A Fan’s Notes
Philadelphia's Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn had the best chemistry
in baseball. By James Greenfield
[read from the beginning] A few minutes after 3 on Monday, on my way to my son’s middle-school baseball game, I got into my car and immediately flipped on 1210 AM to catch the start of the Phils-Nationals matinee. Something wasn’t right. Play-by-play announcer Scott Franzke was struggling; his voice was subdued, his sentences truncated and his tone rising oddly at the end, as though he had to break off to clear his throat or cough. His usually wisecracking cohort, former Phils reliever Larry (L.A.) Andersen, was monosyllabic.
“Harry always told me that you have to be prepared,” Franzke said. “Today, that’s just not possible.” Is it Harry? A chill ran through me, as it has every time I’ve thought of it since. Then a few seconds of dead air, and the Nationals’ public address announcer boomed in the background, asking a moment of silence in Harry’s memory.
It got misty behind my sunglasses. I met Harry only once, a couple of years ago, when my softball teammate John Brazer, the Phils’ “Fun and Games” guy, took us up to the box during a game. Harry greeted all of us with the same broad, genuine smile and warm-handshake that he’d bestowed on tens of thousands of fans for decades. Of course, I already knew him. The calming cadences of his drawn-out, tobacco-cured baritone had filled thousands of my hours–in my recliner in front of the TV; on roadtrips; sitting in a parking lot adjacent to a field, absorbing another half inning before my own softball game started. He was as familiar and comfortable as anyone I don’t live with.
Harry hadn’t been well. There had been unspecified medical procedures, which we learned, after his passing, were designed to clear his arteries. All told, he spent about 17 years of his life on the road or at spring training with the Phils and, for half a dozen seasons before that, the Houston Astros. That’s a lot of late night Parliaments and adult beverages, not a regimen the AMA consider heart-healthy.
It seems inappropriate to mourn Harry without Whitey; they were a team in every respect. Away from the ballpark, they played golf, socialized and hit the night spots together. Whitey, battling diabetes, didn’t drink, improving Harry’s chances of avoiding mishap. Their exploits frequently prompted veiled on-air jibes that you could not have deciphered until one of them started chuckling. You could sensetheir affinity and mutual appreciation.
They were not the Phillies, as commentators have hyperbolized in recent days, but they were the fans’ authoritative gateway to a long-running soap opera with marvelous, finely drawn characters, painting and embellishing word pictures with deftness that made us recognize the utter inadequacy of a cold TV screen. They sat in our dens, in the passenger seats of our cars, on the walls above our favorite taproom stools, and gave us the details, or as many of them as could be divulged without FCC sanctions.
ASHBURN, FROM TILDEN, NEBRASKA, got here first, as the Phils’ rookie centerfielder in 1948. Over 15 years, all but the last couple as a Phil, he built a Hall-of-Fame career, including NL batting titles in 1955 and 1958, and led the Phils to the 1950 NL pennant.
Whitey was a clever player who fashioned a great career with only one extraordinary tool: speed. He hit only 29 homers total, so he wasn’t going to bludgeon you to death like the roid-bloated behemoths who have shamed the sport in more recent decades. But he put the ball in play, wheedled his way on base, and tracked down everything in old Shibe Park’s expansive acreage (447 feet to the fence in dead center). No one knew more about how to prepare and play the game the right way. He owned Philly almost from the minute he got off the bus.
He was a member of the worst team in history, the 40-win 1962 Mets, which drove him into premature retirement at 35, and he became the Phils’ color commentator. Except for most of 1964, when the Phils should have won the pennant but collapsed spectacularly in the last ten days, Ashburn saw a lot of dreadful baseball for more than a decade. How do you put up with that? Sometimes Whitey didn’t. In later years, his trademark pipe at his lips, “hard to believe, Harry” was probably his most savage vocalized indictment, but at the outset he was less circumspect, even with colleagues.
A year or two after Whitey joined the broadcast team, the Phils were playing the St. Louis Cardinals in a tight early-season game. “The Cards still have Ed Spiezio on their bench, and he’s been a hot hitter this spring,” intoned play-by-play man Byrum Saam, whose deep Texas drawl and extended silences seemed funereally apropos of the contretemps he had to disclose to his listeners for 38 years with the Phils and A’s.
“If Spiezio’s going to hit,” replied Whitey, not missing a beat, “he’s going to need an awfully long bat. The Cards sent him to Louisville eight days ago.”
HARRY KALAS grew up near Chicago and was recruited from Houston in 1971 by Bill Giles, a wag whose dad had been the President of the National League and who had built a reputation as a Veeckian promoter. After the 1980 season, Giles struck gold when he put together the Phils new ownership group and, for a tiny cash investment of his own, was awarded a substantial chunk of the team. (Bill’s sometimes wacky experiences and observations are memorialized in his recent book, Pouring Six Beers at a Time.) Giles likes to tell the story of a pre-game promotional gambit that resulted in near disaster: an ostrich race matching Harry against Whitey, riding in harness-racing-style sulkies behind the critters. The ostriches freaked and ran amok; one of them jumping into the stands. Harry and Whitey had to dive out of the sulkies and run for their lives.
Harry had to win acceptance as a replacement for Bill Campbell, who was well-regarded for reasons I never understood. As Campbell got excited, his enunciation tended to become indistinct, and it was not always clear what had happened. My dad called him “Marble Mouth.” Campbell certainly doesn’t belong in the pantheon of creative Philly uber-sportscasters, along with Merrill Reese (still with the Eagles); Tom McGinnis (Sixers—“Are you kidding me?”); Dave Zinkoff (Sixers and Warriors P.A. announcer); John Facenda, a TV newscaster who never did play-by-play but justly became known as the Voice of God for his narration of NFL Films documentaries, a role in which Harry Kalas brilliantly succeeded him; and Les Keiter (Big Five college basketball), who died the day after Harry. Keiter was a peculiar but distinctive piece of work–every long shot was a “howitzer;” a hook shot was a “ring-tailed howitzer;” a shot that rimmed out was “in again out again Finnegan;” he grossly exaggerated the length of shots (“Jimmy Walker with a 40-foot howitzer!”), and he intentionally mispronounced players’ names to achieve double entendres: five-foot-six Curt Marshall of LaSalle became “tiny Court Marshall.”
Anyway, Harry blew away even the Campbell sympathizers, and it wasn’t only because of his on-air artistry. It’s probable that there has never been another sportscaster who so eagerly sought and developed a personal relationship with his team’s fan base. Now that Harry’s gone, stories are emerging from every corner of the Delaware Valley—he’d sign autographs for hours and never refuse; he showed up at funerals, weddings and bar mitzvahs to show respect for people he barely knew; he happily socialized with fans who accosted him on vacation cruises. His affection for people was genuine, and the city returned his embrace. As his casket sat behind home plate for much of Saturday—a remarkable tribute in itself—an estimated 90,000 fans waited in lines stretching all the way around the ballpark so they could work their way down to the field to say goodbye.
Harry also got to know a lot of people on the road because of his fondness for post-game watering holes. His favorite road stop was reported by the Giants’ broadcast team to be Lefty O’Doul’s in San Francisco, which literally has a stool with Harry’s name on it.
His relationship with the Phillies players was closer still. Harry rode in the back of the team plane so he could talk to the guys, and they welcomed him because they knew he had their backs. When he fell asleep, they pondered playing gags on him, but they didn’t want to mess with a legend. As they’ve spoken of him in the last week, their love for the man was apparent.
Whatever your faith, you’ll find a measure of divine justice in the timing of Harry’s passing. In 1980, when the Phils first won it all, Harry and Whitey were prohibited by an absurd Major League Baseball rule from calling the games on local radio. Because of the outcry from Phillies fans, that rule was eliminated after 1980. Harry had to wait 28 years for another chance, and he must have thought he wouldn’t have it. But on October 29, 2008, he was behind the mike when it happened, and I suspect that Whitey was with him.
I was in the ballpark that night and I didn’t hear Harry’s call in the moment. But I have heard it dozens of time since, and it has now merged with my mental image of what took place in front of me. It will be there until nothing is.
WHAT NOW, WITHOUT HARRY AND WHITEY?
The schedule says that all of us keep playing, unspooling the tape of an ongoing adventure. Perhaps another disembodied voice will morph into a friend and confidante, bringing us stories of greatness and failure that are not forgotten.
The Nats were coming to bat in the fifth inning of The First Game Without Harry, a close one. “What do you think Whitey and Harry are doing about now?” wondered L.A.
“Probably smoking cigars,” said Scott Franzke.
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JAMES GREENFIELD is a Philadelphia-area lawyer and the author of Between The Lines, a biography of relief pitcher Steve Howe.
See and hear Harry Kalas announcing the final pitch of the 2008 Series, with Chris Wheeler jumping around in the background.
