Memories of Harry Caray--In a League of His Own

Came the seventh inning one night. A foul ball went flying back to the Cubs’ radio booth. Harry Caray put out his right hand, only to have the missile slap off his palm. From next door came play-by-play by the Braves’ radio man, Skip Caray (an apple fallen near the tree), “That’s an error. Hit Dad in a bad place. The hands.” Harry’s laughter rumbled across the air, out of the ballpark, to be heard forever.

I’m a child of radio who listened to Harry Caray on KMOX in St. Louis in the 1950s. Every baseball night, I went to my room with a Coke and a Velveeta sandwich, heavy on the mustard. If it got to be the 14th inning and my parents didn’t need to know I was awake, I moved the radio under the blankets with my scorebook and flashlight.

Though I’d never been to a major league ballpark and I’d never seen Stan Musial, somehow it didn’t matter. I’d been places and seen things with Harry because the glory of baseball’s radio days was the medium’s insistence that you, the listener, take part.

You joined the act of imagination that made the names come alive. Stan the Man, Duke Snider . . . Ernie Banks. You saw the heroes and you saw the ballparks because Harry saw them for you and shared his joy with you. You even saw the screen-wire fencing stretched 20 feet high in front of fans sitting in the right field seats at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.

“Musial would have a hundred more home runs if they took that wire down,” Harry once said, “but the Cardinals are afraid of losing too many balls in batting practice.” Implied: the cheapskates. The Cardinals paid Harry, but they didn’t own Harry, who more than once suggested his personal eternal despair by biting off the words, “Musial pops up again.” As if Musial’s 3,630 hits would all come with the bases empty.

My radio brought home baseball games from many places. I heard Jack Brickhouse and Bob Prince, Bob Elson and Bert Wilson. (I even confess to liking Wilson’s cheery motto, “I don’t care who wins -- as long as it’s the Cubs.”)

All great broadcasters.

And then there was Harry.

It wasn’t so much he made the games fun, though surely he did. (“Here we are in the 14th inning,” he once said, “and if you’ve gone to the refrigerator for a Budweiser every time I’ve told you to, you’re feeling about as good as I’m feeling by now.”)

Obituaries and appreciations insist Harry Caray’s work for 53 years was the work of a fan, funny and cocky when his team won, angry and melancholy when it lost. We remember Harry the Bleacher Bum, taking off his shirt to broadcast from Wrigley Field’s sunny and zany left field bleachers. We’ll remember Harry the song leader, chewing the scenery through “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

There was more to him than that. Orphaned as a child, scrapping to make a life, fighting for acceptance, the man built a career on a gift of talent so brilliant it was taken for granted. As Musial was a hitter, Caray was a dramatist. Along with a showman’s greatest tool -- an ego the size of any park, including Yellowstone -- Harry brought to his work a flawless feel for story.

“Be careful,” he once said to his team’s pitcher, late in a game, the score tied, the count 2-and-1 to a power hitter. “Don’t make it good.”

Amazing. Six words. Suddenly, we had an interest in the next pitch. Might the slugger take a careless pitch deep? Six words is all. Spoken in anxious admonition, those words made listeners part of the drama, aware of possible danger. Suddenly, the next pitch -- what? the 220th pitch of the season’s 119th game? -- became the most important pitch.

Later, to his team’s hitter: “Take a pitch. Three balls, one strike, game tied, top of the 11th, bases loaded. Do you think he can walk a man with the bases loaded?”

I dunno, Harry, but you’ve got me now, and I’m danged sure going to listen to find out.

“BALL FOUR. HE WALKED HIM.” And here came Harry’s rumbling laugh, har-de-har-har-har. “WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?”

For 25 years he did Cardinals games, fired in 1970 amid rumors of an affair with the wife of an Anheuser-Busch executive. In his autobiography, Harry wrote, “At first, these rumors annoyed me. Then . . . they actually made me feel kind of good. I mean, let’s face it. I wore glasses as thick as the bottoms of Bud bottles, and as much as I hate to say it, I was never confused with Robert Redford. . . . If you were me, would you have gone around denying rumors like that? Hell, no.”

Tom Boswell once wrote of Bill Veeck, “Cause of death: life.” Goes for Harry, too. Last week, Stan Musial said, “We’re going to miss old Harry. He was always the life of the party, the life of baseball.”

Forever we’ll hear Harry’s voice. “Musial hits a drive . . . it’s deep . . . way back ... it might be . . . it could be . . . IT IS! . . . HOLY COW!”