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Former American Press sportswriter Carl Dubois blogs about the games people play, in and out of sports, and the people you meet between and outside the lines.

Carl is an award-winning reporter and columnist living in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon, near Portland. He is sports editor of the News-Register newspaper in McMinnville, Ore.

 Meet the Blogger

A sad day for baseball

Posted April 13, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Filed Under People | Leave a Comment

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BATON ROUGE — This has been a cruel April for the Major League Baseball community, and today it got worse, and worse still.

Longtime Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, 73, died while preparing for today’s game against the Washington Nationals. Former Detroit Tigers rookie pitching sensation Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, 54, died as the result of what news services are calling an apparent accident at his Massachusetts farm.

If you click on the first link, on Kalas, you will find extensive ESPN.com coverage. You might want to turn your speakers off to read the story, then turn them on to listen while you watch the video presentations.

Kalas was part of the Houston Astros broadcast team when I first heard his voice. He moved on to Philadelphia in 1971, calling the first game at Veterans Stadium — and many more after that.

He didn’t get to call the 1980 World Series championship victory by the Phillies because of network TV rights and restrictions at the time, but last fall he was behind the microphone when Philadelphia finally won another one.

You’ve probably heard his voice many times — doing Notre Dame football years ago, or the Fantastic Finishes segments during professional games, or on those folksy NFL commercials for Campbell’s Soup, or on commercials for video games. I am almost certain I heard his voice on one of my nephews’ video games more than a decade ago.

Those who knew him call him a true gentleman. If you read his Hall of Fame induction speech from 2002, you’ll probably agree.

My favorite part is his story about working with Richie Ashburn, also known as Whitey.

Whitey had a marvelous sense of humor. I remember doing games with him, and it would be getting late in the game, late in the evening, and Whitey would say on the air, “I wonder if the people at Celebres Pizza are listening tonight?” Well, within 15 minutes, bang, pizzas are delivered to the radio booth.

This went on for a little while, and pretty soon Phillies management called him in, and they said, “Richie, Celebres Pizza is not one of our sponsors. We can’t be giving them free plugs.” Now, we do do birthday and anniversary announcements on the air. So shortly after his meeting with the Philadelphia brass, it’s getting late again in the evening, and he’s getting hungry, he said. “Well, I have very special birthday wishes to send out tonight to the Celebres twins, plain and pepperoni.”

Harry Kalas had a tall order when NFL Films hired him to do voice-overs that for years were masterfully delivered by the late John Facenda, otherwise known as “The Voice of God.”

Kalas had that kind of voice, and he settled into a long career with NFL Films. Tonight, he and Facenda probably know better than anybody how close that moniker came to being true.

Fidrych burst upon the scene in 1976, a time when you couldn’t watch multiple games on TV (or your computer) every night. There was the “NBC Game of the Week” on Saturdays and “ABC’s Monday Night Baseball.”

It was on the latter that Fidrych became a household name and a national sensation.

Page 3 on that link takes you to that night in Tiger Stadium in 1976, when we watched Fidrych groom the pitching mound and, we thought, talk to the baseball. He later said he was talking to himself, but who wants to ruin a good story like that?

He was loveable, and he was fun to watch. A neighbor, with whom I played sandlot baseball and later American Legion and McNeese baseball, got a perm so his hair would make him look more like “The Bird.” He already had the build. Butch, if you’re reading this, I’m thinking about you tonight.

Rest in peace, Harry Kalas.

Rest in peace, Mark Fidrych.

Rest in peace, Nick Adenhart, the Los Angeles Angels pitcher killed last week in a car wreck.

No more. That’s enough sorrow for one season.

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