For Love of the Game: The Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Just a quick celebration. In 1999 the Tigers beat the Yankees in this fine movie, yesterday they swept them for real in the ACLS!!!

Kevin Costner has made three fine baseball movies. The movies create an accidental but powerful arc covering baseball’s myths and narratives. The trilogy also reinforces a basic truth about the power and limits of sport as a way of life. The collective movies are not only enjoyable—especially Field of Dreams and Bull Durham—but they create a counter-narrative about the personal lived reality of a professional athlete. The movies’ dissection of how a professional athlete’s love of sport threatens their capacity for intimate connection and humanity.

For Love of the Game joins an aging pitching star Billy Chapel in the autumn of his career. The aging vet has just learned that his team, the Detroit Tigers, will be sold, and part of the deal includes his being traded to San Francisco. Billy does not satisfy a cost/benefit analysis for the new owners. Billy has spent his entire career and earned his fame and fortune in Detroit. The night before Billy also learn that his estranged girlfriend Jane Aubrey played by Kelly Preston will not reconcile. Recalling an earlier point she made, “You're perfect. You, and the ball, and the diamond, you're this perfectly beautiful thing…You don't need me.”

The next morning dejected and hung over Chapel heads for the ballpark to pitch and must decide about the trade before the game is over. The movie braids his nine innings with his troubled relationship with Jane. The movie unfolds one inning at a time playing in a raucous and hostile Yankee Stadium building to an improbably perfect game opportunity as the scuffed and awkward story of Billy’s adult personal life plaits between innings.

The movie moves slowly. It possesses neither the self-conscious mythologizing of Field of Dreams not the iconoclasm or humor of Bull Durham. Its stately progression led some reviewers to find it boring, and it remains the least favorite of the trilogy. I believe it is undervalued and feels true to baseball and the themes of the first two movies.

The first them unfolds touching  on the the harsh reality and discipline of an aging athlete, an aging star  facing mortality. In one conceit Costner starts each pitch with a mental imperative “clear the mechanism." When he does this the jeering Yankee fans (is there any other kind?), the scoreboard, even his own teammates recede, and he channels his presence and skill. The moment captures the experience athletes or any high achieving professional recount when they arrive at “flow.” Their practice, focus and situational awareness allow them to deploy their skills where the conscious and unconscious blend into a smooth inner consistency and quality. When it fails him in the movie, we know that he has reached his own limits.

The second theme unfolds in the awkward, tenuous and sometimes touching relationship between Billy and a cautious and burned single mother Jane Aubrey and her daughter Jena Malone as Heather. They meet when Billy saves her from a flat tire and ends up taking her to a baseball game against her will.

She points out, “I need a regular guy, not the guy in the Old Spice commercial.” Missing her irony and metaphor completely, Billy reminds her he was in the Right Guard commercial. Jane usually feels like a fish out of water being with a star athlete of a game she knows nothing about among wives and groupies she shares little with. Yet Costner and she stumble into a kind of intimacy and mutual joy. Costner passes the test so many men fail when they meet single moms. He actually enjoys the “family” feeling and likes being a clumsy, almost, sometimes dad.

Chapel grows to enjoy their world together. But both sides remain so wounded and protected that they agree to a “man’s deal” where they can see other people. Of course Jane does not see anyone else, but Costner reminding us of the man-child (a grown up Nuke LaLoosh from Bull Durham?) lurking in so many athletes sleeps with his masseuse. “What about the deal!” he asks when Jane surprises him only to be be shocked by seeing a scrambling nubile half dressed masseuse.

Jane wants more from the relationships, more than Billy has given to anything except baseball. When she asks him “have you ever had your heart broken?” “Yeah, he replies, “when we lost the pennant in ‘87.” She comes to believe he can never commit to love because he is perfect with his ball and game. Perfect on the perfect baseball diamond so enshrined in Field of Dreams. Billy resembles many athletes and high performing professionals. They feel so in command and at home in their professional world that this lures them into a belief in its own moral and emotional self-sufficiency.

The movie’s turning point occurs when Billy badly cuts his hand and is told by doctors and the team he is finished. His entire career is in jeopardy. He dreads the loss purpose and withdraws from the relationship to focus obsessively on rehabilitation.

Jane realizes that his identity and love lie with the game, not with her. Losing the game shatters his sense of worth and willingness to love. The love of the game undermines his love of her.

His terror at the loss lies not just in its threat to his self-worth but it reminds him that a professional athlete remains a depreciating asset and no more despite the headlines and hero worship. As long as his skill returns a reasonable benefit for its cost, he will be retained. Bull Durham and Love of the Game, however, make clear, every player lives pursued by younger, hotter and better players seeking to take his place. Every athlete is replaceable.

Billy’s friend and mentor, the old owner of the Tigers, sees the trade to the Giants as a chance to leave with dignity. Billy can retire before the trade occurs at the end of the game. The owner does not want Billy traded and devalued into a painful eclipse that so many fading stars experience. At the end Billy takes the owners advice after reflecting on his life and writes on a baseball that he is leaving "for love of the game."

The three movies unite in their insistence upon the priority of humanity to the allure of sport.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Moonbeam Graham achieves his dream of playing with the greatest players of his time. He loves and glories in it, but when a little girl’s life is threatened by choking on a hot dog, he steps back across the line to rejoin his life as a country doctor. He saves the girl and looks back at his moment with the players with satisfaction but not regret. In Bull Durham Crash Davis plays out his minor league career and sets the minor league home run record. He ends his playing career to begin as a coach. But he returns to Annie where two shopworn but authentic people try to create a life together.

Billy Chapel pitches a perfect game to cap his career. Jane has seen it while waiting for a delayed flight at the airport. He beats the New York Yankees. The game makes clear as all “perfect” games do how critical his teammates are to the achievement. He achieves the pinnacle and at this moment retires.For an ancient Greek this would be the moment to die, at the perfect peak, the moment from which his career can only be downhill. But alone at night, alone at night in his luxurious hotel suite, he cries. He meets Jane at the airport before she leaves and reveals the key truth any professional athlete faces when they sacrifice their personal life for their professional life,

I believe that if you give something your all it doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you've risked everything put everything out there…I did it my entire life. I did it with the game. But I never did it with you, I never gave you that….well last night should've been the biggest night of my life, and it wasn't. It wasn't because you weren't there.

Baseball, achievement, sport, profession, even perfection in all its cold beauty cannot maintain intimacy, connection or purpose. The magnificence of achievement and a perfect moment linger but a second. For Love of the Game completes the theme of Field of Dreams and Bull Durham. Sports can be a great and hard profession, even a way of life, but in the end, athletics will not complete a person’s humanity.

The trilogy insists that sports, even baseball, remains a game, just a game. While sport, like all professions, tempts people to confuse it with life, life involves more and wise people learn this.

Bull Durham—the Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Well the baseball season has reached the 30.9% mark. Interleague play has begun and the Mariners are on their way to another 90 game loss season. I thought I would celebrate by reminding myself of another great baseball movie and the middle movie of the Costner baseball trilogy—Bull Durham.

Baseball is a discipline of failure. The greatest hitters fail two-thirds of the time, and the greatest pitchers fail to throw strikes half the time. Succeeding in a world saturated by failure takes self-mastery and resilience. The protagonist Crash Davis of Bull Durham, one of my absolute favorite moves, embodies the stoic dignity of failure.

Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a little thicker, still carries his lanky handsome athletic build and grace (he actually hit two home runs in the making of the movie) plays a professional minor league player. Crash has earned his skill as an accomplished catcher and manager of pitchers who could not quite master major league hitting. He’s grizzled, cynical, self-educated and droll. Unlike the Costner character in Field of Dreams, but similar to his character in For Love of the Game, Crash lives alone with baseball as his path and profession. He has been known to “howl at the moon.”

Crash lives in the shadows of the glory of the major leagues in the grubby perpetual minors. Annie (Susan Sarandan), the movie’s narrator and muse, upholds upholds baseball’s mythical status. As part time community college lecturer in Durham, she introduces the movie with a reminder, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. …I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball...You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring…It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

At this Triple A graveyard for perpetual veterans and launch pad for hotshots, Annie picks one player each year to initiate into the church through reading poetry and love-making. In Bull Durham she has adopted to mother and play with Eby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) an immensely talented fire-balling air-head with the focus of an amoeba.

Crash Davis is approaching the end of his baseball career having once been blessed 21 wondrous days in the show, the Major Leagues.  By a fluke of longevity and talent he needs only 1 home run to achieve the minor league record of 247 home runs. The Durham Bulls bought his AAA contract to tutor the incredibly talented picture and Annie’s protégé “Nuke” LaLoosh. Nuke has just pitched a game in which he walked 18, hit, stuck out 18 as well as hitting the sportscaster, public address announcer and the mascot bull—he has “serious shit.” More to the point Crash announces he has “a million dollar arm with a five cent head.”

As the “player to be named later,” Crash enters just as the manager of the Bulls tells a young player “the organization has decided to make a change,” and a very young player’s dreams end. The movie highlights how genuinely young all the players are and how many will fall by the wayside trying to gain the holy grail, the Bigs, the Show, the Majors.

The cold ruthless culling of all elite sports looms in the background just as the incredibly fine difference between making it and failing. Yet the players are playing a game that flows from joy, fun and intense competitiveness. A desperate player points out it beats selling appliances at Sears. Crash recognizes the man-child in them all. He can still sneak out with the very young players one night to flood the field, slide in the mud and create a rain day. When the manager complains that the team is not paying attention, Crash reminds him, “they’re kids, scare’em.”

The manager follows his advice with one of the greatest explanations of sport in movie history. Throwing bats on the floor in the shower and cowering the team in the shower stall, the manager screams,

“it’s a simple game, you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball .”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is baseball, pure and clean. I mean how hard can it be hit a rotating 2.78 inches ball at 97 mph with a 2.75 inch piece of ash?

You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The movie reminds us that at the core of sport is simple, based upon natural human actions. Yet like great baroque music, these singular themes permit infinite variations that demand high skill from players and induces joy and satisfaction in the spectators.

Crash reluctantly becomes big brother to the young players. With Nuke, Crash has to break Nuke of the habit of relying on talent with no discipline and teach him how to learn. In one memorable incident, Nuke repeatedly shakes off his catcher to throw his “heater.” Crash smiles and lets Nuke throw, of course Crash tells the batter what is coming and the batter hits it a mile, a country mile. Crash gloats over how far the home run travelled and alerts Nuke that Crash let the hitter know to prove to Nuke who is boss. Nuke will have to relearn the lesson constantly.

Despite his callow flakiness, Nuke does not have a bad heart but is spoiled by a world that has value his talent and never asked that he grow up or mature. When Nuke tells Crash “you don’t like me.” And Crash lays out a professional’s credo, “Because you don't respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don't respect the game, and that's my problem. You got a gift….When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you're pissing it away.”

Slowly, with pain and wit, Nuke learns these lessons, sort of. He even learns Crash’s famous critique of strike-outs and defense of off speed pitches, “Relax, all right? Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic.”

The slow comic arc of learning to grow up and take a child’s game seriously is held together by a fun and sexy romance. The movies draws us into the world of aspiring dreams and uneven talent. Not everyone we meet will make the major leagues, in face most will fail. Crash and the movie teach about about resilience and about failure while reminding us, like Field of Dreams, that beneath the game lies the reality and importance of love.

Costner provides a tired lonely dignity to a man who has found his path. He purused it with passion, skill and dignity only to just miss. He scored a “cup of coffee” in the majors and remembers it as a shining moment he can share with the rookies whom will never see the promised land,  “yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once - the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”

The movie reminds us that desire, effort and practice are NOT enough. A player needs a gift, a talent from the gods. Even that is not enough, you need the talent and the discipline and respect to make it all come together. This becomes the lesson that Crash must hand on to Nuke. In the end Nuke does get called up with his gift and the seeds of maturity that Crash has planted, he may have a chance.

At the end the depth of Costner’s own loss and failure are revealed. After Nuke’s call up, Crash ends up at a bar—alone, drinking, ruing his loss. Nuke comes by to thank him, and Costner explodes in fury at the merciless statistical cruelty of baseball. His monologue spits out that the difference between 250 and 300 is 25 hits. 25 dying quails, flares. 25 hits that’s all kept him from the promised land, and he can only stare with awe and anger at the world Nuke will enter with his gift, a world Nuke neither understands or appreciates.

Throughout the movie the triangle among Nuke, Annie and Crash has unfolded with Annie and Crash realizing they belong together in a relation of mature equals, but they can’t act on it during the season to protect Nuke's own fragile ego and burgeoning success.

In the end Crash experiences what we saw at the beginning, “management has decided to make a change,” his manager tells him as he is released. But the manager also tells Crash that he will recommend Crash to be a coach next season, a perfect fit for Crash and baseball. Crash leaves, picks up with the Ashville Tourists and breaks the record, only Annie notices. The movie ends with Crash returning to Annie to begin a real relationship with a woman he can love.

The movie accepts the mythical sense of baseball’s uniqueness and inner joy but does not fall in bloated allegory like The Natural or reverence like The Lou Gehrig Story. Instead it weaves the joy and beauty of the game with the flawed, loopy and intense folks who inhabit its reality. Crash Davis learns and so does Annie that baseball can sustain you but it cannot fulfill you. 

Crash still loves the game and respects its incredible difficulty. He can hand this wisdom on to the next generation and others have seen this. His manager recommends him for a coaching job even as he must cut him. But baseball will be woven into the texture of his life, not be his life, as he move sin with Annie.

As Annie reminds us, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.”

Only in Baseball: Fielder & Sabathia as Athletes

I was watching this most unanticipated World Series and wishing that the Yankees and Brewers were there. I really hate the Yankees so this has nothing to do with loyalty. No, I wanted to sort of test a hypothesis that my son and I argue about over the years. Baseball provides a haven for the most out of shape athletes in the world.

He claims that baseball is the one sport where players play who can in no way be considered real athletes. He strengthens the argument with illustrations of how many obviously out of shape lumpens actually play baseball and do so successfully. With considerable sarcasm he points out that these so called players can’t run fast or far; they are not really strong in a mano a mano sense; they are not real quick and, above all, they do not look like athletes. He likes to cite two obvious cases: Prince Fielder and C. C. Sabathia.  See these pictures as evidence.

So I wanted to watch a series where two of the most out of shape and least athletic looking human beings I have ever seen were playing. Oddly enough they both seem to possess unidimensional and unique baseball  talents that seem little related to a standard or classical conception of athleticism based upon form, speed, strength, courage and elegance..

Anyone who watches baseball knows what I am saying here. Only in baseball could you get body shapes and types of these two. We are not talking about the muscular strength and size of offensive linemen with their remarkable combination of size, strength, mass and intelligence. We are not talking about the fierce combination of strength and courage that goes into one on one battles in football or soccer or basketball where players jockey for position and movement. Certainly we are not talking about the vast endurance, quickness and strength of the modern soccer player, nor the svelte endurance and elegant form of a modern swimmer.

No, we are talking about guys who never hit triples because they would die of heart attacks between second and third. We are talking about guys who would faint the second time up and down a soccer field and guys who would suffer multiple contusions and life threatening damage if we put them in a football uniform. Can you imagine any of them trying to leap in basketball or volleyball? They would strangle themselves in the volleyball net and would suffer heart failure on the basketball court. Girth and width and ponderousness are not qualities any other sport, except sumo wrestling, values. Of course it is also a sport where the Red Sox demonstrated that  star players can eat fried chicken and drink beer during games

I am not denying that some baseball players are superb athletes and many have speed and a remarkable quickness to hit and field. I love baseball but one of its true anomalies is how human beings so obviously and incredibly out of shape and lacking endurance, quickness, speed can actually play and succeed in a professional game.

I think we should celebrate this fact that the nonathletic can play baseball and make it into an icon. After all think about Big Papi, David Ortiz, the immobile designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox. In fact the designated hitter, kind of like being a pitcher, creates a role that permits such individuals to play the sport. We might add the beloved Kung Fu Panda  Pablo Sandoval   of the World Champion Giants from last year’s World Series.

The best analogues I can think of are the accidental seven footers who populate basketball. Many of them have not so great coordination and might be quite slow or have hard hands or little leaping ability. But they are seven feet tall and can take up space and work in a narrow zone when surrounded by four athletic, swift, quick and strong players. And at least they can run up and down the court innumerable times without dying or fainting.

So let’s hear it for baseball. A last bastion! where out of shape people can still play a professional sport. Who else can say that?

Why Care about Baseball Anymore? Part I & II

Spring training is beginning. Commentators wax rhapsodically about the rebirth of hope, spring and baseball. It is that glorious moment with only possibility before teams and fans. No wins, no losses, only hope. The cycle of sport seasons should renew people, offer hope, structure life for the next nine months with hope, conversation and following the execution and sport.

I hate this moment.

Each year I vow not to care anymore. The economic structure of baseball has skewed so radically that nothing resembling hope exists anymore. How much hope can a fan in Oakland,  Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Seattle,  San Diego or Baltimore have? Being a fan is anchored in loyalty and hope, baseball is killing hope.

Without a salary cap and without a mandatory minimum, baseball has evolved into a stable oligarchy of wealth and talent. This is not a monopoly, but with rare and brief exceptions, the winners and participants in championships can be predicted by the cluster of self reinforcing wealth of the top 10 teams. Most professional clubs exist like my old Kansas City Athletics did for the Yankees, as farm systems who develop talent, have them for four to five years and then must trade them or lose them to free agency to the elite wealthy teams like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. You can see by this comparison of the Yankee salary to the average of the rest.

Baseball owners and players both collude in a system that benefits them. Players make exorbitant salaries with long contracts that no other sport would consider. No one who understands the production curve of a professional athlete would award 20 million dollars a year for 7 years to a 32 year old player. This happens all the time among the baseball oligarchs because they do not worry about money in the hobby of billionaires. Small market owners, not faced with a minimum, hide behind the excuse and under-invest in their teams while reaping a profit from under investment and largesse distributed by the Yankees, Philadelphia and Boston with their mega salary structure.

It is already hard being a fan today  because so few teams have stable personnel. Free agency, money and hair trigger billionaire owners with a relentless drive to win produce unprecedented turn over on teams. We follow corporate shells that move fungible players in and out with the rare exceptions of stars who choose and stay at one team for their career. But it is almost impossible to be a fan for a team that offers no hope. It is like rooting for the Cubs but without the romance.

The Cliff Lees of the world are rare. Lee decided to sign for less money and spurned the Yankees for the Philadelphia. Almost no one takes less money unless you are already a millionaire several times over and can decide among winners. Even he  settled for "only" 20 million per year.  I cannot blame Lee and veterans like him who join teams who have real chances of winning championships as well as making him a millionaire. For most of the non-oligarch teams, they can maybe afford one Cliff Lee but cannot provide the supporting cast to be a real contender. The superb players migrate to the rich teams who offer real money and real chances to win. If you look at the Yankees and Boston and the Angels and Philadelphia you see teams built upon the investment and sweat of other systems who cannot afford to keep their players. No player wants to be consigned to a hopeless cause when teams that have the money and a real chance to win pursues them.

The more telling examples is watching the Albert Pujos example unfold. The best hitter in baseball wants a 10 year 30 million dollars a year contract. The Yankees can pay him and not worry a lot as he declines, but for the Cardinals, if they pay him 30 million, that is one third of their total salary structure so the declining production curve undermines their future and makes it impossible to surround him with the talent needed to compete year in and year out. So the deal was not struck, Pujos will leave at the end of the season or be traded late, and a strong well off team will once again lose out to the oligarchs.

So the team identity, investments and future dissipate under the internal ability to pay salaries and the external capacity of a few teams to cherry pick the best and rip out identities from the other team. So much for hope.

PART II

The defenders of this oligarchy cite the few teams who make the playoffs and sometimes steal a series, but these are clearly unstable anomalies. A rare team like Florida Marlins can steal a World Series but it resembles a fluke and dissipates immediately. The other model of long term investment and talent pool like Tampa Bay made the AL east so interesting, but they have to be dismantled very several years after their ascendancy. They  lose control of their players at that point, or they must bail out on players earlier to get some return. The bottom half needs an astrological convergence of all their nurtured talent coming together at once coupled with career years by veterans to have a chance. Then the convergence disappears and all that remains is a frame to rebuild again  like the skeletal Tamp Bay  after their recent fire sale.

The World Series winner in the last seven years had San Francisco (10), Yankees (1), Philadelphia (4), Boston (2), St. Louis Chicago (3),  Boston (2). The exceptions like Texas this year (27) keep critics at bay but dissolve under the stresses of the market and their inability to keep players. If they have loaded systems, they can replenish, but not with the strategic consistency as the Oakland failure of the last decade demonstrates.

Baseball now clusters into teams that: (1) always can compete unless hamstrung by stupidity like the Mets or hubris like the Yankees. (2) Some can compete through a combination of reasonable resources and or career years like the Giants or Chicago and  (3) the hopeless ones like my Kansas City Royals or Pittsburgh or Cleveland who will never compete under this regime. So Kansas City watches Zach Greinke announce he wants to leave a ship dead in the water (20) and ends up in Milwaukee (18) which has a very small window with its combination of veterans and soon to depart invested players like Prince Fielder.

A great organization, even a corporate shell sports franchise, still needs several attributes to attain excellence. It needs a relentless focus upon core mission--build a winning team--depends upon getting good people committed to the goal; creating a culture where everyone is not only competent but works endlessly to find, evaluate, train and organize personnel to accomplish it. The formula does not change--success grows from committed skill+culture+organization.

The fifty percent turnover in football playoffs each year illustrate what real competition looks like in a quasi equal playing field. Football shows how the combination of talent, smarts, and organization can make a difference. Equal playing fields places a value on every team having to evaluate talent and nurture players and draft or sign free agents judiciously.

This year's Super Bowl represents the impossible for baseball. Two regular not ultra rich franchises compete year in and year out and go through ups an downs, but stay alive because of the salary cap, revenue sharing and then win the test of smart management, supple vision and sustained commitment. A Packers could not even exit in baseball and the Steelers would be the Pirates, so people wonder why folks give up on baseball and migrate to football. Football offers hope, baseball kills it.

Baseball depends upon institutional talent development unlike football and basketball. Basketball burns through talent and relies upon AAU and sometimes college. The modern pro game is so deskilled that  in depth talent development does not matter. Football relies  upon college sport which develops players but also educates them and nurtures the  intelligence required by the sport. Baseball, however, takes much more time. College baseball does not come near the skill development level, and the international base requires heavy investment and maturation in minor league play. This is tragedy of the modern system that spawns an illusion of hope for low cluster teams, but then encourages the talent to bolt to the oligarchs once they reach their prime.

I love baseball. I appreciate the art and combination of individual excellence and spacing with integrated teamwork. I enjoy the pace and social aspect of watching, thinking and conversing. I like the time and space configuration as well as the social dislocation to an intensified but non frenetic or ultra violent competitive space.

I lived through expansions, steroids, lock outs, collusion, but in each case, I possessed the possibility of hope. Each spring brought possibility. The essence of sport competitions lies not just in the excellence it inspires, but in the fact that we do not know the outcome in advance. Baseball is destroying this hope for fans.

Voices in the Wind: Missing Dave Niehaus & Ernie Harwell

Sound shapes place and time. The prattle of rain,silent whisper of snow, the moody uncertainty of wind, all infuse memory with indelible sense of place and time. Sound along with sight and smell power our memory, and memories build into identity. These realities enshrine the sound of radio broadcasters with memory and significance for many of us. As certain as the call of a robin, rolling baritone voices signaled the clarion of spring. Baseball broadcasters gain a special prominence  because of the sheer length of the season and number of games, 161 meetings a season with them. Baseball's combination of smaller scale and static to sudden movement lends itself to radio with the time and scale to  cover and paint an aural picture. The speed, complexity and movement of the crowded worlds of  football, basketball and hockey fit more with TV.

Last week Dave Niehaus the long time baseball announcer for the Seattle Mariners died, In May 2010 another "voice from the past" disappeared when Ernie Harwell the long time voice of the Detroit Tigers died. Harwell had called Tiger games for 42 years; Niehaus had been the only voice of the Mariners and often the only good thing about the Mariners from their founding in 1977. Both voices called the seasons of my adult life.

Both announcers spoke with sonorous tones that rolled across late spring and summer evening. Both grew up in a world before TV and knew how to create word pictures and deploy the stops, breath, modulation and rhythm of voice alone to convey the strength of a story. Harwell filled the air with a unique eloquence and clarity in creating word pictures. Niehaus wove homespun stories and often hokey but stick in your head metaphors and signatures for home runs and calls. Neither felt cowered by networks constraints to be kind and would let us know when the play "stinks" to use one of Niehaus's favorites.

Their soothing, rhythmic portrayals of baseball etched a special place for me and my friends in the long hot Ann Arbor summers and the weirdly sunny but cool Seattle summers. Life, chaos, hazards, work, children roiled about me and them, but on the way home in the car, or hiding away for a restful moment, or even sharing some time with the kids, the voices of Harwell calling the great Sparkey Anderson teams and Niehaus plodding through endless mediocre seasons with relentless bonhomie threaded and finally being rewarded ith the great Griffey and Ichiro teams filled  my nights and life with something constant for a few hours.


Their voices saturated the air and the sound of summer for me and many like me.Their voices created a social space to enjoy a sport, be with friends and feel like I was visiting with a wonderful raconteur.  When I wonder why I felt such sadness when Harwell died and now Niehaus, I realized I experienced them as friends and companions who shared long evenings over three seasons each year. Their voices shaped and made the seasons as real as the weather and as true as the weather. I miss their voices in the wind.