The Philadelphia Phillies were more often than not a sorry bunch of ballplayers, at least in my 45 years of watching and listening to them on the radio. We've had some excellent broadcast teams with Harry Kalas, the Hall of Fame announcer, as the one remaining connection to the splendid past. Now it seems that modern broadcasters need to talk all the time and treat every play like it is the equivalent of the D-Day landing, especially the basketball announcer in this town.
I grew up in an era when baseball games were only on TV once or twice a week. It was the radio that connected us to the teams. They were transistor radios that gave off a faint but pleasant odor of a sort of electrical way when warmed by the 9-volt battery inside. We had Byron Saam, Bill "Soup" Campbell and one of the first ballplayers turned announcers, Richie Ashburn who joined the team after his retirement in 1962 as MVP of the worst team in major league history. For the longest time he was the last man to retire having hit above .300 in his last season. He wanted to retire while still on top having seen too many men hang on too long. While he would surely have gotten his 3000th hit in the next 3-4 years, he decided to hang up the spikes (he was the fastest man in baseball in an era of Mays and Mantle) and go back to Nebraska to run for Congress. If he stuck around long enough to get to that magic number, he wouldn't have had to wait another 32 years to get into the Hall of Fame, but he couldn't stand to lose a card game let alone a baseball game and the Mets were not going anywhere (at least not for another 7 years). Well, it turns out a friend of his was running for Congress, so he decided to back off that plan and called up the TV producer for the Phils and asked him for a job. He stumbled a bit for most of the first year but started to get the hang of it, being brought along by Saam and Campbell. Being the most beloved athlete in Philadelphia history, and remaining so today, certainly helped.
Anyway, as a boy listening to those three and later after Saam retired and as a young adult when Kalas (a Chicagoan that worked in Houston) came on board, it was magic to listen to them no matter the score, which was usually a lopsided losing one. Even the heartache of 1964 was a bit more bearable because of the broadcasters sharing the pain with us exactly as we were feeling it.
Harry and Rich became great friends and that comradery came through loud and clear. One thing Bill Campbell told Rich when he first came on air was, if he didn't have anything to say, don't say anything. So there'd be times when there was silence on the air. When you dialed in the station (no pushbuttons) and heard nothing, you knew that in a bit, you'd hear something wonderful fromHarry's perfect voice or Rich's perfect timing or humorous comment. You could hear Rich strike the match to light his pipe and the slow draw and exhale and it was calming, just like the pace of a ballgame.
People used to deliver food all the time to the announcer's booth and Rich loved pizza. A wonderful pizza parlor, Celebres, is near the stadium and he used to ask them to bring food over during the game. Well, one day the producer said they weren't sponsors, so he couldn't mention them on the air. Like many broadcast teams, they used to announce birthdays on the air during the game. Well, Rich wanted some pizza so he announced, "A special birthday wish today for the Celebres twins, Plain and Pepperoni." Well, 20 minutes later, there were 6 boxes of pizzas delivered and everyone in the city had a good laugh.
Rich was an amazing man and my father-in-law. When he passed away, in a hotel room in NYC (he admitted a fear of dying in a hotel room on the road) the whole city went into mourning. His friend, Ed Rendell, then mayor of the city, arranged a closed casket viewing for the city in a beautiful old building left over from the Centennial. His 93 year old mother stood in the receiving line all day. For more than 8 hours thousands of people came by to pay their last respects. He may have been a Hall of Famer with more hits than anyone in the golden era of baseball (1950s) a two time batting champion and the man who Willie Mays called the greatest defensive outfielder he ever saw and a respected baseball writer, but he touched the city as a broadcaster. The love the city had for him was always on display, the family constantly had to share him with everyone, even in mourning. But the outpouring of affection soothed broken hearts and the family came to realize that sharing him was alright in the end.
One elderly man knelt for a long time at the casket, slowly rose and left an old transistor radio by the coffin. In the receiving line he said that radio was his connection to the game he loved and to a man he respected.