat, his face contorting this way and that, he still sends out the most wonderful descriptions of games you’ve ever heard.”

Joe said, “I have no idea how, but his voice has been stronger lately. It’s like he’s putting every ounce of energy God can give him into those three hours of the broadcast.” And Cardinals fans did not want to let him go. Buck had the knack for making the game real, “like talking baseball with the guy across the backyard fence,” wrote Reilly.

On the evening of June 18, 2002, the Anaheim Angels played in St. Louis, the first time the two teams had ever played each other. Darryl Kile was on the mound for the Cardinals in what would turn out to be his last game before his sudden death from a heart attack four days later in Chicago. With Joe Buck broadcasting, the Cardinals won the game, 7-2, a win that put St. Louis into first place in the National League Central.

Joe rushed from the broadcast booth to the hospital to tell his dad. Apparently, that was the news Jack had been waiting for. After months in the hospital, after several surgeries, after losing the ability to speak (Joe compared the last indignity to being like “a great pianist with broken hands”), Jack Buck died just an hour after the game ended. His Cardinals were in first place and he’d let the Angels take him home.

Joe called KMOX with the news and a makeshift memorial quickly started to grow around Jack Buck’s monument outside Busch Stadium II. The radio station that had invented the call-in talk show format put it to good use over the next few days. Tributes poured in from around the country and from all kinds of people. No matter how famous or ordinary the person, they all loved Jack Buck because he loved them.

A month after Buck’s death, Mike Shannon talked about his longtime broadcast partner: “Jack was so good to so many people, you’ll never know. He thought about people and their situations and their walks of life. He would go out of his way to talk to the guy who parked his car, the bellhop, the guy serving the dinner – and he learned a lot (from them).”

Tony La Russa, who had come to St. Louis in 1996 to manage the Cardinals, became friends with Jack and said, “Most fans knew him for his broadcasting, and he was a super talent as a broadcaster. But that was the smallest part of why he was so special. He was a great man in so many ways.”

A ceremony to honor Jack Buck was held at Busch Stadium two days after his death, with his coffin resting at home plate. A Budweiser Clydesdale stood guard nearby. The funeral was held the next day. Many baseball and other sports figures attended.

The title of Jack Buck’s memoir, That’s a Winner!, was the phrase he developed to announce a Cardinals win to his radio audience. It also summed up the way he felt about his life. Jack ended his book with these lines: “Carole once asked me what I would say if I met the Lord and my answer then is the same as it is now. I want to ask Him why He was so good to me.”

In 2009 Joe Buck was recording a public service announcement about Parkinson’s disease with actor Michael J. Fox, who was hit with the disease at a relatively young age. Fox turned to Joe and said, speaking for countless baseball fans: “I miss your dad’s voice. It was so iconic.”

This biography is included in the book “Drama and Pride in the Gateway City: The 1964 St. Louis Cardinals” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by John Harry Stahl and Bill Nowlin. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Carole Buck, Joe Buck, and Julie Buck. Jack Buck: Forever a Winner. (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2003)

Jack Buck, with Rob Rains and Bob Broeg, That’s a Winner! (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1999)

Dan Caesar. “Buck Didn’t Shine in TV Spotlight Like He Did on Radio,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 19, 2002

R. B. Fallstrom. “Final Respects Paid to Jack Buck.” BaseballWeekly.com, June 21, 2002

Kristen Lokemoen. “So long, for just a while.” Show-Me Missouri Magazine, Fall 2002, 12-14. Content used with permission from the publisher.

Rudy Martzke. “Joe Buck Reflects on Fallen Father.” USA Today.com, June 19, 2002

Rick Reilly. “The Spirit of St. Louis.” In Rob Fleder, editor. Great Baseball Writing (New York: Sports Illustrated Books, 2007), 231-233

Richard Sandomir. “Actor Remembers Announcer Who Shared Struggle.” New York Times, April 20, 2009

Rick Weinberg. “98: Jack Buck’s Tribute to America.” ESPN.com

Interview with Mike Shannon, July 16, 2002

Interview with Ernie Hays, July 16, 2002

Interview with Tony LaRussa, July 17, 2002

Interview with Ron Jacober, November 22, 2011

Interview with Milo Hamilton, November 29, 2011

Caray kept his early life shrouded in mystery. Even his birthdate was not clear. Various sources differ on his year of birth, putting it at anywhere from 1915 to 1920. When asked about it, Caray would generally shrug off the question of his age. After his death in 1998, it was reported that according to St. Louis city health records, Harry Christopher Carabina was born on March 1, 1914, on Olive Street in St. Louis. His father, Christopher Carabina, left around the time of Harry’s birth. Harry never met his father and never knew anything about him. According to his autobiography, Harry’s mother, the former Daisy Argint, remarried when Harry was about 5 or 6 years old and died when he was about 7 or 8. (A search of Missouri marriage records shows a marriage between Daisy Argint and Sam Capuran in September, 1926, when Harry would have been 12. Missouri records also show that Daisy Capuran died in April 1928 of lobar pneumonia at the age of 37.) After his mother’s death, he was raised primarily by an aunt, Doxie Argint.

Coming from a poor family, Harry went to work selling newspapers at the age of 8. One of the brightest parts of his childhood was being able to watch the games of the St. Louis Cardinals. Whenever he was able to afford it, young Harry attended games at Sportsman’s Park. At Webster High School in Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb, Harry played second base and shortstop and played well enough that he was offered a baseball scholarship by the University of Alabama. Unable to pay for the expenses for room and board or books, he did not accept the scholarship.

Working odd jobs after completing high school, Harry picked up additional money by playing semipro baseball on the weekends. Playing for such teams as the Smith Undertakers and the Webster Groves Birds, he attracted the attention of some scouts and was invited to participate in a tryout camp for the Cardinals in Decatur, Illinois. Harry didn’t have the physical skills to make the tryout, but through a friend on the Webster Groves baseball team, he landed a steady job as an assistant sales manager with a company that manufactured lockers, gymnastic equipment, and other products.

Harry continued to attend Cardinals games as often as possible. However, he noticed that the games he saw in person were invariably more exciting than the play-by-play descriptions he heard when he listened to the games at home on the radio. Convinced that he could do a better job broadcasting Cardinals games himself, he brashly sent a personal letter to the home address of Merle Jones, general manager of radio station KMOX asking for the job. Impressed with Harry’s drive and enthusiasm, Jones arranged for him to audition for the station. Jones thought Harry had a great voice but needed some experience. He helped Harry to land a job as a sports announcer at a Joliet, Illinois, radio station, WCLS.

By the spring of 1940, Harry was working on WCLS covering sporting events like high-school and junior-college basketball games, summer softball-league games and bowling-league events. At the suggestion of WCLS station manager Bob Holt, Harry changed his last name from Carabina to Caray.

After a year and a half of working at WCLS, Caray was hired as sports director of WKZO in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he worked with the young newscaster Paul Harvey. The station carried Harry Heilmann’s broadcasts of Detroit Tigers games and Caray hosted locally produced pregame and postgame shows. He also provided play by play of Western Michigan University basketball and football. During his stint at WKZO, Caray also got his first experience with baseball play-by-play, broadcasting a semipro tournament in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Caray later claimed that it was during the broadcast of this semipro tournament that he first uttered two phrases he would employ throughout his career. When a player hit a home run, Caray exclaimed, “It might be … it could be … it IS … a home run!” Another expression he claimed to have first used during this early broadcast was “Holy Cow!” Caray later explained, “I knew the profanity that had been used up and down my street wouldn’t go on the air. So I just trained myself every time I was excited to say ‘Holy Cow’ instead of some profanity.”4 The expression itself was not unique to Caray’s broadcasts; it had been used over the air by Minnesota sportscaster Halsey Hall as early as the 1930s and was later picked up by New York Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto. Harry later said, “Not that it’s so unique — everybody uses ‘Holy Cow.’ The unique part was that I finally did it on a major-league broadcast, in 1945, with a lot of radio stations across the country listening to it.”5

Rejected for military service because of bad eyesight, Caray moved back to St. Louis, where he was working at radio station KXOK by early 1944. Working first as a staff announcer, Caray soon had a 15-minute nightly sports show. Unlike other radio sports show hosts of the day, he not only provided sports news, he also editorialized and criticized. His controversial approach won a lot of attention in a year when both St. Louis teams met in the World Series. In the fall of that year, Caray was hired to do play-by-play of the minor-league St. Louis Flyers hockey team, college basketball, and other sports events sponsored by the Griesedieck Brothers Brewery over station WIL.

Griesedieck Brothers were planning on sponsoring broadcasts of Cardinals and Browns home games in 1945 and were looking for a famous sportscaster to handle the play-by-play duties. Caray went directly to brewery president Edward J. Griesedieck to lobby for the job. Griesedieck initially turned him down, explaining that he preferred to hire an announcer in the style of veteran St. Louis broadcaster France Laux. Laux, Griesedieck explained, described the action in a way that allowed a person to listen and yet read the newspaper undisturbed. At this, Caray exploded. “You’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor baseball, and when your commercial comes on, when your handpicked announcer is selling your product, you’re busy reading the paper!” Caray continued, “You need someone who’s going to keep the fan interested in the game. Because if they’re paying attention to the game, they’ll pay attention to the commercial!”6 Convinced by Caray’s argument, and certain that Caray could keep the fans interested, Griesedieck hired him immediately.

Starting in the spring of 1945, Harry was teamed with former catcher and manager Gabby Street to broadcast the home games of the Cardinals and the Browns over WIL. In St. Louis at the time, there were no exclusive broadcast rights. Several local St. Louis radio stations aired the baseball games in direct competition with one another through the 1930s and into the mid-1940s. Caray and Street were competing with such established St. Louis announcers as France Laux and Johnny O’Hara as well as colorful former pitcher Dizzy Dean. Between the enthusiasm of Caray and the analysis and expertise of Street, the duo built a following in the St. Louis area. As the Cardinals won the National League pennant in 1946, Caray and Street gained increasing recognition and popularity from St. Louis fans. Caray’s only regret about the 1946 season was that he did not get the opportunity to broadcast the World Series, which the Cardinals won in seven games.

In 1947 Cardinals president Sam Breadon granted exclusive broadcast rights to Griesedieck Brothers. This meant that Caray and Street would be the only broadcasters for all of the Cardinals’ home and road games. The Cardinals radio network was baseball’s largest network, with 54 affiliate stations in 1948. The network included 91 stations by 1954, introducing listeners in states like Oklahoma and Mississippi to Caray’s play-by-play descriptions. By 1954 Caray had survived changes in Cardinals ownership (August A. Busch, Jr. bought the team in 1953) and a change in broadcast sponsors (from Griesedieck to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery.) Caray and Street worked together until the former catcher died in 1951. Caray’s later broadcast partners in St. Louis included Joe Garagiola and Jack Buck.

Caray’s style was viewed by many as controversial. He said in 1977, “You can’t be controversial by design because it comes off as phony. It has to be spontaneous. I’m like a fan. If I see something on the field I don’t like, I react the way a fan does. If I think a player isn’t hustling I’ll say so. If I think a manager is making mistakes platooning I’ll say so. When I was with the Cardinals I was always in the hot box with managers like Eddie Stanky and Eddie Dyer. I’ve always said the managers and owners don’t like me, but the people love me.”7 Stan Musial said of Caray years later, “He said it like it was. I guess some of the ballplayers were perturbed, but he was a fan. … He didn’t mean anything by it. A little later he’d be rooting for you. He wanted the ballplayers to do well.”8

One of the highlights of Caray’s broadcasting career came on October 3, 1951, in a game that did not involve the Cardinals. Harry shared a booth with Russ Hodges (separated by a curtain) for a special broadcast back to St. Louis of the National League playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Caray was one of many announcers at the microphone as Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run to win the pennant for the Giants. Another exciting moment came in May 1958 as Harry broadcast the play-by-play when Stan Musial got his 3,000th hit. A rather memorable moment occurred on April 17, 1964, as Caray excitedly announced a surprise second-inning double by pitcher Roger Craig by saying, “I can’t believe it! Roger Craig just hit the left-center field fence! The Cardinals are going to win this pennant!”9 Caray made this statement during the fourth game of the season. His enthusiastic call turned out to be prophetic as the Cardinals (who were never in first place until the final week of that season) would clinch their first pennant in 18 years. Harry broadcast the World Series over NBC radio and TV as the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games. Caray also had NBC network announcing duties as the Cardinals went to the World Series in 1967 and 1968, and he also broadcast the All-Star Game in 1957 (on NBC radio).

When not broadcasting, Caray enjoyed partying and mingling with fans at local taverns. He said in 1996, “Everywhere I’d go, if I didn’t know anybody at the bar I’d make a friend out of the bartender in two minutes. If there were two people at the bar, I’d say, ‘Give the house a drink, and be sure to lock the front door so nobody else gets in.’ ”10 Spending so much time on the road with the Cardinals and celebrating with fans afterwards took a toll on Caray’s personal life. In 1949 Dorothy Caray, his wife of 12 years, divorced him. Their 10-year-old son, Skip, remembered being devastated as he learned of the divorce when he saw it headlined on the front page of a newspaper as he walked to school. After the divorce Skip, his brother, Christopher, and his sister Patricia would see even less of their father as he kept up the grueling travel schedule of a professional sportscaster.

Caray’s career and his life nearly came to an end on November 3, 1968. “I was walking across the street leaving a St. Louis hotel at 1:15 in the morning when I was hit by a car,” he said in 1970. “The driver was a 21-year-old veteran just back that morning from Vietnam. He had no driver’s license … no insurance. The car knocked me 35 feet in the air. I suffered two broken legs, a broken shoulder and a broken nose. They said I would be in the hospital for seven months. But I wound up walking out after 3½ months. I never missed a game.”11

Caray recovered and returned for his 25th season with the Cardinals in 1969. It turned out to be his last in St. Louis as he was fired at the end of the season. Rumors circulated that Caray was involved in an affair with Susan Busch, wife of August Busch III. Caray himself would never deny the rumors, commenting that it was good for his ego for people to believe such a thing to be true. He wasn’t unemployed long. In 1970 he was hired to broadcast the games of the Oakland Athletics.

“I’ve criticized the Cards and got into hot situations with the management, and I’ll tell the truth about the club here, too,” Harry said as he introduced himself to Oakland in 1970. “The biggest thing I must have as an announcer is believability.”12 Harry didn’t change anything about his broadcasting style in Oakland. (Athletics owner Charlie Finley tried to persuade Caray to change his trademark expression from “Holy cow” to “Holy mule” in honor of the team mascot but Harry rejected the suggestion.)13 By now married to his second wife, Marian, Harry claimed to enjoy his time in Oakland but refused to move there. “St. Louis is still my home,” he said in June of that year. “I have a nice home in Ladue, a suburb, and I didn’t want to give it up. And Marian and I didn’t want to take our daughters, Michelle and Elizabeth, out of school.”14 Missing the Midwest, after one year Harry left Oakland for Chicago.

Replacing legendary broadcaster Bob Elson, Caray became the voice of the White Sox in 1971. The White Sox under owner John Allyn were experiencing difficult financial times. Unable to offer Caray a salary as high as the one he earned in Oakland, the White Sox offered an attendance clause in Harry’s salary. Knowing that Caray had a reputation for promoting the game and drawing fans, the White Sox offered Caray a $10,000 bonus for every 100,000 spectators the Sox drew over 600,000. (More than 800,000 fans came to see the White Sox play that year.) Beginning in 1973, Caray added television to his duties, providing play-by-play on WSNS-TV for the first and last three innings and switching to radio play-by-play for the middle three. By the mid-1970s, all of the White Sox home games and most of the road games were televised and Harry was becoming one of the most popular figures in Chicago.

Caray loved Chicago and as he had in other cities, he tried to provide fun for the fans. He would occasionally take a cooler of beer to the outfield bleachers at White Sox Park (passing bottles of beer to the fans) and broadcast the game from there. He continued to mingle with the fans in area taverns celebrating into the early-morning hours after the games. He soon became known as “the Mayor of Rush Street.” As much as he cheered on the White Sox when they did well, he remained unafraid to criticize them when he felt it was warranted. His criticisms often put him at odds with players like third baseman Bill Melton and manager Chuck Tanner. By the end of the 1975 season, owner John Allyn had heard enough of Caray’s criticisms and was going to fire him. However, in December 1975 a group of investors led by Bill Veeck bought the team. Veeck, knowing the popularity Caray had with the fans, kept him on.

It was because of Veeck that another one of Caray’s trademarks began. One night Veeck noticed Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the booth during the seventh-inning stretch. Inspired, the next night, Veeck secretly installed a public-address microphone in the booth and turned it on when Caray began singing the song. Caray was surprised to hear his voice singing over the public-address system. He recalled in 1996, “When the game was over I walked up to Veeck and said, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ He said, ‘Harry, I’ve been looking for 45 years for the right man to do this, sing this song.’ I began to puff up with flattery. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘everybody, no matter where they were sitting, as soon as they heard you, they knew they could sing better than you, so they’d join in.’ ”15 Thus began the tradition of Caray leading the fans in an off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.

After working with a series of partners in Chicago, Caray was teamed primarily with former center fielder Jimmy Piersall beginning in 1977. Piersall was even more outspoken in his commentary than Caray. Caray loved working with Piersall. Though they often said things on the air that angered players or management, the White Sox broadcasts became more popular than ever with the public. By 1981 the team was sold to a group led by Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn.

By late 1981 Reinsdorf and Einhorn were planning on putting the White Sox telecasts on a subscription-only pay TV channel. Caray felt strongly that asking the White Sox fans to pay a subscription to watch the televised games would not work. Caray, who already had reservations about working for Reinsdorf and Einhorn, contacted the Chicago Cubs and asked if they would be interested in hiring him to replace retiring TV announcer Jack Brickhouse. They were. In November 1981 it was announced that Harry Caray would be the new voice of the Cubs.

With Caray working the first and last three innings on television (and the middle three on radio), the games were telecast on superstation WGN, which was seen in 30 million homes by the late 1980s. Caray became even more of a celebrity than he had been when broadcasting on a large radio network with the Cardinals. Caray made the jump from the South Side to the North Side of Chicago seamlessly. At the time of his crosstown move, Caray quipped, “Moving to the Cubs and day baseball shouldn’t be too hard. I hear the bars on Rush Street are going to start closing at 2 A.M. soon anyway. It’s those 4 A.M. and 5 A.M. nights that give you a headache.”16 At Wrigley Field, he continued the tradition of occasionally broadcasting games from the outfield bleachers and he led the fans in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

On February 17, 1987, Caray suffered a stroke while playing cards with friends in Palm Springs, California. It was uncertain whether he would work again. Well-wishes were sent by fans all over the United States. “I couldn’t move my leg, I couldn’t move my arm, I couldn’t control my speech,” Caray said. “And then I got boxes of mail, expressions of love in letters and flowers from people I didn’t know, and it breathed a little more hope into me.”17 He worked with a therapist to improve his speech so that he could return to the broadcasts. Caray wasn’t able to be back with the team by Opening Day, so the Cubs used a series of guest broadcasters in his place, including sportscaster Brent Musburger, columnist George Will, and comedian Bill Murray. On May 19, 1987, Caray made his return to Wrigley Field. During the game he received an on-air phone call from President Ronald Reagan welcoming him back to the booth. (It wouldn’t be the last time Caray received greetings from the White House. Reagan visited him in the Wrigley Field booth on September 30, 1988, and broadcast part of the game. In 1994 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton joined Harry in leading the singing during the seventh-inning stretch.)

Caray broadcast for some exciting teams in Chicago, as the Cubs won the National League East title in 1984 and 1989. However exciting the game might be on the field, though, Caray made sure to have fun in his broadcasts as well. Partner Steve Stone recalled how when Caray thought the game was moving too slowly, he would pronounce players’ names backwards. He would also mispronounce the names of players, sometimes on purpose. On Caray’s broadcasts, Rafael Palmeiro became “Palermo.” Delino DeShields became “Delino DeSanders.”18 Five years after the stroke Harry admitted, “I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I mispronounce a lot of names, I know. I’ll never be able to say the name of the Cubs’ catcher (Hector Villanueva). I say Valenzuela. I say Villanova. But people should understand that I’ve never been able to pronounce names correctly—even when I was younger.”19

Toward the end of his life, Harry reflected, “If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have missed my kids’ growing up. I missed a lot, and I have regrets. But I think I’ve made up for that now and I have a wonderful family.”20 By the early 1990s, that family included three generations of Carays broadcasting baseball. His son Skip worked to establish his own name in the business and became the voice of the Atlanta Braves in 1976. Skip’s son Chip Caray would begin broadcasting the games of the NBA Orlando Magic in 1989 and would join his father in the Braves booth two years later. On May 13, 1991, Harry, Skip, and Chip Caray were together at the microphone as the Braves and Cubs played at Wrigley Field. Both Skip and Chip were present during another proud moment in 1989 as Harry received the Ford Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Another of Harry’s grandsons, Josh Caray, has worked as a minor-league baseball broadcaster.

During a road trip in Miami in June 1994, Harry collapsed and was hospitalized. Doctors discovered that he had an irregular heartbeat. He returned to broadcasting the games a month later, but cut back greatly on his travel schedule. Doctors ordered Harry to restrict his alcohol consumption as well. “I’m reduced to drinking O’Doul’s,” Caray said. “Can you imagine Harry Caray unable to drink a martini? Without a cold Budweiser? It’s not me.”21 By now twice divorced, Harry had found a lasting partnership with his third wife, Dutchie. After his stroke, Harry insisted that Dutchie accompany him on road trips. As the years went on, Dutchie’s presence on the road became more important to him. “I don’t want to die alone in a hotel room like my friend Don Drysdale did,” Harry said.22

Shortly before the 1998 season, Harry’s grandson Chip was hired to announce the Cubs games with him. Harry was excited at the prospect of working with his grandson. Sadly, it was not to be. On Valentine’s Day 1998, Harry collapsed while having dinner with Dutchie at a Rancho Mirage, California, restaurant. He never regained consciousness and died four days later of cardiac arrest with resultant brain damage. Harry’s Funeral Mass was held at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. He was buried at All Saints Cemetery in suburban Chicago.

On Opening Day 1998, Dutchie Caray led the Wrigley faithful in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” It’s a tradition that still continues on the North Side of Chicago with “guest conductors” filling Harry’s place as leader of the seventh-inning stretch. After Harry’s death, a statue of him was dedicated outside the entrance of Wrigley Field. In 2010 the statue was moved to the outfield bleacher entrance. Cubs owner Tom Ricketts explained the move saying, “As a real fan, he was always comfortable in the bleachers. He liked the atmosphere in the bleachers.”23 Harry probably would have agreed. He himself said in 1975, “I don’t mind being known as a fan. Listen, baseball is part of Americana and no one is going to supplant it. And no other sport can match it. … I’m a fan, a fan’s announcer.”24

This biography is included in the book “Drama and Pride in the Gateway City: The 1964 St. Louis Cardinals” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by John Harry Stahl and Bill Nowlin. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Publications

Harry Caray and Bob Verdi. Holy Cow (New York: Berkley Books, 1989)

Russ Hodges and Al Hirshberg. My Giants (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963)

Pat Hughes and Bruce Miles. Harry Caray: Voice of the Fans (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2008)

Ray Poindexter. Golden Throats and Silver Tongues: The Radio Announcers (Conway, Arkansas: River Road Press, 1978)

Tony Silvia. Fathers and Sons in Baseball Broadcasting; The Carays, Brennamans, Bucks and Kalases (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2009)

Curt Smith. Voices of Summer (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005)

Steve Stone and Barry Rozner. Where’s Harry? Steve Stone Remembers His Years with Harry Caray. (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1999)

Stew Thornley. Holy Cow! The Life and Times of Halsey Hall (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1991)

Articles

“Air Lanes.” The Sporting News, October 6, 1954.

Mark Alesia. “‘He was the life of baseball’; Friends remember Caray’s colorful life on, off microphone.” Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Illinois, February 19, 1998.

Associated Press. “Caray ignores critics; plays to his doting fans.” Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Illinois, July 17, 1979.

Associated Press. “Harry back in booth; Cubs win.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Star, July 23, 1994.

Associated Press. “Cards Snub Dean, Browns in New Broadcast Policy.” Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier, January 12, 1947.

Associated Press. “Harry Caray suffers stroke.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Star, February 20, 1987.

Associated Press. “Sportscaster Must Pay $575 Monthly Alimony.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Republic, November 11, 1949.

“Back Home at KXOK.” The Sporting News, January 13, 1944.

Ira Berkow. “All is right at Wrigley again.” New York Times, May 20, 1987.

Edgar G. Brands. “Two Stations To Air St. Louis Tilts; Gabby Street to Return, Dean Out as Play Gabber.” The Sporting News, March 22, 1945.

“Caray Makes Ticker Talk Sound Like Park Aircast.” The Sporting News, July 30, 1947.

“City health records divulge the secret of Harry Caray’s age.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 19, 1998.

Jack Craig. “SporTView.” The Sporting News, May 15, 1971.

Pat Cunningham. “ ‘Classless bunch deserves to lose.’ ” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Star, September 18, 1981.

Bob Dolgan. Column. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 7, 1977.

Nancy Gay. “Holy Cow! A conversation with legendary broadcaster Harry Caray.” San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 1996.

Glennon, Ed. “First Lady returns to Friendly Confines.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Star, April 5, 1994.

Todd Jones. “Despite limelight Caray remains a mystery; Baseball voice an institution among fans in Chicago.” Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 29, 1994.

Dick Kaegel. “‘Holy Cow!’ the Voice of Caray Has a Tight Grip on Cards Fans.” The Sporting News, July 2, 1966.

Jerry Langdon. “ ‘Fan’ Carey (sic) is radio’s Cosell.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Republic, July 29, 1975.

Ed Levitt. “Harry Caray Nets New Job as Voice of Athletics.” The Sporting News, February 7, 1970.

Bob Logan. “Caray’s epitaph: ‘You can’t beat fun at the old ballpark.’ ” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), February 19, 1998.

Dave Luecking. “Harry Caray: 1914-1998.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 19, 1998.

Bruce Miles. “Caray statue moved to bleacher entrance.” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), September 2, 2010.

Edgar Munzel. “White Sox Sign Caray As New Radio Voice.” The Sporting News, January 23, 1971.

Jeff Nordlund. “Caray moves into house that Jack built.” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), November 17, 1981.

Jim O’Donnell. “Addition of Brock greases skids for Piersall.” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), June 21, 1981.

Jim O’Donnell. “Caray’s doctor maintains positive approach.” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), February 26, 1987.

“People…in sports.” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Star, November 23, 1972.

Rocky Mountain News Wire Service. “Services to be held for Caray in Calif., Chicago.” Rocky Mountain News, Denver, February 20, 1998.

Barry Rozner. “Caray talks freely about his age, his life.” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), February 16, 1998.

Jim Scott. “Oakland Is A-Okay, Claims a Contented Caray.” The Sporting News, June 27, 1970.

J.G. Taylor Spink. “Broadcasting Awards Won by Allen and Caray.” The Sporting News, October 6, 1948.

Tim Tucker. “ ‘… this is something I was born to do.’ –Josh Caray, Rome Braves announcer.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. May 5, 2007.

Marty York. “Baseball can be fun when you’re Carayed away.” Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 28, 1992.

Online

http://www.ancestry.com (marriage record of Daisy Argint and Sam Capuran).

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/deathcertificates/ (death record of Daisy Capuran).

Notes

Curt Gowdy was the Cowboy behind the mike. Ned Martin quoted Ted Williams and Eudora Welty. Ken Coleman meant the Jimmy Fund. Bob Starr had a gentle lummox William Bendix kind of charm. In evaluating the Red Sox during the mid-to late 20th century, all helped baseball bewitch. Ken Harrelson was the Red Sox’ Southern-fried television analyst. Jon Miller mimed Vin Scully in English, Spanish, and Japanese. Don Orsillo left his father’s farm for Fenway Park. Jerry Remy fled the Red Sox infield to “talk a good game,” said the Boston Globe. Dave O’Brien traded the Mets for the Sox and ESPN. All treated losing like Starr’s partner after an Olde Towne Team loss. “Joe Castiglione is sitting here, looking like he’s been harpooned.” In New England the Red Sox are required study; thus, their Voices take defeat hard.

In 2015 Castiglione set a record for consecutive years broadcasting Red Sox radio and/or TV: 33 since 1983, topping Martin’s 32 (1961-92). On July 20, 2024, he received the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence – arguably sport’s most prestigious individual radio/TV honor.

Long ago Joe left a Hamden, Connecticut, youth to make Sox wireless his baseball leitmotif. “I’ve never met a man more comfortable in his own skin,” mused club president Larry Lucchino. Joe’s warmth is a reason why soldiers of Red Sox Nation in pink and red shirts, pants, and hats fill parks wherever the Townies play. “We travel well,” Joe describes their Diaspora, packing Camden Yards, Safeco Field, and Anaheim’s Big A. O’Brien adds: “There may be somewhere without Sox fans, but I haven’t found it.”

In 2010, Forbes magazine wrote, “[They] are so devoted they top our list of ‘America’s Best Sports Fans.’” Under extreme makeover, Castiglione evolved into everything Red Sox from a boyhood that was “all Yankees,” he said, there being little 1950s and early ’60s Sox interest west of the Naugatuck River. “Later, the area swung Boston’s way, but back then Mel Allen was the globe.” Once the Yankees’ radio/TV Voice hailed a taxi at night in Omaha, the driver not seeing who it was, and said, “Sheraton, please.” The cabbie swiveled his head, almost driving off the road. Variety termed Allen among “the world’s 25 most recognizable voices.”

Yogi Berra said, “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Emulating Mel, Joe called backyard fungos like the 1940-64 Yankees announcer, asked Santa for a beer glass to pour sponsor Ballantine Ale, and half a century later confessed that “Allen’s the reason I’m in broadcasting today.” A “great vocabulary and greater pipes” sustained rout and rain. “He’d weave stories, so tough to master, never caught short” on a two-strike tale. “A Gowdy was great on nuts, bolts, and action.” Mel was the nation’s ultimate celebrity sportscaster, a thespian, not technician, whose 1964 pinstriped firing stunned.

“Allen was almost bigger than the product. I wonder how he’d have handled the Yankees’ fall” – no 1965-75 pennants after 14 in the prior 16 years. “As it was, they lost their identity,” harder to accept than the banal 1950s and early ’60s Sox having none. At Colgate University, Joe aired football and basketball, was a campus disc jockey, and hitchhiked 23 miles each Sunday to a commercial outlet to “spin records and read news.” He called the best part of college “Cooperstown being down the road,” his priorities sure. In 1967 he interned at Yanks affiliate WDEW in Westfield, Massachusetts, for the first time visiting Fenway. “It knocked me out,” said Castig, seeing the light. No Evil Empire could match the Sox’ Impossible Dream.

Castiglione graduated in 1968, then, “hating it,” moonlighted as a part-time salesman before getting a master’s at Syracuse. To pay tuition and “bolster my résumé,” Joe also worked at NBC-TV’s local WSYR as voiceover, Hollywood Matinee fill-in, and The Today Show cut-in. In 1970, at Youngstown, Ohio, his “one-man band” played football, hoops, sports at 6 and 11 P.M., and “six radio shows a day for very little money.” He spent the next decade in Cleveland news and sports, covered the Edmund Fitzgerald’s 1976 sinking in Lake Superior, and aired another wreck, the 1979 Indians. In 1981, Joe called the Brewers’ split-season title, paraphrasing Russ Hodges: “The Brewers win the second half! The Brewers win the second half!” Cheeseheads still chant it among bowling, brats, and beer.

A year later Joe returned to Cleveland’s struggling The Sports Exchange, TV’s first regional network, headed by Ted Stepien. By January 1983, all staff but Castig had been canned. One day mikeman Casey Coleman, Ken’s son, sent Joe’s tape to Sox flagship WPLM, looking to replace Jon Miller. Brewers broadcast guru Bill Haig gave a thumbs-up: “especially good on word-pictures.” What wasn’t good was timing. Joe was scheduled to meet Monday with Stepien – “my assignment, to bring doughnuts.” Instead, he flew to Boston four days earlier to interview, meet WPLM head Jack Campbell, and visit Coleman pėre Friday night.

Next morning Campbell cautioned, “You’ve got the job, but don’t tell anybody. We’ll announce you Monday.” In Ohio, neither doughnuts nor Joe arrived; Stepien refused later to talk to him on the phone. The ex-college DJ – “Give me the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and my favorite, Motown Sounds” – found Ken caught between Bing Crosby and Patti Page. “Sort of like the Red Sox fan, likes things as they were.” On the field, 1983 sixth-place things were dismal. “People ask, ‘How do you sound excited working when your team is down 20 games?’” said Joe. “They don’t understand that no two games are the same. It’s like a lousy long-playing record. You look for a good song to play.”

Jim Rice‘s song played a league-high 39 homers and 126 runs batted in. Boston’s purest hitter post-Kid played another melody. Wade Boggs was superstitious, “eating chicken at all his meals,” said Marty Barrett, “and running sprints at the same time each night.” He was experimental, as girlfriend Margo Adams showed, and a Merlin at bat, taking the 1983 and 1985-88 AL titles (.361, .368, .357, .363, and .366, respectively). The most abiding tune, “Yastrzemski Song,” by Hub radio/TV’s Jess Cain, to the melody of the Hallelujah Chorus, hailed a man who retired in 1983, running around the field in his final game, handshaking everywhere, and playing left field for the first time since cracking his ribs in 1980: “The love-in complete,” said Ned. To Peter Gammons, it “passionately explain[ed] that he understood what makes the Olde Towne Team what it is.”

Yastrzemski played every inning in a Boston uniform. In 1981 George Steinbrenner and Ted Turner offered to pay him “three times what I could make here. But I didn’t want to leave,” Yaz said. “I liked it here. I liked … what the [Red Sox] are.” No. 8 ranked first lifetime in AL games (3,308) and third in total at-bats (11,998), major-league baseball games, and walks (1,845), sixth in total bases (5,539) in the league, and ninth in AL RBIs (1,844). At 43, he was also the oldest to play center field. “I saw the sign that read, ‘Say It Ain’t So, Yaz,’ and I wish it wasn’t,” he had said, thanking the Nation, ownership’s Jean and Tom Yawkey, and third-year manager Ralph Houk in his 1983 farewell. “I wish we could have been together for [all] 23 years, “cause I know we’d have won more pennants.”

None of this reassured Joe as a rookie – “part of Jack Campbell’s cost-cutting program,” he joked, living the whole season at Boston’s Susse Chalet, his family in Cleveland because it couldn’t sell the house. “Twenty-six dollars a night,” he said. “But the worst part was packing my trunk and taking it to the basement each time we went on a road trip so I wouldn’t be charged for the room while I was away.” Meanwhile, Hub print treated him, as Ring Lardner once wrote, like a side dish it declined to order. Why was Miller in Baltimore? Why wasn’t Martin on the wireless? The Boston Herald’s Jim Baker had Joe fired. “I got ripped a lot that first year,” said Castig, “and it hurt.”

By 2000 the Globe’s Bob Ryan wrote, “It’s time someone finally said it: Joe Castiglione is the official ‘Voice of the Boston Red Sox.’” Typically, Joe demurred. “It’s different today,” he said, “with the proliferation of media. There’s [cable], over-the-air TV, and radio – not like the good old days. To call one person that would be misleading.” In turn, Ryan cried tommyrot: “The No. 1 radio man will always be the essential link between a … team and its fans.” In New England “that voice belongs to Joe Castiglione.” Ryan conceded Joe’s “voice ripe for parody – comparatively thin and reedy and nasally.” Offsetting it were traits undervalued in 1983, including decency, credibility, precision – writer Jack Craig said that if a ground ball took three hops, Castiglione would say three, not two or four – and encyclopedic baseball knowledge.

“I’ve always been blessed with good recall,” he told Ryan. “But I have a system. I start a file card on every player. I still do them in longhand because it helps the recall process.” His freshman year, Joe recalled growing up and watching on New York Channel 11 the Mantle–Maris Yankees, managed by Ralph Houk, once decorated in the Battle of the Bulge, The Major’s pinstripes made the 1961-63 World Series. “You assumed the Yanks’d make it every year,” said Joe. In late 1983, the now-Sox skipper asked how he was.

“I don’t know, Ralph,” said Castiglione. “I’m not sure I’m coming back.” His boyhood manager then put an arm around the rookie. “Everybody’s happy,” Houk said. “You’re doing a hell of a job.” At that moment, Joe likely mourned being too young to have served the Major at Bastogne.

The 1984-85 Red Sox finished fourth and fifth, respectively. John McNamara, a baseball lifer, succeeded the retired Houk as manager. March 1986’s Sport magazine wrote, “The Red Sox are the most boring team in baseball.” On April 29 they hosted Seattle on a “chilly, misty night,” said Joe, “the kind of game that brings out only the diehards – and the announcers.” In 1984 Roger Clemens went 9-4; in 1985, had shoulder surgery; in 1986, needed a van to move his hardware. “This night the basketball Celtics played a playoff set at Boston Garden – a big game,” said Martin. “So our [WSBK] TV audience was limited, and so was the crowd” – 13,414.

Before the game, Castiglione had a premonition. “I knew Roger was on his game that night, because batters usually hit a lot of fouls off him.” That evening, the Mariners mostly swung and missed. “Something’s going to happen,” Joe said. What did: “the most memorable game of the most memorable season of my life.” (He spoke before 2004.) Clemens had 12 K’s by the fifth inning. Word filtered to the Garden, which began emptying: The Rocket was on a roll. Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, and Tom Seaver held the bigs’ nine-inning mark of 19 strikeouts. Roger K’d the last two batters in the seventh inning, the side in the eighth, and the first two in the ninth – 19 total. After the final man fanned, TV’s Martin spoke as if still on radio: “And here they come up at Fenway! A new record! Clemens has set a major-league record for strikeouts in a game! Twenty! What a performance by the kid from the University of Texas!” Joe gulped, “One after another – and I felt a thrill like I’ve never known in baseball.” Clemens added: “The strikeouts just came on coming.” He finished 24-4, had a league-low 2.48 ERA, and won the Cy Young and MVP.

“We weren’t a powerful club, not a lot of homers, but fate seemed to like us,” said Joe, ironically, as fate later showed. One ninth inning Boston trailed Texas, 1-0, as Barrett and Steve Lyons each slid into second base – “me from one direction,” Lyons said, “Marty the other.” Outfielder George Wright’s throw took a wrong turn into the Rangers’ dugout. Both scored: Sox win. Another day, down, 2-1, in the 12th, Don Baylor popped between home plate and third base to ex-Townie Rick Burleson, “of all people,” laughed Castiglione, “playing for the Angels at the end of his career.” The Rooster’s dropped pop and a balk helped Boston win, but masked a flaw. On CBS Radio’s “Home Town Inning,” Joe called Dave Henderson the fastest Sox runner. Analyst Sparky Anderson was amazed: “If you think that guy’s fast, that shows how slow your team is.”

Despite being station-to-station, the Red Sox rallied from a 3-1 game deficit to win the LCS. Then, 13 times they needed only one pitch in the 10th inning of Game Six to take the World Series against the Mets. Michael Dukakis had just finished a gubernatorial debate with his GOP foe “when I saw the ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs.” Waiting to interview the imminent champion Sox in their clubhouse, Joe heard a clubhouse security agent turn on his radio. Finding the score tied, Castig raced for the booth, reached the runway, and heard a roar. “I never saw the play, but my heart sank. I knew it was over.” In 2001, former US Senator George Mitchell, hoping that life “lasts long enough to see the Red Sox win a World Series,” said that 1986 still made him ask: Was he dreaming, “kidding himself once more?”

In California, a Bostonian called by The Wall Street Journal “America’s greatest thinker on crime, punishment, and historical order” had been at a meeting “at the worst possible time.” Adjourning, James Q. Wilson raced to his Los Angeles hotel. “No longer would Red Sox fans have to bear the crushing hex put on them by the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, a sale that seemed to end forever any chance of the Sox owning the baseball world.” In his room, the Harvard professor watched “the most famous, agonizing, gut-wrenching [10th] inning of baseball that I ever watched.” One more out – and “the Sox would own the world. I would be ecstatic, emotionally young forever.”

Meantime, Bob Stanley and Mookie Wilson staged an extraordinary battle. Even after the Boston reliever’s seventh pitch was wild, scoring the tying run, “all was [still] not lost. If Mookie were put away, the Sox could score again in the 11th. One more strike and Red Sox fans could breathe.” James Q. Wilson picked up the telephone, dialed the area code of his home and first six digits of his number, and readied to press the last digit on Mookie’s out: “My wife and I could celebrate at least staying alive.” Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle. “My youth was over. I was now, at least for baseball, an old man. The Curse lived on.” Back east, a friend asked if he knew that Buckner, so depressed at missing the ground ball, had leapt in front of a speeding bus. “Oh, no,” Wilson said. “Not to worry,” the friend replied. “It went between his legs.”

Half a million graced a Sox post-Game Seven parade through Boston. “For me it took away some sting,” said Castiglione. “Not for McNamara.” Entering skip’s office to say goodbye, Joe found Mac disconsolate. “Why me, why me?” John said. “I go to church, have my whole life. I don’t understand why this had to happen.” Neither did Wilson, ultimately teaching at Boston College near children and grandchildren. Said The Wiser but Sadder Man prior to his death in 2013: “They have a legal obligation to be within 30 minutes of Fenway Park.”

American dramatist and humorist George Ade said, “The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.” It took a long time to unpack 1986’s baggage. In 1987, Joel Krakow of the Newton, Massachusetts, Captain Video Store knew where to put the 1986 Series highlight film: the horror/science fiction section. That fall McNamara sat in the dugout before the last regular-season game: “You know, I sit here thinking and I still can’t believe we lost the [Series] sixth game. … There’s a part of me that just doesn’t believe it: one f – ing out. That’s all we needed was one f – ing out.”

Retiring, Reggie Jackson batted a last time in 1987 in Boston. Sherm Feller, 69, had been Sox P.A. announcer since 1967, mixing beloved understatement and exacting prose. Each game began, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park.” Feller’s drip-drop cadence kept it simple – “Number 23, Luis Tiant. Pitching, Tiant” – due to calling a game without his dentures. On Jackson’s adieu, Feller, who died in 1994, said memorably: “Number 44, Mr. October.” Reggie’s pending absence was not Boston’s sole change. In 1988, Margo Adams, a former mortgage broker, filed a $6 million suit for breach of oral contract against Boggs, charging that he reneged on repaying her for time and wages lost traveling with him on the road. The media went kablooey. On TV’s Donahue, Margo described the married Wade crashing teammates’ rooms and shooting compromising photos of them with other women – maneuvers aka “Delta Force.” No force could save the skipper, radio talk crying “Knife the Mac!”

Mrs. Yawkey convened a meeting, Mac leaving July 14 – Bastille Day – with his head, if not job. Coach Joe Morgan – Castiglione’s best friend, Walpole native, and Massachusetts Turnpike worker – became “interim manager.” One Joe loved the other’s line: “Interim is not in my vocabulary. I am the manager until they tell me otherwise.” Morgan Magic began with a 12-game win streak and AL record 24 straight wins at home. Rice and Dwight Evans had defied Mac. This skipper didn’t cower. When Morgan inserted a pinch-hitter to bunt, Rice yanked him into the dugout runway. Joe traded shoves, emulating Studs Terkel: “I’m the manager of this nine.” Margo’s squeeze hit .366. Clemens’ eight shutouts were Boston’s most since Ruth. The Townies hailed Oakland’s LCS sweep by uncorking a bender on their flight home. On Hub TV, Rocket mourned having to carry his luggage and how “there are … things that are a disadvantage to a family here.” To Castig, the Sox were making the Bronx Zoo look like Mayberry.

Joe thought Morgan “the most colorful-ever” Sox skipper” – the “original Honest Abe.” By 1989, Boston platooned catchers: lefty-swinging Rich Gedman, “a great guy,” and righty Rick Cerone, “not a great guy.” One night Chicago started righty Shawn Hillegas. After the pre-game show, Joe said, “Maybe I should have asked this on air, but why is Cerone, not Gedman, catching?” Morgan said: “Hillegas is left-handed. Therefore, Cerone’s going to catch.” Castiglione shook his head. “Hillegas is right-handed” “Oh, gees, I screwed up,” said Morgan, not saying gees. “What am I going to tell Gedman?” Joe went to find him and confess. Naturally, Cerone homered to win the game, and Castig mused, “Should I give the background, or not? No, Joe’s my friend. What good would it do to say, ‘Here’s why Cerone’s playing’? I let it go, we’ll see what happens.” Since Morgan played the racetrack, writers asked, “Did you have a hunch, like a horse, playing Cerone?” Joe said, “No, I screwed up. I thought Hillegas was a lefty. That’s why Cerone played, and why I apologized to Gedman.” On second thought, said Castig, “Maybe Morgan is George Washington, who never told a lie.”

By turn, Adams posed nude in Penthouse magazine. Boggs confessed he was addicted to sex, Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd called him “a sex fiend,” and in Tampa a bomb threat forced a change in planes. Around the league, fans chanted “Mar-go!” GM Lou Gorman, trying to trade Wade, whiffed. “You’d think the law of averages would even out – that they would win one,” said the club’s greatest second baseman, Bobby Doerr. You’d think. In August, the Sox added Yaz’s retired number 8 on the right-field façade to Williams’ No. 9 and Joe Cronin’s 4 (from 1984) and Doerr’s No. 1 (1988). The list scrawled half-taunt and half-lament: 9-4-1-8, the month of the last Red Sox world title. Seeking less to forget than redeem himself, Bill Buckner made the 1990 Sox: cheered Opening Day, but retired by June. The year ended aptly: Boston won its third AL East title in five years, lost LCS Games One-Three, then imploded. Clemens argued a call, shoved one umpire, and threatened another. Players scuffled, reliever Larry Andersen leaving the pen to restrain Rocket’s rage. Oakland swept. A Herald cartoon drew Clemens as a baby on the mound, a bottle in one hand, shouting “Bleep!”

“Some Okie I am,” Sooner-born and ex-Angels Voice Bob Starr said, succeeding Coleman on 1990 Sox radio. Joe recalled “his wearing plaid dotted shirts, loving golf, and Ken-like vintage music.” Three years later Starr returned to Anaheim, dying in 1998 from a lifetime of chain smoking. He missed 1995: New flagship WEEI aired the LCS first “wild card” preamble – best-of-five Division Series (DS). 1996: Boston fired a Kennedy – skipper Kevin – unthinkable by ballot. In a designated hitter’s league, Rocket singled “up the middle,” said Joe. “Can you believe it?” – a phrase to use again. Jimy Williams became manager, speaking “Jimy-wocky”: e.g., “If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its booty.” 1998: Slugger Mo Vaughn, arrested for drunk driving, braved a withdrawn Sox contract and mandatory psychological test for alcoholism. Acquitted, he felt insulted. “You can’t ignore the human equation,” said Joe of Mo’s exit. GM Dan Duquette, staff explained, was not a people person.

In 1998 Montreal’s Pedro Martinez joined the Sox, proceeding to throw a 1-0 complete game – “First at Fenway in a decade!” chorused Joe. 1999: Before Fenway Park’s first All-Star Game since 1961, Ted Williams rode a golf cart through a hole in the center-field bleachers down the warning track, along the boxes, around the plate, and toward the mound, All-Stars circling The Kid. The crowd went over the moon. “Do you ever smell the wood burn?” Ted asked Mark McGwire of bat on ball. Rafael Palmeiro refused to leave: “That’s the chance of a lifetime.” MVP Martinez K’d five of his first six batters. The sport had seldom seemed more certain of its place. Boston rallied against Cleveland to win the Division Series, three games to two, the final 12-8 “on the best pitcher in baseball’s … six no-hit innings in relief coming off an injury,” Joe said of Pedro.

In 2000 Ned Martin entered the Red Sox Hall of Fame, whose room shook on his introduction. The ovation stunned him, bringing tears. In 2002 Teddy Ballgame, 83, died of cardiac arrest. That July 22, Ned attended the Ted Williams Tribute at Fenway Park – his first trip back since a 1992 firing. “He’d had a bad back and knee and hip replacement, but wouldn’t miss it,” said son Roley. “He just enjoyed the whole night, especially the videos at the end, the Field of Dreams song, [and] ‘Taps.’” Martin, Yaz, and Gammons reminisced in an on-field ceremony. Ned saw longtime employees, inevitably treating them like royalty, and spoke to Remy, Pesky, Gowdy, and Coleman, who said, “He had a style all his own. He loved the game, and the history of the game.”

Castiglione called next morning by cell phone, finding Martin, 78, “very chipper.” Ned flew to Raleigh-Durham Airport, caught a shuttle bus, and had a massive heart attack. The Sox were playing when news of his death reached Fenway. Red-eyed, Remy reported it on the New England Sports Network (NESN), later saying, “I think what made it tougher is that I’d just seen him the day before.” A moment of silence and a video screen goodbye preceded the next game. “Those who always feel the ‘good old days’ were better than the present might … this time … be right,” wrote the Globe’s Bill Griffith. Said daughter Caroline: “[Papa’s] love was his family [wife Barbara, of 51 years, three children, and nine grandchildren], and his dogs and cat, Emily, and the country.” Mercy! Martin was the cat’s meow.

Ned would have nodded as USA Today called Fenway Park “a cathedral,” daily filled pew by pew. Even on the road the Red Sox were SRO. Baltimore’s color scheme skewed red. Castig met a man who had seen every Boston game in Kansas City since it got the A’s in 1955. In Anaheim, the Nation filled seats of many leaving after the seventh inning to miss traffic. “We’re the home team,” Joe laughed, “for at least half of our games away.”

In 1914 British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey lamented World War I: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” New England’s lamps went on in late 2001, when new ownership bought the franchise. That December 20, the Yawkey Trust accepted an estimated $660 million offer, plus $40 million in assumed debt, for Fenway Park, the Red Sox, and 80 percent of NESN from a group led by former Orioles head Larry Lucchino, Hollywood producer Tom Werner, hedge-fund manager John Henry, and other partners. The sale saved Fenway, though that was not then clear. Within a decade the Red Sox became baseball’s model franchise, selling out a big-league record 820 straight games.

Boston won a wild-card spot in 1998-99 and 2003, but again dropped the Division Series or League Championship Series. Defeat obscured Sox building blocks. Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield seven times won 10 or more games starting and relieving, his ERA and record as good as 2.81 and 17-8, respectively. Jason Varitek became the regular catcher, three-time All-Star, and “our rock,” said Joe. Another block arrived in 2001 already having driven in 165 runs in a year – baseball’s most since Jimmie Foxx. Manny being Manny in later years meant loafing, faking injury, and huffing “Boston doesn’t deserve me” – teammates, sick of him, agreed. Then, Manny Ramirez meant awesome strength, plate discipline, and hand-eye skill. He could spray the ball, pull 400 feet with one hand, and hit best when it counted most: e.g., a record 29 postseason homers. In 2004 Manny hit 44 doubles; in 2005, he parked 45 dingers; in 2006, Ramirez batted .321. His real au revoir was 2007’s LCS, with nine walks and 10 RBIs.

Four straight years Johnny Damon topped the Red Sox in steals. Boston had two 20-win pitchers for the first time since 1949: Derek Lowe 21-8, Pedro 20-4. In 2003 David Ortiz, a 6-foot-4, 230-pound Dominican who greeted people as “bro” or “papi” – hence, Big Papi – left Minnesota for the Fens. The worst of his next five years combined .288, 31 homers, and 101 RBIs. The 2003 Sox hit a franchise-record 238 homers, scored a second-best-to-1950 961 runs, beat Oakland in a five-game Division Series, then went forth to the LCS – the usual rival, with the usual result. “I’ll never forget Martinez jabbing a finger into the side of his head,” said Castiglione of Game Three at Fenway. “Some [like Yankees coach Don Zimmer] thought it meant a beanball coming.”

Next inning Manny protested a high strike call. As benches cleared, Zim charged Pedro, who, confused by role reversal, threw the ex-Sox manager, 72, to the ground. On air, Sox radio’s Jerry Trupiano did a double-take: “Nobody does this, beating up a guy: This can’t be happening.” Castiglione took a longer view: “Look at Zimmer, Clemens, changing teams: in one fight, the Red Sox-Yankees intersection.” New York’s 4-3 decision ended with reliever Jeff Nelson and a groundskeeper scuffling in the bullpen. Down 6-4 and in games, 3 to 2, Boston rallied to tie the series, 9-6, Trot Nixon homering in the ninth. “His second of the game!” Joe ooh-ahed. “What a game!” You ain’t seen nothing’ yet.

The final threatened to cast the Curse in perpetuity. Pedro led, 4-0, then 5-2. In his book, Now I Can Die in Peace, Bill Simmons claims that general manager Theo Epstein and ownership told second-year skipper Grady Little to yank Martinez when he a) threw 100 pitches or b) finished the seventh inning, whichever came first. In the eighth, Pedro yielded another run, had two men on, and looked up to see his skipper. “Let me stay in,” said Martinez. “No, out,” Little said. “I feel good. I can get through it,” Pedro replied, the Sox pen kaput. “OK,” Little said, guessing wrong. Two hits tied the score at 5-5. “Here we go again!” Castiglione chorused. Few remember Nixon’s, Ortiz’s, Kevin Millar’s, or Jason Giambi’s two homers: only Aaron Boone, past midnight at The Stadium, arcing Wakefield’s 11th-inning pitch. “Swing, a long drive to left field! Down the line! Deep toward the corner! If it’s fair, it’s gone! And it is – gone!” said Joe. “A home run! The New York Yankees have won the pennant!” The Pinstripes’ Charley Steiner bellowed, “And the Yankees are going to the World Series for the 39th time in their remarkable history!” Sox history was remarkable, too, if you could look past the pain.

Regard postseason as a TV cliffhanger – “cliff-dweller,” Mets manager Wes Westrum malapropped – like Dallas’s “Who Shot J.R.?” Ought-three’s seguéd to 2004 like two veins from a common mine. Terry Francona replaced Little as manager. Curt Schilling led the AL in victories (21-6), second in ERA (3.26), and third in innings (226⅔); he and Pedro the first Sox teammates with 200 K’s in a year. “We need guys who save runs,” said Epstein, trading Nomar Garciaparra for first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz and shortstop Orlando Cabrera. Papi and Manny meant runs: first post-1931 AL mates to tie .300, 30 homers, and 100 RBIs.

By then, Castiglione taught broadcast journalism at Northeastern and Franklin Pierce Universities, was Jimmy Fund charity-club liaison, and grasped retired Jesuit priest Boston College historian John Day terming radio an apostolate to the shut-in, disabled, and elderly. “That showed me I was freeloading for life,” he said, writing 2004’s Broadcast Rites and Sites, advice for the road. It was not required reading. The October of its release is. Boston swept the Division Series from the Halos. Schilling lost the LCS opener – the Yanks again – 10-7. Next night Pedro pitched, having said, “They beat me. I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” The Bronx crowd unloosed a Bronx cheer: “Who’s Your Daddy?” – Stripes, 3-1. A change of scenery further unhosed the Sox, 19-8, Joe thinking, “The ’04 Red Sox are better than this” – just not good enough to pivot a 0-3 game deficit, since no postseason team had.

What happened next helped redeem the past 86 years. Game Four took 5 hours and 2 minutes and had “the single most important steal in Red Sox history,” said Castiglione, conceding little competition. In the ninth inning, up, 4-3, reliever Mariano Rivera walked Millar, thrice threw to first base, then tossed outside as the pinch-runner tried to steal. “Here is the throw! Roberts dives, and he is safe!” said Joe. “Stolen base, Dave Roberts the hand tag. [Derek] Jeter took the throw. It was close – very close at second.” Bill Mueller then singled to tie the score. In the 12th, Papi channeled the right-field seats, 6-4. A night later Ortiz’s 14th-inning bloop gave the Sox another win, 5-4. “And a little flare, center field!” Trupiano crowed. “Here comes Johnny Damon with the winning run!”

The Townies’ history flaunts tales in which the Red Sox have been rich. 1941, Williams’ .406 average; 1948, Lou Boudreau, clubbing journeyman Denny Galehouse in the first AL playoff; 1960, The Kid’s Final Swing; 1975, Carlton Fisk’s Game Six sock hop; 1978, Jim Woods’ crying of Bucky Dent, “Suddenly the whole thing is turned around”; 1986, Vin Scully’s “gets through Buckner” call. Few top the Bloody Sock. Doctors had vainly tried to stabilize Schilling’s ankle tendon, which kept popping out of place. Before Game Six, team doctor Bill Morgan’s new procedure – “three sutures forming a wall to keep it intact” – helped Curt pitch seven innings, his stirrup soaked in blood. In the eighth, up, 4-2, Boston’s Bronson Arroyo got tying run Alex Rodriguez to dribble near the mound, tagged him near the line, then had A-Rod dislodge the ball: “It rolls down the right-field line!” said Joe. “Jeter hits third, and he’s going to score! A-Rod at second! He should have been out!” It seemed “a mental ‘Not another Red Sox tragic moment!’”

Instead, umpire-in-chief Joe West called Rodriguez out for obstruction, leading bad apples to throw debris, Boston to leave the field, and Big Apple police to wear riot gear. That night, the series tied, Castig previewed his LCS-ending call – “Before, why would I? The Yankees had history on their side.” Joe found that Boston’s last “significant victory” over them had been in 1904 – “then-Highlander Jack Chesbro’s wild pitch scoring Boston’s pennant-clinching run” – one hundred years earlier! Since then, the Stripes had won every crucial set. Next night Ortiz “hammered a [first-inning] drive deep to right field!” said Joe. “And this ball is gone!” – 2-0. Next inning Damon lined “back toward the corner! [Gary] Sheffield looking up! Grand slam!” He later went deep again. An 8-1 lead gave Joe more time to think. “My call had to mention this unparalleled comeback, and how it beat the Yankees.”

Boston’s heart of darkness was not so easily assuaged. In suburban Brookline, ex-presidential nominee Michael Dukakis turned to wife Kitty and said, “You know, we could still lose.” At almost the same time, he later learned, Lucchino turned to Werner at The Stadium and said, “You know, we could still lose.” At 12:01 A.M. October 21, pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra grounded to second base. “Pokey Reese has it!” whooped Castiglione. “He throws to first! And the Red Sox have won the American League pennant [10-3]! Their greatest victory in team history! In the 104 years of the Boston Red Sox, this is the most important of them all” – beating “their archrival. Move over, Babe, the Red Sox are American League champions!” Later, Joe termed his view fact, not opinion, “for without that victory what happened next doesn’t happen.”

Like the 1963 Dodgers, 1966 Orioles, and 1989 Athletics, the 2004 Red Sox never trailed in the World Series. Still, Joe mocked the thought of letdown, since “beating the Yankees would have meant less if the Sox had lost the Classic” – another what-if. Instead, the Series versus St. Louis scripted what John Henry called “the biggest story in New England since the Revolutionary War.” Not wishing to contradict, Castiglione mused, “I think he understates.” Unlike the LCS, Boston’s 3-0 game edge let Joe anticipate Game Four’s finish. This presumed a Series-ending victory, Boston leading, 3-0, in the fifth inning. That morning Castig decided the script must write itself: “I just hoped the final out would be definitive, no checked swing, did he or didn’t he trap the ball?” In the seventh inning, he went to a restroom to change, expecting a postgame bath.

By the ninth, Trupiano was in the clubhouse, Joe alone, so focused “I wouldn’t have heard a firecracker go off under me.” Reliever Keith Foulke got Scott Rolen to fly out and Jim Edmonds to fan, Busch Stadium oozing Red Sox caps and shirts, non-ticket-holders admitted late by gracious ballpark brass. A lunar eclipse hung above the yard – a World Series first. Light bulbs resembled a phalanx of fireflies. Before now, Joe said, his greatest call “hasn’t happened yet.” It did Wednesday, October 27, at 10:40 P.M. Central Time. “Swing [by Edgar Renteria] and a ground ball, stabbed by Foulke! He has it! He underhands to first! And the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship for the first time in 86 years! The Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship! Can you believe it?” The question was rhetorical.

“The Boston Red Sox have forever put that 1918 chant to rest as this band of characters who showed great character all season have won the world championship for New England!” said Castiglione, who recited, “And there’s pandemonium on the field!” – Martin’s 1967 encomium – and Bart Giamatti’s essay Green Fields of the Mind: Baseball “breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart,” except that now it sounded, as Fitzgerald wrote, “like a tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.” In 1975 a then-record 124 million people viewed all or part of the Red Sox-Reds World Series. Game Six of the 1986 Mets-Sox fall classic wooed 81 million, still baseball’s most-watched-ever match. In our cable-fractured age, the 2004 Townies lured the highest Series TV audience since 1996. The Boston Globe swelled its daily press run from 500,000 to 1.2 million, selling out.

The Saturday after the Series, a rolling rally of 17 amphibious vehicles began at Fenway, turned onto Boylston Street, then Tremont Street and Storrow Drive, before entering the Charles River. It passed under the Harvard Bridge, a mass above and upon each bank – Boston’s largest-ever event drawing three million of the devoted and crazed. Offseason the Red Sox took the Commissioner’s World Series trophy to the far outposts of New England and beyond, Castiglione’s signet now “Can you believe it?” In New Haven, Lucchino, the Yale Law alum, asked Joe to repeat it, rapture all around. By phone, mail, in person, and by Internet, the Nation hailed, as fife and drum had at Yorktown, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The getting that was good got even better as the Sox also won the 2007, 2013, and 2018 Series. Such a makeover is hard to find.

On Opening Day 2005 in the Fens – Sox 8, Yanks 1 – Castiglione got a World Series ring, each Townie’s presented by soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Watching was Joe’s son Duke: a New York Fox 5 sports anchor and Sports Extra and WWOR Yankees postgame host. Formerly, Duke had been WHDH Hub anchor, ESPN SportsCenter and Around the Horn guest host, and Sunday Night Baseball, World Baseball Classic, and WCBS New York reporter. (Joe’s and wife Jean’s other children were son Tom and daughter Kate.) The ’05ers looked to Wakefield: Sox-best in wins, ERA, innings, complete games, and strikeouts. A year later, Schilling got his 200th victory and 3,000th K. “Unbelievable control,” said Joe, “could be a prima donna, but ice cold under pressure.” An old cigarette ad puffed, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Schilling would walk that long for a camera.

Boston won the 2005 wild card, losing the Division Series to Chicago. In the offseason the team obtained Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell. Reliever Jonathan Papelbon had a 0.92 ERA in 2006. That September a Papi home run broke Jimmie Foxx’s 1938 franchise-high 50. “There’s a fly ball! Right-center field deep! Back by the bullpen!” said Joe. “And David Ortiz has set a Red Sox record,” leading in homers (54) and RBIs (137). The Sox finished third, their worst standing since 1997. In 2007, they swept the Division Series against California, edged Cleveland in a taut seven-game LCS, and swept Colorado in the Series. To Joe, 2004 was “for dead relatives and friends who hadn’t lived to see a title,” many putting balls and caps and pennants on a gravesite, including his brother-in-law on Joe’s late dad’s. Signs at the rolling rally cited a college mate, Uncle Fred, “You won for my grandma” – catharsis. Ought-seven hailed success. “We were baseball’s best team,” said Castig, not certain in 2004. Beckett’s 20-7 record topped the AL. Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka – aka “Dice-K” – finished 15-12. Lowell led in RBIs (120), played a Fort Knox third base, and was a model citizen: to Castiglione, “maybe the most popular Red Sox since Yaz.”

Papi had a fifth straight season of at least 31 homers (35) and 101 RBIs (117) or more. Dustin Pedroia (.317) had a dirty uniform by batting practice. The Sox stole 96 bases in 120 tries. Jacoby Ellsbury, 23, stole nine in 33 games while hitting .353,

The Series was as one-sided as 2004’s. Boston’s .333 Series average, trailing only 1960 New York’s record .338. In Game Four, the team’s best fireman since Dick Radatz faced Seth Smith in the ninth. “Got him!” Joe said of Papelbon. “The Boston Red Sox become the first team in the [new] century to win two world championships!” Lucchino reminded you, “We won. They lost,” the rivalry still going yard. Another duck boat ride through downtown ensued. One feature was Ellsbury, who’d quickly become a teen heartthrob. “Some signs at our rolling rally proposed marriage [to him],” said Joe. Others would once have made mama wash out her daughter’s mouth with soap.

Joe would win the Dick Young Award for excellence, enter the Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame, air New England College and Northeastern hoops, and have part of Franklin Pierce University’s ballpark named in his honor. The New Englander knew that objectivity was in a listener’s ears. “We don’t openly root, but we pull, for the Sox.” The history major knew how they “are a historical team in a region filled with history.” Joe realized, as one-time baseball broadcaster Ronald Reagan said, that if a person hears 15 facts and one story “told well, it’s the story he recalls.” Daily, people met in Castig’s “office” – Fenway Park – an usher, groundskeeper, vacationer from Canada; a “peanut vendor and a sausage guy across the street.” Inside, “fans never see the passageways and shortcuts”: grounds equipment behind the Monster, door behind the scoreboard, staircase leading to an interview room, batting cage, or pen. Joe felt Fenway ideal for hide-and-seek – as mysterious as Stephen King and unpredictable as Poe.

Personae helped fill baseball’s dead air. In a three-hour game, the ball may be in play eight minutes. In 1960, another Joe, Garagiola, wrote the seminal Baseball Is a Funny Game. Boston’s Joe especially liked to call “gotcha” on himself. One night in 2007 Dave O’Brien addressed how Castig was no techie: retexting past messages, making an accidental 3 A.M. phone call, and a song about Joe somehow appearing on his iPod next to Marvin Gaye’s. He liked high-definition TV – assuming he could turn it on. “I could really use a permanent Geek Squad,” Joe confessed. “You need a personal assistant,” Dave agreed. “That’s going to be my Christmas gift for you. A full-time PA.” Castiglione: “I’ll take it.” After a commercial break, O’Brien praised his partner’s “good-naturedness” about being technically challenged. Joe replied, “I know my limitations.” No high-tech could save an especially slow game. “So we’ve played two really quick innings here,” said Castig. Dave: “Yeah, moving right along.” Joe: “You were clean shaven when this game began.”

In 2011, Castig covered Epstein’s “Dream Team” that by September 2 had leapfrogged the American League East, nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays. Boston then braved an epochal 7-20 year-end collapse: a fold even worse than 1978’s 3-14 September apocalypse. The Townies blew a last regular-season playoff spot, then finished last in the next year’s 2012 train wreck. Worst to first: Stunningly, the poor-on-paper 2013ers won the franchise’s third World Series in a decade. First to worst: The 2014 Sox went down the up staircase, placing last. In 2019, the year after their most recent title, they began another period of malaise on the diamond.

In 2015, the franchise feted Joe’s record 33rd straight season on the air, passing the beloved Martin. Daily Sox co-flagships WEEI and WEEI FM “made sure,” said Castig, “you can get us anywhere on the dial.” Their eight-state radio network boasted 65 outlets, including 15 in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and 13 in Maine: also Vermont (9), Connecticut (5), Rhode Island (1), and New York (6). The Empire State presence numbered three in the author’s home city of Rochester – Red Sox Nation’s westernmost fort save Wyoming’s one affiliate. The network is among baseball’s largest in states and outlets. Fittingly, in 2022, the team named Fenway’s radio booth in Joe’s honor.

From time to time some wonder why the Townies so matter. Tell them to visit New England in the summer before the wind turns harsh and the trees turn bare and a day matches night’s jaw-dropping chill. Read the Boston Globe and Herald. At a diner, hear Sox TV mikemen trade baseball patter. On a beach, listen to the wireless, as ubiquitous as body oil. Have a clergyman ask, “How about those Sawx?” Thanks largely to Joe Castiglione, you will understand what the religion of the Red Sox means.

Throughout, two constants have animated baseball’s unaverage Joe. The first is the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox official charity to fight childhood cancer. Patients at its clinic are often visited by Castiglione and Boston players. Without a second constant, the Sox would not be the Sox – Fenway itself. No one described a ball hit toward left field’s Green Wall like Castig, “never knowing if it might scrape the paint coming down.” Want a drive to carry? “Pray the wind blows out,” he said. Want a fielder disrobed? “Hit to the Triangle.” Hope a bouncer over first becomes an inside-the-parker? “You’ve found the right place.”

To Joe, The Wall’s “nooks and crannies” – Fenway’s “eccentric angularities,” said Bart Giamatti – seemed especially magical when the Sox returned from the road in Sinatra’s “wee small hours of the morning.” It was empty as Castig “looked out on the field,” he said, making the yard “almost mystical. Imagine a fabled ballpark to yourself. You walk alone up a gangway, view the field lit only by the clock, see lights on Ted Williams Way, and watch Fenway just before dawn – well, it’s breathtaking.”  

In late 2024, Castiglione retired as Boston’s lead Voice, saddening its vast audience, most of whom have never met him, yet deem Joe part of an extended family: honest, an encyclopedia of baseball lore, and unerringly precise. Should the need arise, Castig may even call some Sox games next year, showing how baseball play-by-play prizes conversation, evoking wearability and easy listening.

Through good years and bad, writes David J. Halberstam, Joe Castiglione has “wafted softly through New England summers, a steady soundtrack on the radio. No nicknames, no hype and no gloom.” He became the region’s personality of the pastime in the flesh, reaching the pinnacle at Cooperstown in his last full big-league season. “Can you believe it?” You bet.

Author’s Note

This biography was originally published in The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six (SABR, 2016). It has been updated at various points since then, most recently in November 2024.

Acknowledgments and Sources

I am indebted to several sources for the radio play-by-play and analysis contained herein: WEEI Radio executive sports producer Jon Albanese; noted major-league archivist John Miley; and Tom Shaer, former WITS Boston wireless reporter, now head, Tom Shaer Media in Chicago.

Virtually all other material, including quotes, is derived from my books:

America’s Dizzy Dean (St. Louis: The Bethany Press, 1978)

Voices of The Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio & Television Broadcasting – From 1921 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)

The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas: Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (New York: Macmillan,1995)

Of Mikes and Men: From Ray Scott to Curt Gowdy: Broadcast Tales from the Pro Football Booth (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1998)

Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary, 1999)

Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005)

The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2007)

A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011) 

Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012)

The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House (University of Nebraska Press, updated version, 2024)

Tom Cheek was the voice of baseball and the narrator of summer for Blue Jays fans throughout Canada and beyond for almost three decades. Starting with the team’s first regular-season game on April 7, 1977, he shared the game with fans from February through October. He shared some of his favorite baseball moments and told stories about the people he knew and met. He shared his raw emotion when something good or bad happened during a game. He shared all that he knew about the game he loved so much. He shared it until a brain tumor made it impossible for him to continue in 2004. And then the sharing was gone.

When Cheek’s voice disappeared from the airwaves, it shook the very foundations of Blue Jays nation. Club President Paul Godfrey said as much in 2005: “When Tom suddenly stopped, it was like the whole organization stopped. That’s how much he means to the club.”1 It was as if a close friend had been taken away very suddenly, never to be heard from again. “I can’t tell you anyone who more epitomizes the heart and soul of the Toronto Blue Jays than Tom Cheek,” said Godfrey. “His voice has touched millions of fans over the years.”2

Thomas Fred Cheek was born on June 13, 1939, in Pensacola, Florida. His father, also named Tom, served as a World War II fighter pilot in the Battle of Midway in 1942. Following in his father’s footsteps, Cheek himself joined the military and served in the US Air Force from 1957 to 1960. While he was in the service he met broadcaster Red Barber.3 He met his future wife, Shirley, a native of Hemmingford, Quebec, while stationed in Plattsburgh, New York. They married in 1959 and soon had three children, Lisa, Jeffrey, and Tom.

Cheek knew from a young age that he wanted to be in broadcasting. After his discharge he went to school at SUNY Plattsburgh and then the Cambridge School of Broadcasting in Boston. He began his career in broadcasting as a disc jockey in Plattsburgh. His next job was in Burlington, Vermont, where he worked as a corporate sales manager and as sports director for a group of three radio stations including WBMT, which carried Montreal Expos baseball. He also called University of Vermont sports and was almost hired to take over as the full-time play-by-play announcer for the expansion Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association.4

While in Burlington, Cheek found occasional work as a fill-in broadcaster for the Expos, Cheek said in an 1985 interview that broadcasting games for the Expos put him on the path to become the future Toronto Blue Jays radio play-by-play announcer. He made the 99-mile trip to broadcast games usually on Wednesdays in 1974 through 1976.5 His work with the Expos did not go unnoticed. According to John Lott, “His work convinced Len Bramson, a Toronto broadcast executive who was developing a coast-to-coast radio network for the expansion Blue Jays, to make Cheek the lead man in the radio booth.”6

The expansion Toronto Blue Jays announced in December 1976 that Tom Cheek would become the play-by-play announcer for the new club. Hewpex Sports Enterprises announced that the radio broadcast borders for the new club would cover a 14-city area across the province of Ontario with the possibility of adding more stations before the club began spring training for its first season. The network would extend to “Kingston in the East to Sarnia in the West, in Tiger Territory, and Timmins in the North,”7 With a 14-city network in place, and a radio announcer ready to go, all that was left for Tom Cheek to fulfill a lifelong dream was call his first game with his new club.

On a snowy April 7, 1977, with the temperature right around freezing, Bill Singer threw out the first pitch for the expansion Blue Jays against the Chicago White Sox at Exhibition Stadium. Upward of 44,649 fans including a young Wayne Gretzky, packed the ballpark to see Toronto’s first major-league baseball game. Trailing 2-0 in the first inning, Doug Ault hit the first home run in franchise history, which started the team’s comeback that day. The Blue Jays rallied and won, 9-5. Cheek said the win that day ranked as his top Blue Jays memory.8 There would not be much more for Cheek to cheer for the rest of the season or for a few years to come. The Blue Jays finished their inaugural season with a 54-107 record, 45½ games behind the New York Yankees. For the first six years of its existence, the team did not have a winning record. That started to change in the mid-1980s.

Fans tuning in to hear Cheek’s baritone voice over the years also heard the voices of his radio partners. From 1977 through 1980 former major-league pitcher Early Wynn called games alongside Cheek. Jerry Howarth replaced Wynn in 1981.

Cheek and Howarth constituted the play-by-play tandem of Blue Jays baseball for over two decades. The partnership covered the evolution of the franchise from an American League East bottom feeder to its rise to prominence starting in the 1980s, and then to its rise to the top of the baseball world with back-to-back World Series titles in 1992 and 1993. The duo stayed together for the duration of Cheek’s career.9

From the start, Cheek remained a constant in the radio booth, never missing a game until 2004. The Blue Jays’ fortunes started to turn in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, and they won their first division title in 1985. A year before his death, Cheek recalled how he felt when that happened: “When George Bell dropped to his knees on the turf at Exhibition Stadium in 1985 as the Blue Jays won their first division title, I started thinking about all the guys who’d contributed over the years to get them there – and I choked up,” said Cheek. “You could hear the catch in my throat. I promised I’d never do anything like that again.”10

The Blue Jays were not yet in a position to go far in the playoffs. They lost the American League Championship Series to the Royals in 1985, the Athletics in 1989, and the Twins in 1991. They finally captured the pennant in 1992, becoming Canada’s first team to make it to the World Series. Members of the press seemed to be relieved by the club’s first pennant. “The next step for the Blue Jays, who have been carrying enough guilt for an entire country because of their three previous playoff failures, is the World Series, in which they will take on the Atlanta Braves beginning Saturday in Atlanta.”11

The Blue Jays beat the Atlanta Braves in six games to become the first team outside of the United States to win the championship. The Series was noteworthy when it came to Cheek and the broadcast. During Game Two of the series, the US Marine Corps accidentally displayed the Canadian flag upside down during the national anthem. This outraged Blue Jays fans but did not seem to bother pinch-hitter Ed Sprague, who hit a game-winning home run off Jeff Reardon, at the time baseball’s saves leader. The round-tripper was the first pinch-hit home run for the Blue Jays all season. And probably more prophetic than odd, before Sprague hit the home run, Cheek commented on the air, “Watch him hit a homer.”12

In Game Six, Cheek and Howarth went outside their normal broadcasting rotation once the Blue Jays took the lead in the top of the 11th inning. Normally, Cheek would call the first two innings of a game then turn the play-by-play over to Howarth for the next two innings and they would continue this pattern for the remainder of a game. Howarth called the top of the 11th as usual but after the mid-inning commercial break, Howarth turned the broadcasting call over to Cheek for the bottom of the inning. Howarth, in a grand gesture, was hoping to have Cheek call the Jays’ first-ever World Series win.

With two outs in the 11th, Cheek made the call that gladdened Blue Jays fans: “Timlin to the belt. … Pitch on the way. … There’s a bunted ball, first-base side. … Timlin to Carter and the Blue Jays win it! The Blue Jays win it! The Blue Jays are World Series champions!” As fans across Canada began to celebrate, Cheek went on: “The Blue Jays have won the World Series so Canada, let it all out, it’s party time! It was a long time coming but it’s here.”13 Canadians across the nation celebrated alongside Cheek well into the night.14

The Blue Jays won the pennant again in 1993, and one of the most dramatic endings to a World Series occurred in Game Six. With Toronto leading three victories to two, the Philadelphia Phillies led 6-5 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. Phillies closer Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams was on the mound hoping to send the World Series to a decisive Game Seven. The Blue Jays’ Rickey Henderson started the inning with a walk. Devon White flied out to deep left field. Paul Molitor singled.

With two on and the count 2-and-2, Joe Carter cemented his legacy as a Blue Jays legend by driving Williams’s next pitch over the left-field wall to win the Series in a walk-off. Fans over the years have pointed to Cheek’s call of Carter’s home run as perhaps his best-known call.

Cheek reflected on the call at spring training camp in Florida in 2005. “I was looking for something to say, and Joe gave it to me because he was jumping up and down. I was merely mentioning to him through the airwaves that you’ve got to touch all the bases.” Those listening heard that call live with the type of raw emotion that often engulfs someone who has seen something almost magical. “Touch ’em all Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”15 It has become one of the most famous lines in baseball broadcasting history.

Over the seasons Cheek acquired a unique insider’s view of the club that very few in the organization had achieved. So he decided to share some of his knowledge about the team and in 1993 he and co-author Howard Berger released Road to Glory: Sixteen Years of Blue Jays Fever, which chronicled the first 16 years of Blue Jays baseball. Jim Proudfoot of the Toronto Star opined that “Cheek, who’s witnessed every inning the team has played, is perceived as the ultimate insider,” and added, “His viewpoint was bound to be uniquely revealing.”16 Cheek wrote of why Peter Bavasi abandoned the club presidency in 1981 and why Tony Fernandez, in Cheek’s view, abandoned the team in 1987. Baseball fans loved the book and made it a best-seller. Bookstores all across Canada had a hard time keeping the book on their shelves.17

After the dramatic World Series win in 1993, the Blue Jays began to slide. For the rest of Cheek’s time with the team, it didn’t finish any higher in the standings than third.

On Thursday, June 3, 2004, the Blue Jays lost to the Oakland Athletics, 2-1, in 11 innings but the game itself took a back seat to what happened in the Blue Jays radio booth that night. Cheek’s father, Tom Sr., had suffered a fatal heart attack the previous night and so Tom rushed home to be with his family. After 4,306 regular-season games and 41 postseason contests without missing a broadcast, Cheek was not in the booth that night. Howarth handled the game with color commentary for a few innings provided by injured Jays outfielder Frank Catalanotto.

Howarth took a moment to reflect on the now-broken broadcasting streak of his longtime partner. “Having sat here for 23 years, it’s incredible because of all of the factors that go into broadcasting a game,” Howarth said. “It’s a testament to his professionalism, to his commitment to fans. It takes a lot to keep a streak like that alive. There are several factors, like health, graduation, funerals, that can intrude.”18 Blue Jays President Paul Godfrey weighed in: “A feat of this magnitude does not occur without a great deal of sacrifice and perseverance from the Cheek family. Tom’s dedication and contributions to the Toronto Blue Jays organization are immeasurable.”19

Former major-league pitcher Tom Candiotti compared Cheek’s streak to that of another baseball ironman, Cal Ripken Jr. So did former Blue Jays general manager Pat Gillick, who said, “He was sort of like Cal Ripken, in that you knew he was going to show up every day, you knew he was going to be there with the same pride, the same dedication to excellence. You could always count on Tom to bring his very best every day.”20 Cheek accepted the kind words but would not accept the comparison of his streak with Ripken’s. “There will only ever be one streak in baseball,” Cheek said. “That would be the one that Cal Ripken put together. He was out on the field doing it every night while I was just up there watching.”21 Cheek returned to the booth soon after the funeral and tried to get back to doing what he loved. His return did not last long. Cheek soon found himself in the biggest battle for his own life.

Cheek felt ill a week after returning to the booth. Tests at a Toronto hospital indicated a brain tumor. On June 13, his 65th birthday, Cheek underwent surgery to remove the tumor. “Everyone at the Toronto Blue Jays wishes Tom a speedy recovery,” club President Paul Godfrey said. “Our thoughts are with the entire Cheek family, and we hope to see Tom back in the broadcast booth very soon.”22 And Cheek returned to broadcasting six weeks later despite chemotherapy treatments that impaired his short-term memory. On July 23, 2004, he called two innings of the Blue Jays game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.23 Cheek was able to return and broadcast home games on a limited basis while undergoing treatments, but he was replaced by guest announcers when the team was on the road. His popularity with the fans never wavered during his absence. Thousands sent him best wishes and wished the longtime broadcaster a speedy recovery.

The Blue Jays invited Cheek for an on-field presentation at SkyDome on August 29, 2004. Mike Wilner served as one of the replacements for Cheek as he recovered from surgery. Cheek and Wilner sat in the dugout looking out onto the field and talking before the ceremony. Cheek soon noticed that a portion of the 400 level was covered with a blue tarp. “It was amazing to see the look of recognition, and then of genuine embarrassment move across his face,” Wilner remembered. “He kept saying ‘You have GOT to be kidding me,’ because he honestly didn’t believe that just showing up to work every day deserved such major praise.”24

An emotional crowd of 44,072 was there to honor Cheek. The Blue Jays had played the Yankees that weekend and had not performed well so the team and its fans were eager to have something to cheer about. Cheek sat with his wife and watched as the Blue Jays removed the blue tarp to officially add him as the newest member of the team’s Level of Excellence.

Geoff Baker of the Toronto Star described the scene: “They sat through a video montage on the SkyDome’s JumboTron, one that replayed Cheek’s greatest calls, including Toronto’s first division title clinch in 1985, Dave Stieb’s no-hitter in 1990, and Joe Carter’s decisive home run in the 1993 World Series. Eyes throughout the stadium turned moist as photos from Cheek’s younger days flashed on the screen, accompanied by the strains of Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year.”25

Cheek made his way to the podium and addressed the crowd. After making a crack about the Yankees, he addressed his medical condition. “I’ve been fighting a situation now for over a month, almost two months now,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can to stay ahead of it. A brain tumor. We’re dealing with it.”26 Even Yankees radio announcer John Sterling had to take a moment to compose himself. Cheek, the consummate professional, went back to the Blue Jays radio booth after the ceremony to take his place and get ready for the game.

Tom’s wife, Shirley, told a reporter almost a decade later how that day changed his life. Cheek had told her that he had never imagined the connection he had forged with the fans and how important that connection was to them. “I never could really get the point until somebody said, and a lot of others followed, ‘Since I was a little kid, you’ve been giving the sound of summer.”27 It finally clicked for him. “He had so many people that would say he was the voice of summer,” she said. “‘I listen to you on the lake. I listen to you on the tractor out in Saskatoon, or, you know, wherever. But I think it really hit home when he saw that his name was going up on the wall and how much he had meant to the fans listening on radio.”28

Cheek wanted to bounce back and try to return to the booth for good in 2005. He was nominated for the National Baseball Hall of Fame Ford C. Frick Award for the first time before the 2005 season. He was honored to be nominated and even though he didn’t win it (San Diego Padres announcer Jerry Coleman did), he looked forward to getting back into the booth to call Blue Jays games in the coming season. “I can’t wait to get out here and get back on the field and get back in the booth,” he said.29

Early in spring training, Rogers Media announced that Cheek would be back in the booth for Opening Day with Jerry Howarth. But Cheek suffered a setback when in March an MRI revealed that the cancer had returned and another tumor had formed. Rogers Media canceled his return pending the results of his surgery. Cheek, determined to beat the odds and do his job, made one more appearance in the radio booth for the Blue Jays on Opening Day.

“The last time Cheek was in the booth was Opening Day 2005,” Mike Wilner wrote, “when he joined Howarth and Warren Sawkiw at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, close to his home in Oldsmar, and Jerry insisted he get on the mic and call a few pitches. Reluctantly he agreed, and took over as Orlando Hudson came to the plate in the top of the third. Hudson homered, and so did Vernon Wells behind him, and that was enough for Cheek.”30 Cheek’s career as a broadcaster essentially ended that day.

On October 14, 2005, with his wife; his three children, Jeff, Lisa, and Tom; and his seven grandchildren present, Cheek died at the age of 66 at his Florida home. “It’s difficult to put into words the overwhelming sense of grief and loss shared today by the Blue Jays family, the city of Toronto, the extended community of Major League Baseball and its many fans,” Blue Jays President Paul Godfrey said. “He was a great goodwill ambassador for baseball in Canada.”31

Cheek did not believe that he deserved a lot of praise for just showing up to work every day. He seemed genuinely embarrassed that the Blue Jays added him to their Level of Excellence in 2004. Despite his resistance, others sought to reward Cheek for his efforts in promoting baseball. The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame honored Cheek with the Jack Graney Award for his contributions to baseball in Canada in 2001. The Canadian Sports Hall of Fame established an annual Tom Cheek Media Leadership Award, with Cheek being honored with the first award in 2005. The award was established to recognize media members who help promote Canadian sports “in an extraordinary and enduring way.” A website was created that sold wristbands to help fund cancer research. The year after Cheek died, the Blue Jays wore a white circular badge with the letters “TC” and a microphone in black on their left sleeve.32 And in 2013 Cheek was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award and earned enshrinement into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Baseball over the radio serves as the preferred way of catching baseball games for countless numbers of baseball fans all over the world. Even though television broadcasts have long replaced the radio as the most used communication device for watching baseball, there are still many who will turn their television volume down and listen to their favorite radio announcer call the game. The best of the baseball radio talent through the years: Mel Allen, Vin Scully, Gene Elston, and Ernie Harwell have become the voice of baseball for many. “Tom Cheek was the voice of summer for generations of baseball fans in Canada and beyond,” said Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson in a press release announcing the Ford C. Frick Award for Cheek. “He helped a nation understand the elements of the game and swoon for the summer excitement that the expansion franchise brought a hockey-crazed nation starting in the late 1970s.”33

Tom Cheek “was more than just a broadcaster,” said Len Bramson, the one-time talent-hunting guru who lured him to Toronto from Vermont hoping he’d establish an identity for the newly awarded Jays franchise. “He was big, had the voice. He was cordial with everybody, he could talk to anybody. In front of a crowd, he was outstanding. He did it with no notes. He just loved to talk about baseball.”34 Baseball fans all over Canada and beyond loved to hear him talk about baseball.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 Shi Davidi, “Cheek Up for Honour,” Toronto Star, February 22, 2005: E06.

2 Davidi.

3 Tom Cheek, Road to Glory (Toronto: Warwick Publishing, 1993), 7-30.

4 Cheek, Road to Glory; Canadian Press, “Tom Cheek, Voice of Toronto Blue Jays, Dies.” http://www.americansportscastersonline.com/tomcheekmemoriam.html.

5 Home Town Cable Network, “Toronto Broadcaster Tom Cheek – 1985,” YouTube, October 3, 2016. https://youtu.be/htU0td0aavA.

6 John Lott, “Voice of Summer; Tom Cheek, Who Brought His ‘Folksy, Intimate’ Style to Jays Broadcasts For 27½ Years, Is Finally Headed to Cooperstown,” National Post, Toronto, December 6, 2012: B5.

7 Neil MacCarl, “Blue Jays Polish Skills in Winter Loops,” The Sporting News, December 18, 1976: 54.

8 Sam Jarden, “April 7, 1977: Blue Jays Play Their First Ever Game,” The Sporting News, April 7, 2020. https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/mlb/news/april-7-1977-toronto-blue-jays-play-their-first-ever-game/17if403ulmlq418soqp71hx20t. “Tom Cheek, Voice of Toronto Blue Jays, Dies.” http://www.americansportscastersonline.com/tomcheekmemoriam.html.

9 CatchTheTaste, “1991: Behind the Scenes with Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth,” YouTube, July 6, 2019. https://youtu.be/ILDzMImogvc.

10 “2013 Ford C. Frick Award Winner Tom Cheek,” National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/awards/frick/tom-cheek.

11 David Bush, “O, Canada! A’s Fall, 9-2, Blue Jays win A.L. pennant, finally reach their 1st World Series,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 1992: C1.

12 “Jays: Memories of ’92 and ’93 Series,” Toronto Star, August 11, 2018: S4.

13 Eye Flow, “Toronto Blue Jays World Series 1992 Tom Cheek,” YouTube, October 21, 2014. https://youtu.be/xODky9oDqMI.

14 Canadian Press and Herald Staff, “Blue Jays Fever: Canada Gets World Series,” Calgary Herald, October 15, 1992: A1.

15 Jeremy Sandler, “Blue Jays Broadcaster Misses Out on Hall of Fame Award,” National Post, February 23, 2005: B10.

16 Jim Proudfoot, “Cheek’s Book on Blue Jays a Treasure Hunt,” Toronto Star, July 6, 1993: D4.

17 Proudfoot.

18 Geoff Baker, “Sadly, Cheek Finally Misses a Jays Game,” Toronto Star, June 4, 2004: C04.

19 Geoff Baker, “Sadly, Cheek Finally Misses a Jays Game.”

20 Geoff Baker, “Tom Cheek: Ironman of the Airwaves,” Kitchener-Waterloo (Ontario) Record, October 11, 2005: D2.

21 Geoff Baker, “Blue Jays Honor Emotional Cheek,” Toronto Star, August 30, 2004: E07.

22 “Jays Announce Cheek Has Brain Tumor Removed,” Detroit Free Press, June 15, 2004: 8E.

23 “Touching All the Bases,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 24, 2004.

24 Mike Wilner, “Wilner on Jays: Remembering the Great Tom Cheek,” Sportsnet Canada, July 3, 2013, https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/wilner-on-jays-remembering-the-great-tom-cheek/.

25 Geoff Baker, “Blue Jays Honor Emotional Cheek.”

26 Geoff Baker, “Blue Jays Honor Emotional Cheek.”

27 John Lott, “Voice of Summer; Tom Cheek, Who Brought His ‘Folksy, Intimate’ Style to Jays Broadcasts For 27½ Years, Is Finally Headed to Cooperstown.”

28 Lott.

29 Jeremy Sandler, “Blue Jays Broadcaster Misses Out on Hall of Fame Award,” National Post, February 23, 2005: B10.

30 Mike Wilner, “Memories of Cheek, Who Touched So Many Lives,” Toronto Star, March 20, 2021: S1.

31 Associated Press, “Tom Cheek, 66; Announcer Called Blue Jay Games for 27½ Seasons,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2005, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-oct-11-me-cheek11-story.html; CBC Sports, “Tom Cheek, Longtime Voice of Blue Jays, Dead,” October 9, 2005, https://www.cbc.ca/sports/tom-cheek-longtime-voice-of-blue-jays-dead-1.528332.

32 “Voice of the Blue Jays Tom Cheek Dies,” Pittsburgh Tribune Review, October 9, 2005.

33 “Tom Cheek: Late Blue Jays Announcer Wins Top Hall of Fame honor,” Sherman Report, December 5, 2012. http://www.shermanreport.com/tom-cheek-late-blue-jays-announcer-wins-top-hall-fame-honor/.

34 Geoff Baker, “Tom Cheek: Ironman of the Airwaves,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

Altogether Coleman spent nearly five years in the Marines and sandwiched in a nine-year big-league career with the Yankees that was plagued by injuries around his service in Korea. When healthy he was a fine ballplayer, graceful and acrobatic at second base and a dangerous slash hitter.3 He was the Associated Press American League Rookie of the Year in 1949 but his best year was 1950, when he hit .287 and was named the MVP of the World Series.4 After retiring from his playing career at the age of 33, Coleman went on to become a Hall of Fame broadcaster, first for the Yankees and then for more than 40 years for the San Diego Padres.

Gerald Francis Coleman was born on September 14, 1924, in San Jose, California, the second of two children of the former Pearl Beaudoin and Gerald Griffin Coleman. His sister, Rosemarie, was born two years earlier. Although the children were born in San Jose, the family lived in San Francisco. Their father was a backup catcher in the Pacific Coast League for a couple of years and continued to play semipro baseball while working as a bank teller.5

But as Coleman related in his memoirs, his and his sister’s childhoods were anything but idyllic. Their father had a drinking problem and was verbally and physically abusive. Their mother left him when Jerry was about 8 years old, taking the children with her. Shortly thereafter, Jerry’s father shot his estranged wife three or four times as she came out of a dance. Pearl was seriously injured and was in the hospital for about nine months as her children went to live with relatives and her husband left town. Her husband was apparently never prosecuted, although the shooting made front-page news.6

Jerry and his sister were reunited with their mother when she finally got out of the hospital. Pearl had permanent injuries; her left elbow would not bend and for the rest of her life she had to wear a brace on her left leg to be able to walk. She was unable to work and with two children was forced to go on welfare. Meanwhile, Jerry’s father moved back to San Francisco after a couple of years. Pearl had divorced him in the interval, but he had gotten a steady job with the post office and so she actually remarried him so that he would provide for the family. Fortunately for Jerry and his sister, their father worked the 4 P.M.-to-midnight shift so they seldom saw him.7

As Jerry grew up he began to play a lot of sandlot baseball in Golden Gate Park. He was also a good basketball player and his athletic prowess got him admitted to the prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco.8 There he played basketball and baseball and as a senior made All-City in the former sport, setting a city single-game scoring record with 23 points against Commerce High on March 8, 1942.9 While in high school he began to play for the Keneally Yankees, the premier semipro baseball team in the Bay Area.10 There his teammates included future New York Yankees teammates Bobby Brown and Charlie Silvera as well as future major leaguers Bill Wight and Dino Restelli.11

During Coleman’s senior year in high school, the Brooklyn Dodgers offered him a $2,500 bonus to sign after a tryout camp, but Jerry’s mother wanted him to go to college, so he accepted a combined basketball/baseball scholarship to USC.12

December 7, 1941, right in the middle of Coleman’s senior year, changed all that. In March he heard a presentation at his high school about the Navy’s V-5 flight-training program from two naval aviators and immediately decided that he wanted to become a Navy fighter pilot. Although he graduated from high school in June 1942, he would not turn 18 until that September. Joe Devine, a Yankees scout who had followed him during his high-school years and who had recruited him to play for the Keneally Yankees, offered him $2,800 to sign with the Yankees organization and Coleman accepted since he was not yet old enough to enlist.

The Yankees assigned him to Wellsville, New York, of the Class D PONY (Pennsylvania, Ontario, New York) League, where two of his teammates were CharlieSilvera and Bob Cherry, both of whom had also been teammates in the San Francisco sandlots. Hampered initially by a cut finger from an uncovered fan, Coleman struck out his first six times at bat. Eventually he found his swing and batted .304 for the season in 83 games and 289 at-bats while shifting between shortstop and third base. A Wellsville groundskeeper worked with him before games to develop a hit-and-run stroke that he used his entire career. Although Coleman didn’t know who he was, he turned out to be Chief Bender, one of the greatest pitchers of the early twentieth century.13 

When the season ended Coleman returned to San Francisco and was accepted into the Navy’s V-5 flight training program. He was first assigned to train at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, where he first soloed. He subsequently trained at St. Mary’s University in California; Olathe, Kansas; and Corpus Christi, Texas, where he decided to become a Marine pilot. Coleman was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps on April 1, 1944.14 From there he was assigned to Jacksonville, Florida, where he learned to fly the SBD, also known as the Dauntless dive bomber. He wanted to fly dive bombers because they had the potential to sink aircraft carriers.15

After short stints in Cherry Point, North Carolina, and the Miramar Naval Air Station in California, Coleman was sent to Guadalcanal in a troopship on which he joined a squadron known as the Torrid Turtles.16 Guadalcanal was by then a staging area and Coleman flew raids from Green Island to the Solomon Islands. Later he transferred to the Philippines, where he flew raids to Luzon and other Japanese-held strongholds. While there he was able to play a little baseball and basketball during down times.

Coleman was sent back to San Francisco in July 1945 after flying 57 combat missions, because he was qualified to fly off aircraft carriers. After a leave, he was to be assigned to an aircraft carrier to prepare for the invasion of the Japanese mainland. But the Japanese surrendered in August, so Coleman was reassigned to Cherry Point, North Carolina, before his discharge in January 1946.17

After missing three seasons because of his war duty, Coleman, still only 21 years old, returned to professional baseball for the 1946 season. The Yankees promoted him to the Binghamton Triplets in the Eastern League where he played under the legendary Lefty Gomez. There he batted a solid .275 in 134 games and 487 at-bats, earning a brief late-season call-up to the Kansas City Blues in the American Association. Shortly after the season, Coleman married Louise Leighton, who had also graduated from Lowell High in San Francisco. The couple had two children, Diane and Jerry Jr., before divorcing in 1980.18

Coleman stuck with Kansas City in 1947 and batted .278 in over 500 plate appearances while playing shortstop and third base under manager Billy Meyer.19 That performance earned him an invitation to the Yankees’ 1948 spring training, where he was the last man cut by New York manager Bucky Harris.20 The Yankees sent him to the Newark Bears of the International League to learn how to play second base as a potential replacement for George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss on the parent club.21 He ended up playing a lot of shortstop and third base as well and saw his average slip to .251 in 562 plate appearances.

Even so, the Yankees called Coleman up for the last couple of weeks of the season, although he did not appear in a game. The time he spent on the bench proved beneficial, however, because he quickly figured out that as a 160-pound right-handed hitter, he was not going to be able to hit home runs in Yankee Stadium. Bill Skiff, his manager with Newark, had urged him to learn to bunt and to exercise better bat control. And with the Yankees Coleman noticed that his old semipro teammate Bobby Brown choked up on the bat and had much better bat control than he did, so he decided to follow suit.22

Coleman had forced himself to learn to smoke when he was overseas but Skiff told him that with his slight build, smoking was sapping his strength. Coleman related in his memoir that he quit immediately and never smoked another cigarette.23

He made the Yankees out of spring training in 1949 as a 24-year-old rookie, set to back up Stirnweiss at second base. When Stirnweiss got spiked on Opening Day, Coleman found himself starting at second and leading off the second day of the season in Yankee Stadium against the Washington Senators. The first ball hit to him went right between his legs for an error, but, after a popup, he started a double play when Buddy Lewis  hit a one-hopper to him. 24 Coleman grounded out to shortstop Sam Dente to first baseman Eddie Robinson in his first at-bat, leading off the bottom of the first against Paul Calvert, and went 0-for-4 on the day on four groundouts as the Yankees won 3-0. He got his first big-league hit leading off the next day, singling to left field off Forrest Thompson in another Yankees win.

With his first hit out of the way, Coleman went off on a hot streak and on April 26, his seventh game, had a 4-for-4 day against the Philadelphia Athletics, including his first major-league home run, off Alex Kellner, a two-run shot to left in the eighth inning that won the game for the Yankees, 5-4.25 That game increased his batting average to .417. Yankees coach Frankie Crosetti worked with Coleman on the hit-and-run, bunting, and bat control and he hovered around .300 for much of the season, although he was out at one stretch because of a sinus condition.26 Coleman finished his rookie season with a .275 batting average in 128 games and 523 plate appearances. He led American League second basemen in fielding percentage and teamed with shortstop Phil Rizzuto to quickly become the top keystone combo in the league.

The 1949 pennant race went down to the final game of the season with the Yankees and Red Sox tied for the league lead and playing at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees led 1-0 heading into the bottom of the eighth when Tommy Henrich’s leadoff home run off Mel Parnell made it 2-0. The Yankees then loaded the bases against Tex Hughson with two out, which brought Coleman to the plate. He fought off a high inside fastball and hit it on the trademark just beyond the reach of second baseman Bobby Doerr and hard-charging right fielder Al Zarilla inside the line for a bases-clearing double to make the score 5-0. The drama wasn’t over, however, as the Red Sox rallied for three runs before Vic Raschi was able to retire the side and secure the pennant.27

The Yankees went on to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series in five games, with Coleman playing all five and batting .250 with three doubles and four runs batted in. After the season he was named the American League Rookie of the Year by the Associated Press.

For many years Coleman was apologetic about his dying swan double28 against the Red Sox until he ran into former Yankees manager Joe McCarthy at a banquet. “You swung at it, didn’t you?” McCarthy said, meaning that he put the ball in play and didn’t strike out.29 Many years later, Coleman visited Ted Williams in the hospital in San Diego. Williams was recovering from a serious stroke and had trouble speaking. But the first thing he said when he saw Coleman enter his hospital room was, “That f—–g hit you got,” a very clear reference to Coleman’s bloop double some 40 years before.30

Coleman had his career year in the 1950 season that followed. He got off to another blazing start and was still batting above .290 when he was named to the American League All-Star team for the midsummer classic. For the season he played in all but one game and batted .287 with a career-high 69 RBIs. The Yankees won their second straight pennant and then swept the Philadelphia Phillies, known as the Whiz Kids because of their youth, in four straight low-scoring games in the World Series. Coleman continued his timely postseason hitting, driving in Bobby Brown with a fourth-inning fly ball for the only run of a Game One 1-0 Yankees victory. Coleman had three hits in Game Three, including a walk-off single to left-center off Russ Meyer that fell between Richie Ashburn and Jack Mayo and scored Gene Woodling with the winning run in a 3-2 win. For his efforts, Coleman was named  the MVP of the Series. The Yankees scored only 11 runs in the Series, but Coleman knocked in three of them, including two game-winners.

With the Korean Conflict going full tilt, Coleman knew that he was subject to recall by the Marines. After World War II, officers were not discharged but simply put on reserve or inactive status, meaning that they could be recalled to active duty. And Coleman realized that it was much more efficient for the military to recall trained fighter pilots than to train new ones.31

Uncle Sam did not call Coleman that winter and he was able to play the entire 1951 season, batting .249 in 121 games, as rookies Gil McDougald and Billy Martin pushed for playing time on the infield. The Yankees won their third consecutive pennant, by five games over the Cleveland Indians. During the World Series, won by the Yankees over the New York Giants in six games, Coleman shared second base with McDougald and went 2-for-8.

After the season, Coleman embarked on a two-month tour of US military bases in Europe that was organized by the commissioner’s office. He was joined by Stan Musial, Jim Konstanty, Frankie Frisch, Charlie Grimm, Elmer Valo, Steve O’Neill, Dizzy Trout, and two umpires. He knew his recall by the Marines was imminent, but he did manage to play the first two weeks of the 1952 season and appear on the Ed Sullivan Show before reporting for duty at the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in early May. In 11 games before his recall, he batted .405 in 47 plate appearances.32

Once he regained his flying skills at Los Alamitos, Coleman was transferred to the El Toro Marine Station, also in California, to learn to fly Corsair attack planes.33 He went into action in Korea in late January 1953. Over the next four months Coleman flew 63 combat missions, had two near-death experiences, and saw Max Harper, his tentmate and close friend, shot down and killed by antiaircraft fire right in front of him.34 The physical and emotional toll of those experiences was enough to get Coleman grounded and he finished his tour of duty performing intelligence work from the front of the DMZ.35 

Coleman was discharged in time to return to the Yankees by mid-September of 1953 as his team was on its way to its fifth consecutive pennant and world championship.36 Coleman made eight mostly token appearances and was not on the World Series roster.37 He was ready for spring training in 1954 but found that the pressure and fatigue he had experienced in Korea had affected his depth perception and thus his batting eye.38 Although still only 29 years old, Coleman struggled the entire season and batted only .217 in 107 games.

The 1955 season was even worse for Coleman, although he became the player representative for the Yankees in spring training. In the first week of the season, he was caught in a rundown between third base and home and tried to plow over Red Sox shortstop Owen Friend in front of the plate. Friend dodged and Coleman landed on his left shoulder instead, shattering it. Surgery would have meant missing the rest of the year, so Dr. Sidney Gaynor, the Yankees’ orthopedist, manipulated the bones back in place and put a large plaster cast over his left shoulder and arm to immobilize it.39

Coleman returned to action on July 19, but in his first game back was beaned in Comiskey Park by Harry Byrd, a White Sox reliever. Fortunately, Coleman was wearing a batting helmet, still not mandatory in 1955, but he still suffered a serious concussion that landed him in the hospital for two days and kept him out of the lineup for over a week.40 For the season, he appeared in only 43 games, mostly at shortstop and third base, and hit .229 in 112 plate appearances. The Yankees won the AL pennant and then lost the World Series in seven games to the Brooklyn Dodgers, their longtime rival. Coleman got into three games as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement, going 0-for-3 at the plate.

Almost immediately after the season, the Yankees embarked on a six-week tour of Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines, playing exhibition games against local competition. When they played a game in Hiroshima, they were among the first group of Americans to visit there since World War II.

Although Coleman had the reputation of being a very smart, heady ballplayer, he occasionally supplied some comic relief. His Yankees teammate Eddie Robinson remembered the first time southpaw pitcher Bill Wight started a game for the Baltimore Orioles against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium after being out of the American League for a while. Coleman had played with Wight in the sandlots in San Francisco and before the game went around telling his teammates that Wight had a great pickoff move. He said, “You’ve got to be very careful. If you just take your foot off the base, he’ll pick you off.” Coleman then got on first base in his first at-bat and Wight promptly picked him off.41

Coleman was among several interchangeable infielders in 1956 for manager Casey Stengel and shared time at second base, third base, and shortstop with Billy Martin, Gil McDougald, and Andy Carey after Phil Rizzuto was released. He batted .257 in 80 games and 203 plate appearances as the Yankees won their seventh American League pennant in eight years. They went on to reclaim the world championship in seven games against the Dodgers but Coleman played in only two of those.

The following year, 1957, would be Coleman’s last as a player. He appeared in 72 games, mostly in a utility role, and batted a solid .268 in 180 plate appearances. The Yankees comfortably won their eighth pennant in nine years by eight games over the Chicago White Sox. This time they faced the Milwaukee Braves in the World Series and lost in seven games as former Yankees farmhand Lew Burdette won three games and pitched two shutouts against his former organization. Coleman started all seven games at second base and batted .364 for the Series, the highest on the team. He singled against Burdette in the ninth inning of Game Seven, in what was the last at-bat of his career.

Coleman’s lifetime batting average for nine big-league seasons is .263 with a .340 on-base percentage. Although he hit only 16 home runs in his career, he struck out only 218 times in 2,415 plate appearances. Casey Stengel, never one to lavish praise, said of Coleman, “Best man I ever saw on a double play. Once I seen him make a throw while standing on his head. He just goes ‘Whish!’ and he’s got the feller at first.”42 He became so proficient at the double play that “it almost seemed the ball would ricochet in and out of his glove without actually touching it.” Overall, he played second base “with grace and style.”43

Although Coleman’s playing career was over at the age of 33, his baseball journey was just beginning. Even with his great World Series in 1957, Coleman understood that he was headed for a backup role to incoming second baseman Bobby Richardson and was afraid of being traded and having to uproot his family.44 Thus, when Yankees General Manager George Weiss offered him a job as director of player personnel, Coleman jumped at it. His responsibility was to work with the Yankees’ scouts and provide players for all the Yankees farm teams except their top team in Richmond, Virginia.45

Coleman aspired to eventually become the general manager of a big-league team, but his travel as personnel director had him away from home the majority of the time and was difficult because of his young family.46 In 1960 he left to go to work in promotions and marketing for the Van Heusen Shirt Company, a position he obtained at the behest of his friend Howard Cosell.47 He had been offered a broadcasting job with CBS Television by Bill MacPhail right after he retired as a player, but he turned it down because he had just taken the front-office job with the Yankees.48

But in 1960 MacPhail again offered Coleman the opportunity to get into broadcasting by conducting pregame interviews on CBS’s Game of the Week and doing occasional game broadcasts when Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese, the regular broadcasters, were not available. Since the CBS games were only on the weekends, he was able to keep his position with Van Heusen. He was completely ill-prepared for the job49 and recalled that his first pregame interview was with future Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst who saved him from disaster by talking nonstop for five minutes or so after Coleman asked, “How’s it going, Red?”50

Coleman’s inexperience also showed early on when he was interviewing Washington Senators manager Cookie Lavagetto during a pregame show. The National Anthem began and Coleman, unaided by his director, continued with the interview, thinking that perhaps the audience could not hear the anthem. Although CBS received a number of letters in protest, as Coleman recalled, “My military background saved me.”51

He must have improved rapidly because in 1963, after his third year with CBS, Ballantine Beer, which sponsored the Yankees telecasts, invited Coleman to join the Yankees broadcast team. He accepted, resigned from Van Heusen and CBS, and joined the Yankees for spring training in March. He was the newest member of the Yankees legendary broadcast team of Red Barber, Mel Allen, and Phil Rizzuto, his old keystone partner.52 The first season he broadcast only road games because Barber was not traveling and typically would broadcast half the home games on radio and half on television.53 Barber took Coleman under his wing and became a mentor, for example telling him not to guess on the air but to make sure what he said was “right.”54

Coleman broadcast the Yankees games for seven years and worked with Joe Garagiola after the team fired  Barber. During that period, in 1967 he traveled to Vietnam to visit troops with Joe DiMaggio, Pete Rose, and Tony Conigliaro.55 By 1970 his wife very much wanted to move back to the West Coast and Coleman hoped to get a job broadcasting for the expansion San Diego Padres. The team did not have an opening and so Coleman took a sports broadcasting job with KTLA-TV in Los Angeles.56 There he alternated doing the nightly sports news with Tom Harmon, the former Heisman Trophy winner at Michigan, who was also a decorated World War II pilot.

Howard Cosell helped Coleman also get a job doing weekend sports shorts for the ABC radio network. Then, in 1972, Buzzie Bavasi, the Padres’ president, offered Coleman a broadcasting job and he snapped it up.57 It was a job he held, with the exception of one year, until he died 42 years later. In the mid-1970s he also began broadcasting CBS Radio’s Game of the Week and did so for 22 years.

That exception was 1980, the year Coleman served as manager of the Padres. He and Bob Fontaine, the Padres general manager, had grown up together. After the Padres finished 68-93 in 1979, Fontaine persuaded Coleman to succeed Roger Craig as manager. Coleman received a three-year contract for a total of $200,000 with the understanding that he could return to the broadcast booth if the managing stint did not work out.58 Unhappily for all concerned, it did not. The club started the season with a promising 22-19 record but then went into a nosedive. The club owner fired Bob Fontaine shortly before the All-Star break and replaced him with Jack McKeon, who had been the assistant general manager. Although the everyday lineup featured Dave Winfield and Ozzie Smith and had great team speed with three players stealing 50 or more bases, the club struggled getting on base. The Padres also had Rollie Fingers in the bullpen, but the staff was overall mediocre. The team finished last in its division with a 73-89 record, 2½ games behind the fifth-place Giants, and, during the final week of the season, Coleman was told that he would not be coming back as manager.59

After his season as manager, Coleman did return to the broadcast booth with the Padres. He also remarried in October 1981, marrying the former Maggie Hay. He was 57 and she was 31 and the couple had a daughter named Chelsea in 1985.60 Coleman gravitated to broadcasting mostly on radio because he enjoyed describing the action for the fans. He juggled broadcasting the Saturday Game of the Week on CBS radio with Padres games until 1997, taking red-eyes and early-morning flights to get back for Sunday Padres games.61

Over the years Coleman became so popular that he was almost an iconic figure in San Diego. He became known as “The Colonel” on radio broadcasts and around Petco Park since he had retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel. Broadcasting highlights were when the Padres went to the World Series in 1984 and 1998.62 He sometimes remarked, however, that he, because of the Padres habitually weak teams, had broadcast more losing games than anyone in history.63

Coleman became known for his “rich and intimate” but concise delivery64 and developed two trademark calls with the Padres. When a Padres player made a great defensive play, Coleman would say, “Hang a star on that one, baby!” During home games, Coleman would then hang a two-foot-wide gold star out the broadcast booth on a broomstick. Radio station KFMB broadcast the Padres games and at one point gave out “Hang a star on that one” membership cards to fans. His other call “Oh, doctor!” was first used by Red Barber. Coleman related that it just came out of his mouth once early during his time with the Padres and he continued to use it when something extraordinary occurred on the field.65

Coleman was also known for his malapropisms on the air, which came to be called “Colemanisms.” Perhaps the best known is when he described Dave Winfield going back for a long fly ball. Coleman allegedly said, “Winfield goes back. He hit his head against the wall. It’s rolling back toward the infield.”

On another occasion, he reputedly described a double by saying, “He slid into second with a stand-up double.”

Then there was the time that he noted that “Gaylord Perry and Willie McCovey should know each other like a book. They’ve been ex-teammates for years.”

He reportedly said, “George Hendrick simply lost that sun-blown popup.”

He once introduced the starting pitcher by saying “On the mound is Randy Jones, the left-hander with the Karl Marx hairdo.”66

Padres President Buzzie Bavasi once said, “I made some good acquisitions here … Nate Colbert, Cito Gaston, Dave Winfield, Randy Jones, Rollie Fingers, Ozzie Smith. But the best acquisition I made for this town was Jerry Coleman.”67

Coleman was universally respected and admired within baseball. Jeff Torborg, who worked with him for several years on CBS Radio, said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything negative about Jerry.” He was also unfailingly humble and self-deprecating. Joe Garagiola remembered an occasion when Coleman was conducting a pregame interview with an infielder and asked the player how he made the double play. Afterward Garagiola told Coleman, “You asking him how to do a double play is like the pope asking somebody how to say Mass. You did it better than anybody.”68

In 2005 Coleman was honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, receiving the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in baseball broadcasting. That same year he was inducted into the Marine Sports Hall of Fame; along the way he was also inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, the San Diego Padres Hall of Fame, and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame. In 2012 the Padres honored Coleman by unveiling a statue outside Petco Park of him in his Marine aviator uniform.

Jerry Coleman died on January 5, 2014, from complications after a fall.69 He was laid to rest with full military honors including a 21-gun salute and an F-18 flyover in the missing-man formation. At his death, Coleman was 89 years old and had led a remarkable life, starting with a very difficult childhood. He became a bona-fide war hero in two wars, had a baseball playing career that earned him Rookie of the Year and World Series MVP honors, and then transitioned into a Hall of Fame broadcasting career. Through it all, he remained a very humble man with a great sense of humor and an appreciation for his good fortune in surviving two wars and for his ability to play major-league baseball. Jerry Coleman was not only a San Diego treasure, but an American treasure.

Notes

1  Ted Williams was also a fighter pilot who famously served in both World War II and Korea but Williams saw combat only in Korea.  

2 Dan Daniel, “Quiet Coleman Speaks Out With His Bat,” The Sporting News, October 18, 1950: 3.

3 Peter Golenbock, Dynasty — the New York Yankees 1949-1964 (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), 53.

4 “Gerry, Don — Top Rookies,” New York World-Telegram, November 4, 1949.  Roy Sievers of the St. Louis Browns was voted Rookie of the Year by Baseball Writers Association of America, with Coleman finishing third in that vote. The official designation of the World Series MVP was not instituted by the major leagues until 1955, but the BBWAA voted Coleman the Babe Ruth Award as its Most Valuable Player in the 1950 World Series. As a result, most authorities have recognized Coleman as the MVP of that Series.  See, e.g., George Vecsey, “Jerry Coleman, 89, Yankee Infielder, Fighter Pilot and Voice of the Padres,” New York Times, January 6, 2014: A15. 

5 Jerry Coleman with Richard Goldstein, An American Journey — My Life On the Field, In the Air, and On the Air (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2008), 14-15.

6 Coleman, 15-16.

7 Coleman, 17-18.

8 Graduates of Lowell include Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, California Governor Pat Brown, actress Carol Channing, author J.D. Salinger, and sculptor Alexander Calder. Coleman, 20.

9 Coleman, 27.

10 According to Coleman, the team was sponsored by the Keneally Bar in San Francisco which was owned by a guy who never drank. Josh Board and Joe Hight, “The Man Who Hung the Stars,” San Diego Reader, April 7, 2005: 30. The bar owner was Neil Keneally. The team had been called the Keneally Seals but Keneally renamed the team the Keneally Yankees in honor of New York Yankees scout Joe Devine, who later signed Coleman. Bob Stevens, “This Is Jerry Coleman,” Baseball Digest, January 1950: 4.  

11 Coleman, 27-28; Stevens: 4.

12 Coleman, 29.

13 Bender had apparently been given a job by George Weiss, general manager of the Yankees.  Although Coleman was a willing student, Bender shortly disappeared, and Coleman never saw him again. Coleman, 31-33.

14 Coleman, 37-38.

15 Todd Anton, No Greater Love — Life Stories from the Men Who Saved Baseball (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2007), 93-94; Todd Anton and Bill Nowlin, eds., When Baseball Went to War (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2008), 80.  Bob Cherry, who had played with Coleman in San Francisco and in Wellsville, went through pilot training with him and also chose the Marines. Coleman, 39.

16 Board and Hight: 30.

17 Coleman, 41-49; Anton, 94-96.

18 Sadly, Louise battled alcoholism much of her life and committed suicide with a drug overdose in 1982. Coleman, 149-150.

19 After the season, Coleman went to see a doctor to see what he could do about his weight loss and thus strength loss during the long season. He was a teetotaler until the doctor told him to drink two beers a day to help him maintain body fluids. Coleman, 57. Coleman later related that he hated beer and that the last one he ever drank was after his last game in 1957. Anton, 97-98.

20 According to Coleman, it seemed as if he was always the last man cut. Board and Hight: 31.

21 Coleman, 56-57.

22 Coleman, 57-59; Stevens, 5.

23 Coleman gave Skiff a lot of credit for getting him to the big leagues and possibly saving his life by telling him to stop smoking. Coleman, 61. David Halberstam, Summer of ’49 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1989), 39-40.

24 Coleman, 65-66. About the error, Coleman was quoted as saying, “My first big league play and I booted it like the rankest busher. I could hear the train whistle back to Newark right then.” Stevens, 6. See also “Keystone Kid of the Champs — Jerry Coleman,” Sport Life, August 1949: 53.

25 “I was walking on clouds that night.” Stevens, 7.

26 Coleman, 68-71; “Keystone Kid of the Champs,” 90.

27 Coleman, 87-88.

28  In 1950 Coleman was quoted as saying, “It was embarrassing to hit a ball like that. I just hit it off my hands. Disgusting little blooper. … It was a shamefully weak hit.” Stevens, 8.

29 Coleman, 92; Halberstam, 249; Dom Forker, The Men of Autumn: An Oral History of the 1949-53 World Champion New York Yankees (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1989), 202.  

30 Interview with Bobby Brown, June 25, 2018.

31 Coleman, 98.

32 Coleman often joked that he was the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1941. Coleman, 105.

33 Fellow major leaguers Ted Williams and Lloyd Merriman were also recalled to Korea to fly fighter planes and teammate Bobby Brown, by now a medical doctor, was recalled, serving in a MASH Unit and later in a military hospital in Japan.

34 On one occasion Coleman’s was the last plane coming in for a landing after a successful raid. The control tower became confused, however, and gave clearance for a wounded Sabrejet from another airfield to land at the same time. The two pilots saw each other at the tip of the runway and the Sabrejet pilot gunned his engine, missing Coleman’s plane by inches. The Sabrejet pilot crashed and was killed. Just two weeks later Coleman’s engine conked out during takeoff when his Corsair was loaded with 3,000 pounds of bombs. As he tried to brake, he released the bombs which fortunately did not detonate. However, one of the bombs caught his tail wheel and flipped the plane upside down. Coleman ended up upside down inside the cockpit with his arms pinned to his side and his safety harness choking him. By the time the emergency crew reached him, he had passed out and was blue in the face. Coleman, 113-114. Coleman remembered thinking, “What a way to die, at least I could be right side up.” Phil Rizzuto with Tom Horton, The October 12 — Five Years of New York Yankee Glory, 1949-1953 (New York: Forge, 1994), 111.

35 Coleman, 109-117.

36 George Weiss of the Yankees knew that Coleman was near the end of his tour and tried to hasten Coleman’s return from Korea so that he could join the Yankees late in the season. Coleman, 117-118; Anton, 105, 106; Nowlin & Anton, 85-86.

37 Because he appeared in a few games in both 1952 and 1953, Coleman was one of 12 players to play in the Yankees’ run of five straight world championships. In the mid-’50s the Yankees had a commemorative plaque made of those five straight world championships and gave one to each of the 12 players. When interviewed in the early ’90s Coleman was told that he was the only one of the 12 not to have the plaque on display. Coleman, who lived in LaJolla, California, and had a great view of the Pacific Ocean from his house, responded, “If you can’t feel good when you pick up the paper and look out over the Pacific Ocean, coming back into the house and seeing pictures of yourself in baggy pinstripes is not going to help you feel any better.” Rizzuto with Horton, 111.

38 Coleman, 122-123; Jim G. Lucas, “Coleman: A Real Bomber,” New York World Telegram Saturday Magazine, July 11, 1953; Forker, The Men of Autumn, 204.

39 Coleman, 123; Dan Daniel, “Coleman Injury Hits Yanks Hopes to Trade for Top-Flight Hurler,” New York World Telegram and Sun, April 23, 1955.

40 Coleman had been hit behind the left ear in 1947 without a helmet while playing for the Kansas City Blues and reported that it affected his equilibrium for weeks, so he always wore a helmet when they became available. Coleman, 123-124. 

41 Eddie Robinson and C. Paul Rogers III, Lucky Me: My Sixty-Five Years in Baseball (Dallas: SMU Press, 2011), 110.

42 Arthur Daley, “Sports of The Times/Return of a Hero,” New York Times, August 24, 1953; Carlos DeVito, Scooter: The Biography of Phil Rizzuto (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2010), 176.

43 Coleman was also a fastidious dresser, including the way in which he wore his uniform, and that coupled with his smooth and acrobatic play at second base earned him the nickname “Fancy Dan.” Golenbock, 53. 

44 Several teams including the Boston Red Sox were reportedly interested in acquiring Coleman when he retired. Dan Daniel, “Class Always His Top Trait,” New York World Telegram, January 11, 1958. Bobby Richardson later recalled that during his rookie year Coleman would show up early and work with him at second base, even though Richardson was trying to take his job. He said, “I owe a lot to Jerry Coleman.” Dom Forker, Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-1964 New York Yankees (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1990), 3.

45 Coleman, 147.

46 Golenbock, 272-273 (describing long hours working for George Weiss).

47 Brian Jensen, Where Have All Our Yankees Gone? (Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), 63-64. 

48 Coleman had gotten to know MacPhail when he played for the Kansas City Blues and MacPhail was the traveling secretary for the team. He subsequently went into the broadcasting business. Coleman, 153.

49 Curt Smith, The Storytellers (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 45-47. (Coleman describing his first broadcasting experience).

50 Coleman, 153-154; Joe Vella, “Coleman Recounts Fun of Games,” Oneonta Star, August 11, 2005.

51 Coleman, 154; Curt Smith, Voices of Summer (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005); Smith, The Storytellers, 119.

52 According to Coleman, initially “Scooter [Rizzuto] and I were kids who had a wonderful time but [were] maybe not as professional as you’d like.” Smith, The Storytellers, 47. See also DeVito, 225,226.

53 Coleman, 161-163.

54 Coleman, 165-166.

55 Coleman, 170-171. 

56 He, through Pat Summerall, apparently turned down a job to become President of the Oakland Seals hockey team.  Jensen, 65.

57 Coleman, 175.

58 Coleman, 191-192.

59 Coleman, 197-199.

60 Coleman, 203-205.

61 Coleman, 156.

62 According to Coleman, his most memorable game as a broadcaster was Game Four of the NLDS when the Padres had to defeat the Cubs to force a fifth game and Steve Garvey hit a ninth-inning two-run home run to win for the Padres 7-5.  See Smith, The Storytellers, 171, for Coleman’s call of Garvey’s home run. 

63 Jensen, 67.

64 Baseball broadcast historian Curt Smith described Coleman’s play-by-play as “rich and intimate; he was the bearer of a clean meticulous story line.” Curt Smith, Voices of the Game (South Bend: Diamond Communications, 1987), 370.

65 Coleman, 176.

66 A more complete list of “Colemanisms” is at funny2.com/coleman.htm. and Smith, Voices of the Game, 370-371.  See also Smith, The Storytellers, 73, 101, 109, 117-118.

67 Board and Hight: 42. 

68 Jay Posner, “Hang a Star on Mr. C,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 31, 2005. 

69 Vecsey: A15.

“That 1954 team was not only the best I ever covered, it was also the best group of guys,” Dudley continued. “They did everything together, on and off the field. They won together and lost together, although they didn’t lose very often.  There were no cliques. The 1954 Indians were a fun-loving team, a loose team, which was either another reason why they were so good, or the result of their being so good.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] 

“Don’t forget, Al Rosen broke a finger, and George Strickland was out for six weeks with a fractured jaw. But Vic Wertz (at first base) and Rudy Regalado (at third base) stepped in for Rosen and did well and Sam Dente played the best ball of his career when Strickland was out.  It was a great team.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Even after the Tribe was swept in four games, Dudley said, there were no excuses: “…there were no alibis, which should tell you something else about that team.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] 

Dudley was the eyes and ears of Indians fans for 20 years.  His ability to intertwine the call of the game with storytelling was a unique gift that only the greatest of broadcasters can provide to their listeners.  Even though four decades have passed since Dudley called the action on the field, he is still revered as the greatest announcer the team ever had. And he is closely associated with the great Indians teams of the 1940s and 1950s.    

James R. Dudley was born on September 27, 1909, in Alexandria, Virginia.  He was the fifth child born to Mr. and Mrs. William Dudley.  William Dudley owned his own farm in Gills Creek, located in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. Jimmy was a good, all-around athlete as a child. Later he competed in baseball, football, and basketball at the University of Virginia.  He graduated from college with a degree in chemistry, which landed him a job at duPont.                   

But boredom set in while Dudley was at duPont, and a friend suggested that with his voice he might want to give radio a try.  Dudley took his friend’s advice and started his broadcasting career in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1937. From there he bounced around the East, making stops in Washington, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh. Eventually he made his way to Chicago, and went to work at powerhouse station WIND in 1942. “When he was a Cubs announcer in those days, I was Hal Totten’s briefcase carrier,” he told the author of a book on broadcasters. “I was sort of his ‘gopher’ – I’d do the odd jobs – and once in a while he’d let me do play-by-play, but for no more than an inning, tops.”[fn]Curt Smith. Voices of the Game (Dallas: Taylor Trade Publishing, 1987), 165.[/fn] It was valuable experience for Dudley, but with World War II on, he went into the US Air Force, putting his career on hold while he flew in India.

Dudley moved to Cleveland after the war to announce hockey games for WJW, which also happened to be the Indians’ flagship station.  Fate smiled on him in June 1947 when he was assigned to broadcast a sandlot game at Cleveland Stadium being broadcast by the station. George Creedon, the head of Standard Brewing Company, which had just acquired the rights to air the Indians’ games, was listening to the broadcast and was impressed by Dudley. He told Indians owner Bill Veeck that he wanted Dudley to do the Indians’ games. Veeck agreed, and Dudley became the play-by-play announcer for the Indians in 1948.   

Dudley’s first on-air partner was Jack Graney, who had been an outfielder for the Indians in the Deadball Era. Graney was a fine player and an excellent announcer.  He was a master at the “re-creation” of major-league games and was the first former ballplayer to make the transition from the field to the announcer’s booth. “Jack was my first air partner and the one that did the most to help me,” said Dudley. “He told me that 85 percent of people who listen to baseball broadcasts either know more about the game or think they know more about it than you do.  And I never forgot what he said.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

For Dudley, taking over the announcing in 1948, was as if he were in baseball heaven. The Indians won the world championship that year after a thrilling American League pennant race and a one-game playoff victory over Boston after the Red Sox and Indians ended the regular season tied.  The Indians then overpowered the Boston Braves in six games in the World Series. “It was like living a dream,” Dudley recalled. “Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It was so hard to believe – the crowds flocking to the ballpark each day, the pressure, the Red Sox and Yankees nipping at our heels.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Dudley married Angelyn Hendrick in 1950, and they were married for 49 years.  They had two children, Douglas and Barbara.  

The Indians competed for the first ten years of Dudley’s tenure, winning the pennant again in 1954. A winning, competitive team naturally breeds interest, and Dudley turned into a favorite of the Indians faithful as more fans tuned in to listen to the broadcasts.  His smooth delivery coupled with his slow, easy rhythm was suitable to the leisurely pace of a baseball game. Dudley believed that his success, and that of other Southern-born announcers, came from their voices. “I think our accents appealed to people – they were sort of graceful, they fit in with the game,” he said. “Dixie speaking is slow, leisurely, it sort of moves with the weather. And baseball is that kind of game.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] He was often compared with other broadcasters who were also from the South, among them Lindsey Nelson, Red Barber, Mel Allen, and Ernie Harwell. 

Like many announcers at the height of their popularity, the phrases Dudley used to describe the action became everyday lexicon. Dudley would say “the string is out” when the batter had a full count.  His homer call was “Going … going … gone.”  And his call of a double play usually was “Over to second, one away… back to first, it’s a double play!”

In 1957 Dudley was joined in the radio booth by Bob Neal. Neal was a stark contrast to Dudley’s “aw shucks” style, having once aspired to be an opera singer.  He had done play-by-play for the Cleveland Browns in the early 1950s. The pair despised one another, each detesting the other’s style and personality. They alternated innings, rarely occupying the booth at the same time.  “There was a game when Dudley had a terrible case of the stomach flu,” recalled late Cleveland broadcaster Nev Chandler.  “Dudley did the first three innings, and then Neal did the middle three. Dudley was in the men’s room, very sick.  The old broadcaster’s code is that you don’t leave the booth until your partner comes back.  But after the sixth, Neal left.  Come the seventh inning, Dudley was still sick. For the first couple of batters in the inning, all you heard was crowd noise, the crack of the bat, and the vendors yelling, ‘peanuts, popcorn.’  Finally, Dudley dragged himself into the booth and finished the game with no help from Neal.”[fn]Terry Pluto. The Curse of Rocky Colavito (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 182-183.[/fn]   

Cleveland radio personality Pete Franklin recalled:  “In my first night at the Stadium, I sat between Jimmy Dudley and Bob Neal, who were doing the radio broadcasts in the 1960s. I had been introduced to them individually and had made small talk before the game.  I sat between them for two innings, three innings, then four innings. They never spoke to each other.  They would talk to me, and I’d talk to them. But Dudley and Neal wouldn’t even look at each other.  I felt a chill. They loathed each other.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]    

Neal was moved to TV in 1962, but was reunited with Dudley for three years in 1965. Gabe Paul had come to Cleveland as general manager in 1961.  Neal developed a relationship with Paul, and used it as leverage to oust Dudley in January 1968. The timing was not lost on Dudley, who realized it would be too late to catch on with another team. “One of Jimmy’s mistakes was that he didn’t socialize with Gabe Paul, but Bob Neal did,” said Cleveland sportswriter Hal Lebovitz.[fn]Terry Pluto, Akron Beacon Journal, August 3, 1997, C7.[/fn]

Dudley caught on with the Seattle Pilots in 1969.  He was teamed with Bill Schonely for one year, until the franchise moved to Milwaukee.

Dudley resided in Tucson, Arizona, in the offseason during and after his major-league career.  After Seattle, his name was mentioned whenever an opening for a broadcaster appeared.  But he never broadcast another major-league game.  He did a lot of work for the University of Arizona and the Tucson Toros of the Pacific Coast League, and served as a pitchman for several products in the Cleveland area. 

On August 3, 1997, Dudley was awarded the Ford C. Frick Award Broadcast Award. “Jimmy Dudley provided tremendous insight to Cleveland Indians baseball for countless listeners,” said Baseball Hall of Fame President Donald C. Marr, Jr. “Baseball history evolves many wonderful stories. Jimmy’s soothing and docile delivery, combined with his keen ability to tell these stories, captivated his listening audience. His name is added to an impressive list of previous recipients of the prestigious Ford C. Frick Award.”[fn]Baseball Hall of Fame news release, February 13, 1997 [/fn]

Dudley’s son, Doug, accepted the award for him. A statement issued for him by the Hall of Fame said: “I’m very honored to be the recipient of this fine award. I’m proud of what I accomplished as a broadcaster and am thrilled to join such a prestigious group of former winners.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Jimmy Dudley died on February 12, 1999, after suffering a stroke. He was survived by his wife, Angie, his two children, and two grandchildren. Many listeners can still hear Jimmy sign off Tribe games with his signature line, “lotsa good luck, ya heah?”

This biography is included in the book Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.