Before tonight's broadcast is over he'll tell several more stories, all of which are pertinent to the action at hand and all of which draw laughs from and light-hearted interplay with Price. "He's a treasure trove of stories about the game," Miller says, fondly recalling a long train ride he once took with Harwell, on which he heard a bunch of them. "When he first came up Leo Durocher was there. He once had a fight with Leo on a train! Leo was buggin' him and Ernie decided he wasn't going to take it and they ended up scufflin'. He was there for the Bobby Thomson home run, Willie Mays breaking in to the big leagues."
Most of tonight's stories are a bit more down-to-earth, like this one about Ernie Fazio: "Well, we're talking about bats and weights and so forth. Ernie Fazio, the light-hitting Houston infielder, switched from a 33-ounce to a 29-ounce, and he said, 'After I strike out, a 29-ounce bat is a lot easier to carry back to the dugout.'" Fazio played in the early '60s.
Harwell sometimes refers to himself as a historian of baseball -- usually by way of saying that his historian's perspective allows him to realize that he, like everyone, can be replaced. "Heck, when I was 8 or 10 years old, I was reading the [Baseball] Guides from 1905, 1906, 1908, about the World Series. I read that stuff just like it was fiction. So I always sort of absorbed all that stuff," he says.
He also calls himself a failed sportswriter. By the age of 16 he was confident enough of his baseball knowledge that he wrote to the Sporting News offering to be the paper's Atlanta correspondent, a job he'd noticed was unfilled. He signed the letter W. Earnest Harwell to sound older. (His first name is William.) He got the job. He also worked the copy desk at the Atlanta Constitution while attending Emory University, a job he credits for his way with words. "That's the best training I ever got as a writer," he says, "looking at other people's stories, seeing what worked and what didn't." But newspaper jobs were scarce in 1940, when he graduated, so he auditioned at WSB. "I got lucky and won it," he says.
He got the Crackers job during the war, after he filled in for a few games while in uniform, before the Marines ordered him to stop. He took over after his discharge, in 1946.
Harwell made the bigs because Branch Rickey, the legendary Dodgers general manager, had scouted him -- "He was very, very far-reaching, you know, he covered everything" -- in anticipation of Red Barber's leaving to broadcast the 1948 Olympics. That didn't happen, but Barber did fall ill.
"Branch Rickey called and said, you know, 'Red, we don't know whether he's gonna live or die. He's sick. I'd like to have Ernie Harwell come up and replace Red Barber,'" Harwell recalls. "My boss, Earl Mann, who owned the ball club, said, 'Well, he's under contract. If you really want him, Mr. Rickey, send me your catcher from Montreal, Cliff Dapper.' So I'm in the big leagues, traded for a minor-league catcher."
And there you have it. The only broadcaster ever traded for a player. "Anything that gets you to the big leagues," Harwell says. "It was a little unusual. It got me a little publicity from time to time. It's one of those things people like to bring up."
It even worked out for Dapper. "He got to manage the Crackers, and he loved Atlanta. He told Buzzie Bavasi that and Buzzie told me that. Atlanta was a good franchise. They were owned by Coca-Cola. High-class operation, independent. He liked it."
In Brooklyn Harwell came under the tutelage of Barber, who managed to pull through and live for another 44 years. Baseball's first great broadcaster was the closest thing to a mentor Harwell would ever have.
"Red was sort of a tough taskmaster, and I think that was good for me." Harwell says. He says that before working with Barber he thinks he already had most of his basic approach -- give the score often, act as a reporter rather than a cheerleader -- "but it was emphasized by the way he did it."
The Giants had come calling after his first year in Brooklyn, but Harwell turned them down because he didn't want to leave the Dodgers so quickly. A year later, in 1950, "they made me an offer I couldn't refuse." He moved across town to the Giants booth, where a year later he would witness the most storied pennant race in baseball history, the "Miracle at Coogan's Bluff," the Giants' comeback from far behind to tie the Dodgers, then beat them in a playoff.
Harwell's new partner was Russ Hodges, a far more pedestrian announcer than Barber or the Yankees' man, Mel Allen, but a fellow who holds a high place in baseball lore because of his radio call of Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World," the playoff-winning home run against the Dodgers in '51: "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"
Harwell was there that day too, on the TV side. It was the first sports series broadcast coast-to-coast on television, and he figured he had the plum assignment. Now, he jokes, only he and Mrs. Harwell know what he said that day.
"I just said, 'It's gone,'" he says. And immediately started worrying. "I had a little quick misgiving. You always have that sometimes. 'Oh boy, suppose Pafko, the left fielder, backs up against the wall.' I guess in my subconscious I was saying, 'Suppose he catches it.'"
Obviously, he didn't.
"A guy from the Sporting News gave me a picture, and doggone it the guy in the front row was catching the ball! I didn't realize it was that close."
Harwell calls it his most thrilling moment in baseball. "It was early in my career, for one thing. It was in New York, the center of media attention. It was the climax of a great comeback by the Giants, and the Giants and the Dodgers of course were hated rivals. It all came together in that one swing of the bat."
In 1954 the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, and Harwell was hired as their first announcer. Though this part of his career is almost never talked about, he was in Baltimore for six years, and he enjoyed himself, even though Baltimore was a football town and the Orioles were lousy. "We had some good times there. I loved Baltimore. Lulu" -- that's Mrs. Harwell -- "had a house there. She'll bend your ear off about the house she left in Baltimore to come here."
In 1960 the Tigers hired Harwell on the recommendation of their other announcer, George Kell, a Hall of Fame third baseman who finished his career with the Orioles and had spent a little time with Harwell in the Baltimore booth.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
"Now the pitch is on the way, he swings and misses, and the first half of the first inning is history. No score, the Tiges coming to bat."
Harwell, and almost nobody else, calls them the Tiges, just the first syllable. After 42 years of marriage, you develop pet names.
That marriage is ending happily. Once, of course, it ended unhappily. After the 1990 season, the Tigers and their radio station at the time, WJR (it's still unclear where the idea originated, and nobody's taking credit for it now), asked Harwell to announce that he would be retiring after one more year, along with his longtime partner, Paul Carey, who had already decided to call it quits at the end of the season. The team, Harwell was told, wanted to "go in a new direction."
Problem was that unlike Carey, Harwell, just shy of his 73rd birthday, wasn't ready to retire. He called a press conference and announced that he would be leaving after the '91 season, but he wasn't retiring -- he was being fired.