RIP Ernie Harwell - age 92

[Grace]

All baseball lovers are mourning the passing of Ernie Harwell, from cancer, at the age of 92.

He was one very classy guy.

Link to his obit in the Washington Post. Long, but well worth the read.

[Karen]

Rest in peace, sir. And just think all the great games you can have up there, with all the baseball greats from previous generations ...

[Grace]

Some of his gems -

"Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. …

"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 the scout reporting that a 16-year-old sandlot pitcher in Cheyenne is the coming Walter Johnson.

"In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color, merely something to distinguish one team's uniform from another's.

"Baseball? Just a game — as simple as a ball and bat. And yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes."

[RICHARD]

Ernie Harwell, whose departure from the Brooklyn Dodgers broadcast team paved the way for Vin Scully's arrival, will be honored with the Vin Scully Lifetime Achievement Award in Sports Broadcasting.

Harwell, acquired by Dodger chief Branch Rickey in an actual trade for catcher Cliff Dapper in 1948, is 92 and suffering from inoperable cancer. He then joined the Giants in 1950 and was replaced by Scully.

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My pea brain boggled when I heard this tidbit.

Actually?

Is telling people about baseball, work?

BS

[Grace]

Is telling people about baseball, work?

Not for Ernie, it wasn't. It was love, pure and simple.

That award was presented on Wednesday, the day after Ernie died. Al Kaline accepted for him - that had been arranged a long time ago.

Link to article.

[phesina]

On Wednesday, May 5, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan spoke in tribute to Ernie Harwell on the Senate floor.. beginning as follows:
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“For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

Mr. President, spring after spring, for four decades, a man named Ernie Harwell would recite those words. He would recite them at the beginning of the first baseball broadcast of spring training. And those are the words that would tell the people of Michigan that the long, cold winter was over.

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Go to http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=324685 for the entire speech, both text and video.