As most of you members already know, HOF baseball announcer icon Ernie Harwell passed away from bile duct cancer a few days ago. Many of us that have enjoyed Harwell's greatness through the years are currently in mourning right now.
Our local fish wrap reprinted Ernie's essay, "The Game for All America (A Definition of Baseball)" that originally appeared in The Sporting News on April 13, 1955". I had not read this before, and I thought it would be worth sharing this with the other members on the off-chance that you haven't read this either.
"THE GAME FOR ALL AMERICA"
By Ernie Harwell
"Baseball is a president tossing out the first ball of the season and the pudgy schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. A tall, thin old man waving a scorecard from the corner of his dugout-that's baseball. So is a big fat guy with a bulbous nose running home one of his 714 home runs.
There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball. And so is a scout reporting that a 16- year-old pitcher in Cheyenne is a coming Walter Johnson.
Baseball is a spirited game of man against man, reflex against reflex- a game of inches. Every skill is measured, every heroic, every failing, seen and cheered, or booed, and then becomes a statistic.
In baseball democracy shines its clearest; the only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is a rule book and color merely something to distinguish one team's uniform from another.
Baseball is a rookie, his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream. It's a veteran too. A tired, old man of 35 hoping those aching muscles can pull him through another sweltering August and September.
Nicknames are baseball. Names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy. Baseball is the clear cool eyes of Rogers Hornsby, the flashing spikes of Ty Cobb and an overaged pixie named Rabbit Maranville.
Baseball, just a game, as simple as a ball and bat and yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, a business, sometimes almost even religion. The fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch and then dashing off to play stickball with his teenage pals. That's baseball. And so is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
Baseball is cigar smoke, hot roasted peanuts, Ladies' Day, "Down in front!" "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," the seventh inning stretch and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Baseball is a man named Campanella telling the nation's business leaders, "You have to be a man to be a big leager, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too." This is a game for America, this baseball, a game for boys and for men!"
RIP Ernie, you will be missed!!
