Falstaff TV Game of the Week

[Oldtix]

Was saddened to read this today...

WASHINGTON - Buddy Blattner, 89, a former Major League Baseball player whose career as a broadcaster included seven years on “Baseball’s Game of the Week’’ with co-host Dizzy Dean, died Friday of complications from lung cancer at his home in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield.

He began his 26-year broadcasting career in 1950 in St. Louis, calling games for the Browns, the city's American League team, alongside Dizzy Dean, the Hall of Fame pitcher turned down-home baseball announcer.

Mr. Blattner and Dean began broadcasting “Baseball’s Game of the Week’’ for ABC-TV in 1953 and were together through the 1959 season, the last four seasons on CBS. They also broadcast nationwide on the Liberty and Mutual radio networks at a time when baseball fans in the South and West, before expansion, had to rely on Mr. Blattner and other distinctive radio voices to follow the careers of Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and other stars of the era. The voices of the announcers, mingled with the crowd noise and the sharp crack of the bat, brought the game to life for radio listeners in neighborhood barbershops, on the factory floor, and in trucks making deliveries.

Mr. Blattner was the dependable straight man of the broadcast duo. The colorful Dean, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1930s, could be depended upon to mangle the English language, resort to such country colloquialisms as “he slud into second base,’’ and break into a rendition of “The Wabash Cannonball’’ during on-the-field lulls. TV viewers could always rely on Mr. Blattner to at least give the score.

“People liked [Dean] giving everything but the score, but wanted me to restore sanity,’’ he told author Curt Smith for the book “Voices of Summer’’ (2005).

Mr. Blattner got tired of Dean’s antics after awhile, prompting him to ask for a release from his $75,000-a-year contract. “Diz can be charming,’’ he told the Washington Post in 1959, “but he likes to push people around. I made up my mind he’d do it only once to me.’’

Mr. Blattner was also the radio voice of the St. Louis Hawks of the NBA in the '50s and spent two seasons in the booth for the St. Louis Cardinals before coming west to work for the Los Angeles Angels. He joined them in 1962, a year after expansion admitted them to the majors, and paired with Don Wells on the Angels' radio broadcasts from 1962 to 1968.

He then became the first play-by-play announcer for the Kansas City Royals, serving in that capacity from their inaugural season in 1969 until retiring in 1975. Denny Mathews was his Kansas City broadcast partner.

Robert Garnett Blattner was born in St. Louis on Feb. 8, 1920. As a youngster, he would sneak into a St. Louis pool hall to play table tennis on a wooden board atop a pool table, and at age 15 he won the St. Louis and Missouri state championships. At 16 and 17, he traveled to Czechoslovakia and Austria with the US team, which won two world championships.

In 1938, the summer before his senior year in high school, he signed with the St. Louis Cardinals as an infielder and played Class AAA ball in Columbus. Four years later, the Cardinals called him up. He played 19 games with his hometown team before enlisting in the Navy.

He started broadcasting games on the radio while stationed in Guam during World War II. He came home to play for the New York Giants from 1946 to 1948 and for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1949, his final major-league season. He hit .247 for his career, with 16 home runs, and then ascended to the broadcast booth. “As former ballplayers go, he’s the most glib, with the exception of Waite Hoyt who broadcasts in Cincinnati,’’ Post sportswriter Shirley Povich observed.

After his retirement from broadcasting following the 1975 season, Mr. Blattner competed in senior tennis tournaments across the United States. He also created the Buddy Fund, a charity that provides athletic equipment for underprivileged youth in the St. Louis area.

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