Friday, February 20, 1998

No one entertained better than Harry Caray

By Al Pickett / Abilene Reporter-News

Football and basketball play-by-play announcers bring us the game.

Baseball broadcasters, on the other hand, entertain us. They become part of our family for six months each year. They are part of the background noise as we cook on the grill or mow the lawn.

In the summer, it is comforting to know we can hop in the car to run to the store and pick up the Texas Rangers' or Abilene Prairie Dogs' broadcasts on the radio. We can listen for only five minutes and catch the score. Or we can listen to the entire game -- and be entertained with the anecdotes and stories as well as the details and statistics.

For more than 50 years, no one entertained America better than Harry Caray.

For a whole generation of Americans, Harry was known for his work on the Chicago Cubs' games on WGN-TV. WGN and Atlanta's TBS were the first super stations in the dawn of the cable era.

When baseball became a regular stable of summer television, Harry was the game's most visible ambassador. The long-standing ritual of singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch became a highlight of games at Wrigley Field as the raspy-voiced Harry grabbed the microphone and led the singing.

Harry couldn't sing a lick, but so what. That didn't matter. As Harry would often say, "Ah, you can't beat fun at the old ballpark."

Unfortunately for many of those years, we baseball fans in Abilene were shut out of enjoying Harry since the local cable system didn't carry WGN. Most fans across the country, however, became just like Harry, Cubs' fans who pulled for a miracle that never happened -- a Cubs' pennant.

Caray wasn't just a Harry-come-lately to the televised era of baseball, however.

For another whole generation of baseball fans in the south and midwest, Harry Caray was known as the radio voice of their beloved St. Louis Cardinals.

From 1945-69, Caray was the voice of the Cardinals on the radio. Beamed over the airwaves on powerful 50,000-watt KMOX out of St. Louis, as well as baseball's largest radio network, Caray was entertaining fans from Mississippi to Kansas, Missouri to Tennessee, Iowa to Oklahoma, Illinois to Arkansas and Kentucky to Texas long before we knew what a super station was.

I remember listening to Harry shout repeatedly "the Cardinals win the pennant" when the Redbirds beat the New York Mets and the Cubs upended the Philadelphia Phillies on the final day of the 1964 season, clinching the National League crown for St. Louis.

"He is the single greatest salesman of the game who ever lived," Caray's WGN-TV sidekick, Steve Stone, told the Chicago Tribune following Caray's death Wednesday.

Caray was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989.

"So what if he mangles a few words and gets the names wrong," Stone said. "In the end, what difference does it make? The object of baseball is for everyone to enjoy themselves. In the seventh inning, no matter where we go, everybody stands up and looks to the booth, looks to Harry. He is a people magnet."

Opening Day at Wrigly Field in a little more than a month will certainly be emotional. For the first time in years, Caray won't be there to lead the seventh-inning singing. It just won't seem right.

But his memory should be proper reminder for us all that baseball -- no matter whether it's on the Little League, high school, minor league or major league level -- is all about having fun at the old ballpark.