As the Season Wanes, Harwell’s Career Ends : Baseball: Announcer is finishing his 32nd year with the Tigers, who are finished with him.

It is autumn again; the days are growing shorter, the nights are getting colder.

As he has for 32 years, Ernie Harwell is watching from his broadcast booth behind home plate at Tiger Stadium as summer slips into fall.

In the past, October has meant a pause in Harwell’s career. This year it is a conclusion, an end thrust upon him, a final chapter he didn’t get to write.

Ten months after Harwell announced the Tigers and radio station WJR would not renew his contract following the 1991 season, his career as radio voice of the Tigers is near its end.

“As a baseball announcer I always retire in the winter, so this won’t be anything new for me,” he said in a recent interview at the Farmington Hills home he shares with his wife of 50 years, Lulu. “I’m used to retiring in a sense.”

Not so, said Lulu Harwell.

“Don’t let him kid you,” she said. “He never retires.”

Harwell’s career with the Tigers--though not necessarily his career in radio--will end Oct. 6, after the season finale in Baltimore. He will take with him a generation of memories, baseball’s most prestigious broadcasting award and the disappointment of his abrupt dismissal from the job he has held since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

“I’m ready to accept it and move on,” the 73-year-old Georgia native said of his termination. “I had to . . . realize that everybody can be replaced.”

In a game of legends, Harwell’s thick, pleasant voice and down-home nature have become legendary.

His career in Detroit has spanned eight presidencies and 14 managers. In 43 years as a major-league announcer he has missed just two games. On Aug. 2, 1981, he became the fifth recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame for excellence in broadcasting.

“I just happen to be the announcer who sat in that chair for 32 years,” Harwell said of his popularity and success in Detroit. “I’m sure if somebody else had done it the same things would have happened to them.”

The Tigers and WJR offered little explanation for Harwell’s dismissal, saying only that they wanted to move in a new direction. They will start from scratch next season, as Paul Carey, Harwell’s sidekick for 19 seasons, will retire after this season. Carey made his decision months before Harwell announced his dismissal.

“What I would like to see is the best play-by-play team, expert analysis of the game,” said Phil Boyce, WJR’s program director. “I’d like to hear strategy, why are changes being made. I’d like to hear a more in-depth analysis of what’s going on in the game.

“Ernie’s style is different. It’s more matter-of-fact, sort of like the Dragnet style, ‘Nothing but the facts,”’ Boyce said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that style. But I think as we make a change it would be toward more analysis, more strategy.”

Neal Fenkell, the Tigers’ director of broadcasting, said the new team probably will be chosen this fall. There are about 45 candidates, he said.

While Harwell accepted the move quietly, others were outraged.

“It kind of burns me up,” said Chicago Cub broadcaster Harry Caray. “You don’t do that to a man who has been to all of America what Ernie Harwell has been.

“Nobody’s got more credibility than Ernie Harwell,” he said. “Couldn’t they have worked something out?”

“It’s not the fact that he got fired, it’s just the way it was handled at times,” said Lulu Harwell.

Fans called immediately for a boycott of the 1991 Tigers home opener. About 200 gathered outside the stadium that day to listen to Harwell call his last opening day for the Tigers, although attendance was higher for this year’s opener than in 1990.

Harwell was born in Washington, Ga., in 1918 and moved to Atlanta when he was 4. He says he decided on a career as a sports writer when he realized he wasn’t a good enough second baseman to play in the majors.

He got his first job at age 16 as the Atlanta correspondent for The Sporting News, and worked for six years at the Atlanta Constitution--earning $1 a day--until getting a job with Atlanta radio station WSB in 1940.

“They called me the sports director,” he said. “I was the only one there to direct.”

He spent four years in the Marines and rejoined WSB in 1946, covering the minor league Atlanta Crackers. Two years later he was traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers for minor league catcher Cliff Dapper when the Dodgers’ regular broadcaster, Red Barber, contracted ulcers.

Crackers owner Earl Mann told Dodgers owner Branch Rickey “you can have Ernie, but you have to send me the catcher,” Harwell said.

He worked for the Dodgers for two years and jumped to the New York Giants, where he worked until 1954 and enjoyed the best moment of his career.

It was Oct. 3, 1951, the third game of the best-of-three National League playoff between the Dodgers and Giants.

Harwell was the the play-by-play announcer for NBC television when Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard ‘round the world,” a ninth-inning three-run homer that gave the Giants a 5-4 win and the National League pennant.

“I just said, ‘It’s gone,’ and that’s about all there was to say” as the celebration unfolded on the television screen, Harwell said.

In a nearby radio booth, Russ Hodges, doing the game for the Giants on WMCA, spilled forth the jubilant refrain, “ . . . the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant . . .”

“That would be the highlight of my broadcasting career,” Harwell said.

He was the first radio announcer for the Orioles, covering the team’s first game in 1954 at Memorial Stadium. The Tigers’ season-finale will be the last game ever played in Memorial Stadium, giving Harwell the distinction of the first and last broadcast there.

Harwell came to Detroit in 1960, replacing Van Patrick. He split time between TV and radio before moving exclusively to radio in 1965.

Harwell said he has yet to decide whether he will retire after this season or accept an offer from another team. Carey hinted that the Orioles are among those interested, and said Harwell might announce his plans during the Oct. 6 broadcast.

Harwell and Carey will be honored at Tiger Stadium in a brief ceremony before Sunday’s game against the Orioles.

“He has such a love for baseball,” Carey said of his partner. “You see it, you hear it, you feel it in him.

“I think baseball will have a little chink in its armor after Ernie Harwell is gone.”