Every Play Was a Passion Play for Caray

I couldn’t begin to contrast Harry Caray with the greats of his era.

I know little firsthand about the man who died last Wednesday--his history, his politics or his lifestyle.

But I know this: To me, and probably to hundreds of thousands of other Midwesterners who first heard the game through his raspy, rousing radio voice, baseball sounds like Harry Caray.

In 1978, when I was 13, a family whose children I baby-sat took me for the first time to old Comiskey Park. I cared little for baseball or sports at the time--the outing was something to do on a long summer day.

We walked through the dank belly of Comiskey, all concrete and dim lights, and up the stairs to the lower deck.

In front of me, awash in sunlight, was the biggest swath of the greenest grass I’d ever seen. As sappy as it sounds, I stood mesmerized by the thousands of people in the stands, the players on the field, the smell of hot dogs, smoke, beer and history mingling and wafting around the slats of the old, wooden seats.

Then the kids’ father turned on a radio.

“It’s a BEEEE-U-tiful day for baseball here in Chicago!” I heard. The voice sounded like its owner had just awakened, but the unmistakable inflection was that there was nowhere better to be in the world. The man on the radio was mesmerized too, and he had been for more than three decades.

I couldn’t see him up in the booth at the seventh-inning stretch, but tens of thousands of us stood and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” because Harry Caray told us to. As he root, root, rooted for the White Sox, so did I, because he made it sound like so much fun. The upper deck blocked our view of the only home run until fans in right field began to reach for it, but I knew it was going out because Harry said so.

“It might be--it could be--it IS! A home run for the Chicago White Sox!” the voice crackled through the radio, and we all yelled with him.

By the time the crowd had chanted “Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goo-oodbye” for the ninth time, I was smitten with a game and a team, thanks in large part to the raucous delivery of a man who was having the time of his life.

I went to no more White Sox games that summer, but Harry told me about them all on the radio. I scheduled my adolescent afternoons around his broadcasts. I saw him often on television, wondering how his huge glasses stayed on his face as he hung out the window trying to catch foul balls with a butterfly net. I watched the jerseys of the batters in the on-deck circle, trying to pronounce each name backward before Harry did.

The next March I couldn’t wait for spring training to begin, when Harry would broadcast from Florida. I sat for hours next to the radio in my parents’ kitchen with a homemade score sheet, tracking the hits and outs of the White Sox as Harry called them. If I had some errand or chore I needed to do, I’d do it during the middle innings, when Jimmy Piersall or another pseudo-Harry would broadcast in relief. In the seventh, Harry would come back on the air to finish off the really important part of the game.

Season after season, I heard White Sox baseball through Harry’s voice, and it was never anything but fun.

The year I graduated from high school, Harry went north a few miles to the hated Cubs. Naively, I felt betrayed until I grasped the essence of Harry: He wasn’t passionate about White Sox baseball, Cardinals baseball (which he’d called for 25 years before) or Cubs baseball. He was passionate about baseball.

I’ve listened to his national broadcasts off and on since then, heard him age, make mistakes, slur his words. Some say that recently he had degenerated into a caricature of himself. But even last season, when Harry broadcast the pathetic Cubs, his gravelly voice never lost the inflection I’d heard that first day in Comiskey Park.

Now I’m 32 and make my living in sports. I’ve seen countless baseball games and have reveled in the beautiful, eloquent voices of broadcasting giants such as Ernie Harwell and Vin Scully. I know they were just as passionate as Harry, but I wonder: Did they also have as much fun?

And when I see a game-winning hit, a leaping catch at the warning track or an impossible double play, no matter what words come out of the broadcast booth, I hear, “Holy Cow!”

I hope baseball will always sound like Harry Caray.