Baseball World Suffers Loss of Two Hall of Famers

Baseball lost two Hall of Famers this past week with the passing of legendary radio announcer Ernie Harwell and the dominant pitcher of the early 50’s, Robin Roberts.  Harwell was 92 and Roberts 83.

Harwell was the only non-player to ever be part of a baseball trade when in 1948 Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey engineered a deal involving a Dodger catcher going to the minor league Atlanta Crackers for Harwell.   At the microphone he had a soothing, folksy, down-home type of delivery and he made everyone feel like they were a part of his game.  Like so many other legendary broadcasters of the “pre-baseball on TV era” Harwell could paint the word picture and make you feel like you were at the ballpark seeing , feeling and smelling everything he was experiencing.  As voice of the Tigers for 42 of his 55 years in the business, one of the many great characteristics of Harwell’s play-by-play was him congratulating fans in Tiger Stadium when they came up with a foul ball.  “Hey, that’s a great catch down their along the right field line. I think that's Bill from Dearborn.  Way to go.”  Of course, it wasn’t Bill from Dearborn—just Harwell’s way of making the game more personal and connecting with his legion of loyal listeners.  He was ushered into baseball’s hall in 1981 as winner of the Ford C. Frick Award.

Roberts, inducted into Cooperstown in 1976, strung together six consecutive 20+ winning seasons in the early-mid 50’s for the Phillies.  On his way to 286 career wins he was the ultimate workhorse.  The most astounding statistic, which points special attention to how the game has changed today with specialty relief pitchers and lack of strong starting pitching, is Roberts’ complete games numbers.  He started 609 games and finished 305.  In fact, Roberts had more complete games in his entire career than the Phillies organization has had in the last 25 years! Roberts was a control freak.  Hurling huge numbers of innings as he did, Roberts issued an average of just 1.3 walks per game over his 19-year career.  Incredible.

This did come back to bite him a bit.  Because he was always around the plate, and the fact he was on the mound eating up innings like an Over-eaters Anonymous member on a binge, Roberts yielded an all-time record 505 career home runs.  Ironically, current Phillie Jamie Moyer, 47 years young, is next in line when it comes to career gopher balls.  He is less than 10 behind.

It was just a few years ago that former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw authored a best-selling biography about "The Greatest Generation."  If you took the sports version of that same era in American history you'd find Ernie Harwell and Robin Roberts.