Take Me Out to the Ball Game

I have loved baseball for as long as I can remember. My brother, a year and a half older, loved the sport as well. Any summer day when it wasn’t raining would find us outside playing catch until dark.

Contact with our heroes—we were loyal Chicago White Sox fans—was almost entirely through radio. Once my brother saved up enough money to buy a transistor radio, we’d throw the ball back and forth while listening to the game. It was magical to imagine that our tosses were somehow part of the game being broadcast. My brother would pretend to be Luis Aparicio, and I would be Nellie Fox.

Once every two or three years, Dad would take us to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox play in person. I remember climbing the beer-smelling steps up to the bleacher section until I caught that first glance of the perfectly manicured grass and the beautifully raked sand. I thought the garden of Eden must have looked like that.

As the game commenced, however, I began to feel that something was missing. Looking back now, I realize that the missing piece was the banter of the radio announcers, men whose names we knew as well as the names of our heroes on the field. On Saturday, we would tune into the Game of the Week to hear Dizzy Dean. On both radio and TV, Jack Brickhouse and Lou Boudreau covered White Sox and Cub games, although we suspected that they were Cubs fans at heart.

There is a difference between baseball announcers and their basketball, football, and hockey counterparts. The play-by-play of basketball and hockey games is nearly non-stop, which means that broadcasters do well just to describe the ever-changing action. Granted, football has more breaks, when the teams are in the huddle or at a timeout, but baseball presents the greatest challenges for broadcasters.

Baseball is a game of pauses. There is the time it takes for the pitcher to receive the signal and throw the ball. There are the minutes when a batter hits one foul ball after another, or when the manager or pitching coach walks slowly to the mound to chat with the pitcher and catcher. The pause is longer if a pitching change is made, when a relief pitcher jogs slowly in from the bullpen in the outfield before being given a few more minutes to warm up.

Dead air time is the unforgiveable sin of radio announcing. Consequently, to fill the frequent pauses in a baseball game, announcers have to be gifted storytellers and entertainers. Harry Carey of the Cardinals and, later, the Cubs was legendary. My favorite was Bob Uecker, who was in the Milwaukee Brewers’ broadcast booth from the nineteen-seventies until the end of last season. Uecker was rightfully honored last weekend in Milwaukee. Often, Uecker’s humor was more entertaining than the game.

I bear witness that a good broadcasting team can accomplish miracles. It was mandatory for While Sox fans to hate the Cubs, and vice versa. During my youth, the Cubs were frequently lousy, which gave us great pleasure as we teased our Cubbie-loving friends.

But over the last forty years of passing through Illinois on our way to Wisconsin for vacation, I have found the White Sox broadcasters to be routinely boring. In contrast, the Cubs’ announcing crew of Pat Hughes and Ron Santo was a joy to listen to. Hughes had a dry sense of humor that often got

Santo laughing uncontrollably. And no one grieved more openly when the Cubs lost a close game than Santo, who’d been an All-star Cubbie third-baseman for decades.

Yes, it happened. Through Pat Hughes and Ron Santo, I ended up a Cubs fan. What can I say in my defense but this? That’s the power of the spoken word.