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| Red Barber |
| by Warren Corbett |
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Walter Lanier "Red" Barber was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on February 17, 1908, sharing a birthday with basketball's Michael Jordan and football's Jim Brown. Seventy years later he was one of the first two broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with his rival and sometime partner Mel Allen.
As the lead play-by-play announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he brought the down-home idiom of his Southern roots to the borough whose residents were ridiculed for speaking of "dem" and "doze."
He broadcast Cincinnati Reds games from 1934-38, then won his greatest fame as the Dodgers' voice from 1939-53. Leaving Brooklyn after a falling-out with Dodger owner Walter O'Malley, he joined the Yankees' broadcast team from 1954 through 1966.
He was forever compared with Mel Allen, his contemporary as voice of the Yankees. Curt Smith, who chronicled the history of baseball broadcasting in two books, wrote in The Storytellers, "The Ol' Redhead was white wine, crepes Suzette and bluegrass music; Mel, beer, hot dogs and the United States Marine Band."
Red's father, William Lanier Barber, was a locomotive engineer from Brown's Creek, North Carolina. His mother, Selena Martin, was an English teacher and school principal from an old Mississippi family. She insisted that her children practice what she taught. "My mother gave me an ear for language...She gave me my interest in religion, too," he wrote. The Barbers later had a second son, William Martin, and a daughter, Effie Virginia. (Facts about Barber's personal life come primarily from his autobiography, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, written with Robert Creamer.)
"My father didn't have the education my mother did, but he was a wonderful raconteur, a natural storyteller," the son said. "He'd sit out on the front porch and tell stories by the hour."
The Barbers moved to Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, when Walter was 10. He was a high school football halfback and kicker at 5'8" and 165 pounds. He graduated first in his class and was rewarded with a $20 gold piece.
His first ambition was to be an end-man (the lead comedian) in a minstrel show, and he performed in blackface during high school and college. While he was working his way through the University of Florida as a waiter and boardinghouse manager, one of his housemates, Ralph Fulghum, asked him to read a research paper on the university radio station. As Red put it, "Then came the great turning point of my life. I know that Satan took Christ up on a mountain and showed him the world and said, 'If you bow down to me I'll give it all to you.' Christ wasn't tempted, but I was. Fulghum tempted me out of all proportion. He said, 'If you come out and read this paper I'll buy you dinner tonight.'"
Red Barber made his radio debut reading a paper on "Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics."
That led to a job with WRUF and to his first sports assignment: Florida's opening football game in 1930. He called his debut "undoubtedly the worst broadcast ever perpetrated on an innocent and unsuspecting radio audience." He was so bad that he was pulled off the air and other announcers tried their hands at the next two games.
During those weeks, Barber began attending football practice and picking the brains of an assistant coach. He learned how to prepare for a broadcast. He talked his boss into giving him another chance, and the sportscaster's career began.
Barber encountered the other passion of his life in Gainesville: Lylah Murray Scarborough, a nurse who treated him when he was brought into the infirmary one night after an accident. They were married in 1931.
In 1934 he was hired to broadcast Cincinnati Reds games. Many accounts say that Reds' general manager Larry MacPhail brought Barber to Cincinnati. This is not true; he said he had never met MacPhail and was hired by WLW and WSAI radio, stations owned by Powel Crosley Jr., who also owned the Reds. On Opening Day he broadcast the first major league game he had ever seen. "That was the most joyous day of my life, next to my wedding day," he remembered.
In 1935 Red broadcast the first of 13 World Series, over the Mutual network. What he remembered most vividly was the pre-game briefing by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis summoned all the announcers from all the networks (there were no exclusive rights deals then) and in his customary Sermon-on-the-Mount style, lectured them, "Don't editorialize. Report."
Landis's admonition was prompted by Ted Husing's 1934 Series broadcasts, when Husing criticized the umpires. Husing was banned from the Series forever after.
Many of Barber's successors in the booth have called him the first reporter to broadcast baseball. "I've heard tapes of Red Barber in the 1930s and '40s," Bob Costas told the Los Angeles Times (8/6/02), "where he tells you there's a line single to left-center and he tells you how many times it bounced before the center fielder picked it up. You needed that then.
"Today, even the very good announcers, will very rarely describe a guy's stance or the peculiarities of a guy's windup, because they've been subconsciously influenced by television even though they're on the radio."
Here is an example of Barber's vivid description, from the pre-game show before the 1938 All-Star Game, as he introduces a national audience to Cincinnati's Crosley Field: "You're not going to find anything about a cheap home run. The closest way you can get a home run is to pull it just inside the left field line, which runs true north, and that is 328 feet, but the left field wall is about 20 feet high. It slants off very sharply toward the northeast." (Unless otherwise credited, excerpts from Barber's broadcasts come from From the Catbird Seat: Red Barber, a 1993 documentary produced by Cincinnati public radio station WVXU.)
Barber's best-known innovation for broadcasters was a simple device to remind him to repeat the score frequently for listeners who had just tuned in: He kept a three-minute egg timer, an hourglass, on his desk in the booth. Every time the sand ran down, he repeated the score and flipped his timer over. Dozens if not hundreds of later announcers adopted this prop.
An important part of the early play-by-play man's job was the re-creation of out-of-town games. Broadcasters didn't begin traveling with teams until after World War II. The announcer in a studio hundreds of miles from the ballpark used Western Union's telegraphic pitch-by-pitch accounts to simulate a live broadcast. Re-creation continued to be a part of baseball on radio until the mid-1950s and even later in the minor leagues.
Most broadcasters tried to make the re-creation seem as realistic as possible: using sound effects of recorded crowd noise, cranking up the volume when for an exciting play; two pieces of wood banged together to simulate the crack of the bat; recorded organ music.
"A lot of fellows wanted to make this Western Union re-creation sound like a live, viable broadcast," Barber said in a 1985 appearance on KCMO radio in Kansas City, Missouri. "My reaction was just the opposite. I wanted the audience to know at all times that I was doing a re-creation."
He used no sound effects and placed his microphone close to the telegraph key, so listeners heard the beeps of Morse code.
The telegraph operator decoded the dots and dashes and typed the letters onto paper. It was a bare-bones report: "S1C" for "strike one, called"; "S1F" meant "strike one, foul"; at the end of an inning, "ntg ax" meant "nothing across," no runs, no hits, no errors.
"You did that broadcast from a series of mental pictures," Barber said. "I made it my business to mentally photograph every player - how he looked, how big he was...I memorized the idiosyncrasies, the habits...I memorized how each pitcher pitched. So as I stood in the studio I saw the game."
On September 17, 1937, Red and his usual telegraph operator, Harry Moorman, celebrated the birth of daughters on the same day. Red and Lylah's daughter Sarah would be their only child. She became a professor of English.
When Larry MacPhail left Cincinnati for Brooklyn in 1939, he took Barber with him to the nation's media capital.
Barber played on radio's largest stage, but he was not its brightest star. When he arrived in New York, Ted Husing and Bill Stern were kings of the sportscasting hill. Mel Allen would surpass Barber in fame and high-profile assignments.
In 1941 the Dodgers won their first pennant in 21 years. They would remain at or near the top of the National League until they decamped to Los Angeles in 1957.
Bringing Brooklynites the exploits of a winning team, Barber may not have been the toast of Broadway, but he was the toast of Flatbush Avenue. Many people who lived in Brooklyn in the '40s -- notably talk-show host Larry King -- have insisted that they could walk down any street in the borough and never miss a pitch, because Barber's voice was wafting out of every window and every passing car.
During World War II Barber became a civic institution as chairman of Brooklyn's Red Cross blood drive and host of radio War Bonds sales.
New York offered Barber unmatched opportunities. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he called the first National Football League championship game to be broadcast nationwide in 1940, when the Chicago Bears buried the Washington Redskins 73-0. He regularly broadcast football games of the professional Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants and Princeton University.
The opportunities extended beyond sports. Various broadcasting histories record his appearances on entertainment programs with bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Woody Herman, Lena Horne and Mario Lanza. He was host of his own variety show, The Red Barber Revue.
For nine years after the war he was director of sports for CBS, where he first heard a young Fordham University student then known as Vince Scully.
During the war, Dodger general manger Branch Rickey was signing as many promising young players as his scouts could find, laying the groundwork for a decade of success. He was also laying the groundwork for an even more important move. Months before he signed Jackie Robinson, Rickey confided his plan to Barber. Red said he was the first one outside Rickey's family to hear that Rickey intended to break organized baseball's 60-year-old color line: "I believe he told me about it so far in advance so that I could have time to wrestle with the problem, live with it, solve it."
It was a wrenching moral dilemma for the Southerner. Barber never admitted any racist feelings. In his history of Robinson's rookie year, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, he declared, "I was not a racist." He wrote in his autobiography, "The Negroes who came and went through our lives were always treated with the utmost respect and with a great deal of warmth and a great deal of affection." At the same time, he acknowledged, "[T]here was a line drawn, and that was that." Southerners of Barber's generation never encountered a black person in a situation of social or economic equality until they reached middle age. That was that.
After Rickey's revelation, Barber told Lylah, "I'm going to quit." She suggested they have a martini and sleep on it.
His wife's cooler head prevailed, but Barber said, "It really tortured me." Eventually he concluded, "...all I had to do when he came was treat him as a fellow man, treat him as a ballplayer, broadcast the ball."
He also owned up to his self-interest: "Economics has a way of being the hidden persuader. I valued the job at Brooklyn."
In his 1991 interview with Bob Costas, Barber recalled, "I don't think I ever said he was a Negro. I didn't have to. Everybody knew who he was."
The rookie Robinson led the Dodgers to the 1947 World Series. That classic included two of Barber's most famous games. In game four, Yankee righthander Bill Bevens took a no-hitter into the ninth inning, while walking ten. Brooklyn pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto came to bat with the Dodgers trailing by one run and two runners on base: "Two men out, last of the ninth. The pitch. Swung on. There's a drive hit out toward the right-field corner. Henrich going back. He can't get it. It's off the wall for a base hit. Here comes the tying run - and - here's - the winning run."
On National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," April 23, 1982, Barber told host Bob Edwards, "When all of the excitement was over for a little bit, I just sorta caught my breath and without thinking about it, Bob, I said, 'Well, I'll be a suck-egg mule.'"
Edwards asked why he said that. Barber replied, "When you're doing something such as you and I are doing, live radio without any preparation, no script, you are just concentrating on your work and something just comes out...When you realize that things suddenly come out of your subconscious or your unconscious when you're talking to an open microphone, sometimes it frightens you. I know that one of the reasons that many, many years ago, when I start broadcasting, I made a resolution that I would never say a word in private, a profane word or a foul word, that I could never say on a microphone, because I didn't want any speech habits to get where sometime in an unguarded moment I might say something."
In the sixth game, Brooklyn had a three-run lead when Joe DiMaggio came to bat. In Barber's words: "Here's the pitch. Swung on, belted. It's a long one deep to the left center. Back goes Gionfriddo. Back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh, doctor. (Pause for crowd noise.) He went exactly against the railing in front of the bullpen and reached up with one hand and took a home run away from DiMaggio."
More than thirty years later a young broadcaster named Chris Berman on the upstart cable network ESPN adopted "back, back, back," he said, as a tribute to Barber.
In a National Public Radio broadcast decades later, Barber said those calls demonstrated an important rule for a play-by-play announcer: On a long drive, watch the outfielder; he'll be the first to know whether it's catchable. Thus, "Back goes Gionfriddo." "Henrich going back. He can't get it."
Barber was celebrated for his vivid imagery, all the more memorable because he brought the country sayings of his Southern upbringing to urban Brooklyn. WVXU assembled this Red Barber sampler:
The game "is just as tight as a brand-new pair of shoes on a rainy day."
"He's got a smile on there as big as a slice of watermelon."
"He just tied him in a knot and turned him every way but loose."
Johnny Mize "swings that big bat as easily as if it was a dry turkey feather."
"They'll tear up the pea patch before the day is over."
"The bases are FOB - they're full of Brooklyns" - he acknowledged he made up after seeing the term which meant "free on board" in the shipping industry and turning it over in his mind.
His most enduring coinage was "sitting in the catbird seat": In Barber's lexicon, that meant a batter with a three-ball, no-strike count or a team with a comfortable lead. "The catbird seat" was used in the title of his autobiography and the writer James Thurber used the phrase as the title of a 1942 short story in The New Yorker which featured a loud-mouthed woman, Mrs. Ulgine Barrows, who was fond of quoting Red's sayings. As for its origin, he said, "I bought it." He said he lost a poker game to a player who told him, "I was sitting in the catbird seat."
Ernie Harwell, who broke into big-league broadcasting under Barber in 1948 and lasted for 55 seasons, told WVXU, "The ironic thing was, he was a very cultured man, and on the air he sounded like some guy from the backwoods, you know...And he really wasn't. He loved the opera and he loved the classics and all that kind of stuff. He lived on Park Avenue in New York."
In The Broadcasters, a combination history and how-to book, Barber cited Rudyard Kipling's "six honest serving-men" from the poem "The Elephant Child:"
"What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who"
He added six more of his own: "preparation, evaluation, concentration, curiosity, impartiality, and, if such can be achieved, imperturbability."
"Preparation" came first.
Vin Scully, who inherited Red's mantle as "Voice of the Dodgers" and has worn the label for 53 seasons so far, joined the broadcasts in 1950 as a 22-year-old. "His work ethics were so strong that he imbued me with that spirit," Scully told WVXU. "Get to the ballpark early. Check, check, re-check. Talk to players, managers constantly. And that rubbed off on me."
In 1950 attorney Walter O'Malley bought Rickey's 25 percent interest in the Dodgers and took control of the franchise. Red's relationship with the new owner was touchy. "O'Malley wanted to cut me down to size," he said in his autobiography. "He is a devious man, about the most devious man I ever met."
Barber broadcast his thirteenth World Series in 1952, again sharing the NBC radio and television microphones with Mel Allen. It would be his last.
Ever since the Gillette Company bought exclusive rights to the Series in 1939, he had chafed at their cavalier treatment of announcers. That first year he was paid $70 a game, twice the union scale. By 1953 the fee was $200 a game "for the biggest sports even on coast-to-coast television," he fumed. Barber declined Gillette's offer to broadcast the '53 Series when the company refused to negotiate his fee.
When Red told O'Malley what had happened, O'Malley's reply - "That's your problem" - ended Barber's relationship with the Dodgers. His contract for the Brooklyn broadcasts had expired, and the sponsors had made no move to renew it.
Barber told that version of the story in his books. A different recollection comes from Buzzie Bavasi, the longtime Dodger general manager and once Red's neighbor in Scarsdale, New York. "We discussed his future with the Dodgers on many occasions," Bavasi wrote in a 2002 e-mail exchange with the author. "He had made up his mind to seek employment somewhere else. When Walter [O'Malley] heard this he immediately let Red go."
Bavasi, who worked for O'Malley for two decades, added, "Yes, Walter did have a problem with Red's popularity. I doubt that there would [have] been a change if Walter had not heard that Red was looking elsewhere."
A few days after he left the Dodgers, Red was hired by the Yankees.
The new job was quite a comedown. For twenty years in Cincinnati and Brooklyn, he had been the principal broadcaster, handing out assignments to his assistants. He decided how many innings they would call, who would do which commercials, who would handle pre-game and post-game shows.
Further, he said, "If the game took a certain twist, if there was a big rhubarb or a fight or if a man got beaned - if a thing was serious enough - I didn't hesitate to take the air back."
The Yankees' principal broadcaster, Mel Allen, was the most famous sports announcer in the country. Red was hired to handle pre-game and post-game shows on televised home games and to work a few innings of play-by-play. He traveled with the team only occasionally.
"Mel accepted me as an equal," he insisted. "...he could not have been nicer to me either then or all through the years we worked together"
"When he went to Yankee Stadium, he still had the storyteller skills, but he was more of a dry reporter, somewhat bitter, and the verve in his voice was gone," Bob Costas, who grew up in New York in those days, told Curt Smith in The Storytellers. "Barber on the Yankees wasn't anywhere near as good as Mel."
He was forced to adjust, grudgingly, to fundamental changes in the broadcasting industry. In 1939 he had broadcast the first major league game on television over NBC's experimental station W2XBS, when only a few dozen homes had TV sets. In the 50s television became the dominant medium. He was never comfortable with it.
Even more strongly, he deplored the influx of retired ballplayers into the broadcast booth. He dismissed them as "former-great-star-expert(s)." By 1965, after the Yankees fired Allen for "popping off," Barber was sharing the booth with three of those "experts": ex-shortstop Phil Rizzuto, ex-second baseman Jerry Coleman and Joe Garagiola, a onetime backup catcher who had parlayed a quick wit and a trove of real and invented anecdotes about his boyhood pal Yogi Berra into a broadcasting career.
Garagiola occupied a special place in Barber's hell. In the Yankees' booth Garagiola committed what Barber considered the unforgivable sin: "He cut in on me in the middle of sentences...He ran over fellows."
CBS had bought the Yankees, and network executive Michael Burke took over as the team's president in September, 1966. He curtly informed Barber, "We have decided not to seek to renew your contract."
In his 1968 autobiography, Barber left it at that. But in 1970, when he published The Broadcasters, he added a fillip that has become the generally accepted explanation for the end of his 33 years as a major league broadcaster.
On a chilly, rainy day near the end of the season when baseball's marquee franchise fell to last place, the Yankees played a home game before 413 fans. Barber wrote, "I knew what the story would be: This was the smallest crowd, by far, in the history of the massive ballpark built by Babe Ruth, Ed Barrow and Colonel Jake Ruppert." He asked the television director for a shot of the empty seats. The director refused, and Barber was told that the order came from the CBS executive who supervised Yankee broadcasts.
But Barber was still a reporter. As he recalled it, he said, "I don't know what the paid attendance is today - but whatever it is, it is the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium...and this smallest crowd is the story, not the ball game."
According to the University of Florida's Smathers Library, where Red's papers are housed, he broadcast play-by-play on 13 World Series, four baseball All-Star games, five Army-Navy games, one Sugar Bowl, two Rose Bowls, eight Orange Bowls and four National Football League championship games.
That career was over.
Red and Lylah had established their permanent home in Key Biscayne, Florida, near Miami. She lived there year-round and he came home after the baseball season.
At age 58, he began what he called his retirement. In 1967, his first summer off, he and Lylah drove across the country.
But it was an active retirement. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column and did sportscasts for Miami radio and TV stations. He wrote four books, newspaper commentaries and reviews. Cable television impresario Ted Turner hired Barber and Mel Allen to call the 1978 Little League World Series, one of the most bizarre anachronisms in broadcasting history.
That same year, he and Allen - forever linked - became the first broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. They received the Ford C. Frick Award for "major contributions to baseball," an award named for the commissioner Barber despised. (Although recipients are usually referred to as "Hall of Fame broadcasters," the Hall does not consider them members. There is no "Broadcasters' Wing," either; the voices are honored on a wall plaque in the National Baseball Library.)
Red would take one more star turn on a national stage, introducing himself to a generation of listeners who knew only the Los Angeles Dodgers and who, if they followed baseball at all, followed it primarily on television.
The Barbers had left the fast-growing Miami area for the smaller city of Tallahassee, where Lylah had attended Florida State College for Women, the predecessor of Florida State University.
In February, 1980, to commemorate Black History Month, National Public Radio's Morning Edition called Barber for some comments about Jackie Robinson. Soon after, he joined the program as a regular commentator.
His first appearance came on New Year's Day, 1981. The next day he began his weekly spots, four minutes at 7:35 a.m. eastern time every Friday. There would be more than six hundred of them.
The host of Morning Edition, Bob Edwards, lovingly captured those years in Fridays with Red, published after Barber's death. (Most material about the last years of his life comes from that book.)
Tallahassee station WFSU-FM ran an audio line to the Barbers' home, and he broadcast from a desk in his office. Nominally the spot was a sports commentary. In reality, it was a free-form conversation about just about anything, often including his flower garden and the adventures of his cats. He talked about opera; he quoted Victor Hugo and Kahlil Gibran. Listeners were treated to excerpts from some of his broadcasts.
To the buttoned-down Edwards - who had every word of his broadcasts scripted, even "I'm Bob Edwards" - it was both a nightmare and a delight. Red insisted that his segment be live. He made it unpredictable.
A producer would call him every Thursday to discuss topics for the next morning's broadcast. By Friday, Red had often changed his mind and took off in a totally unexpected direction. Edwards described himself as Barber's straight man.
Red gave the starchy newsman a whimsical nickname, "Colonel," after Edwards was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel by his home state.
Barber made much of his garden and of Edwards's ignorance of the subject. Because Red talked about his camellias so often, Edwards's wife planted one in their back yard. Red wanted to know what variety it was. Edwards replied, "Pink."
"Red's spot on 'Morning Edition' was the most popular feature of any program on public radio," Edwards wrote. "...And for many listeners, Red was a reminder of a father, a grandfather or a favorite uncle they had - or wished they had."
But he also showed the mostly-young NPR staffers what Edwards called his "flinty" side. A producer who was a few minutes late with the Thursday phone call got a lecture on punctuality. Some of Edwards's substitute hosts lived in terror of those unscripted Friday mornings.
He was as much a perfectionist as ever: Edwards said he could hear the click of Red's stopwatch at the beginning and end of his allotted four minutes.
Red's religious faith frequently figured in the broadcasts. He quoted scripture and gave condensed versions of some of the sermons he had preached as a lay reader in the Episcopal Church.
During his Yankee years, he and second baseman Bobby Richardson organized Sunday morning prayer services in the team's hotels when they were on the road. Connection magazine in 1998 said this was the beginning of Baseball Chapel, an organization of Christian players.
After leaving baseball, he wrote two books with spiritual themes. Walk in the Spirit is a collection of inspirational stories from sports, including Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella's paralysis and the life of Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes, who quit track competition to become a physician.
In Show Me the Way to Go Home, Red recounted his own powerful spiritual awakening. He was taken to a hospital in Pittsburgh in 1948, near death from bleeding ulcers. He wrote, "Then there was a presence in the room...I was no longer alone...I was told...that I was not to fear, but close my eyes...and sleep. The next morning when I woke I was still in Pittsburgh."
In 1985 Lylah published her own autobiography and appeared on Morning Edition to plug it. Around that time she developed Alzheimer's disease, and much of the rest of Red's life was devoted to caring for her.
"By the time I met him in the early 1980s, he was so frail it seemed a gust of wind might take him away," Bob Edwards wrote. Barber had suffered various physical ailments since the 1940s, going deaf in his left ear and surviving a heart attack and surgery for ulcers that removed much of his stomach.
His career had come full circle: from noncommercial station WRUF in 1930 to noncommercial National Public Radio more than fifty years later. Once more, radio was his home. In his first NPR broadcast he said, "I'm a child of radio."
Like many other radio veterans, Barber never accepted television. He endured it.
He explained why in Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat: "On TV it's the director's show, and the broadcaster is an instrument of his, like a camera. On radio, it's my show, where my knowledge and experience and taste and judgment decide what goes and what doesn't. On radio, you're an artist. On TV, you're a servant."
Many nostalgic fans, as well as present-day broadcasters from Bob Costas to Jon Miller, tout the virtues of baseball on radio. Terry Cashman, composer of many baseball songs, wrote this lyric: "Play-by-play - I saw it on the radio."
Allan Barra, in the online magazine Salon (11/7/00), described listening to tapes of Barber's broadcasts: "There were no complex statistics, no hype and, of course, no visuals. Just poetry. When the wind was blowing the flag. A description of how the fielders were set. An anecdote or two about each player. With nothing to work with but words, Barber painted a picture of the game that kick-started my own imagination in a way that technology never could."
"The Barbers and Scullys came up with radio," Bob Costas told the St. Petersburg Times (5/17/02). "They had to be able to paint the picture. The attention to detail, having to describe the whole thing, was part of how these guys came along.
"The craft is different now. Even the talented guys on radio today have been influenced by having come up with television. Rarely do you hear a guy say what a player's number is or what his stance looks like or talk about adjustments in the outfield alignment. Sometimes you hear a guy call a home run and not even say where in the ballpark it went out. Like, 'Oh, that's gone.' "
Jon Miller, the primary baseball voice of ESPN and the San Francisco Giants, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (6/30/02), "The actual description, giving the count, if the guy is left-handed or right-handed, where did he go to field the ball -- did he go right, did he go back -- those are things lacking in radio broadcasts now. And those are the fundamentals. People need to see what's going on, not just a rough outline of it."
But broadcasting styles have changed. The expectations of the audience have changed. The expectations of a new generation of broadcasters have changed.
The most prominent play-by-play broadcaster of 2003 is Joe Buck, the 34-year-old lead announcer for the Fox Network's baseball and NFL telecasts and the son of longtime St. Louis Cardinals' voice Jack Buck, whose career began in 1948.
"Listening to tapes of Red Barber, listening to tapes of Mel Allen, I know a lot of that stuff wouldn't fly today," Buck told the Post-Gazette. "It was a lot of cliche -- can of corn -- that wouldn't fly. And they were just doing straight baseball. I feel this need to entertain as well as do straight baseball."
Barber would no doubt have cringed at that. In fact, Red was not "doing straight baseball." He had an act all his own: "rhubarb," "tearin' up the pea patch," and "I'll be a suck-egg mule" were clearly designed to entertain as well as inform.
In May, 1992, Barber underwent surgery for cataracts. It was not successful. He was nearly blind, and an NPR producer began doing research for him.
On October 8 he begged off of the next day's broadcast, blaming a sore throat. On that Friday he drove himself and Lylah to a hospital. He underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage and fell into a coma.
Red Barber died at 84 on October 22, 1992, at the Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. The New York Times reported the cause of death was pneumonia and other complications from surgery.
He was survived by Lylah, his wife of 61 years, and their daughter Sarah, then living in New Mexico.
His ashes were buried in his yard, beneath five camellias.
In his Morning Edition tribute, Bob Edwards said, "One of the great voices of America will speak to us no more, and the camellias will never smell as sweet."
Red would not have liked that; camellias have no scent, as several listeners informed the Colonel.
The NPR eulogy ended with Red's voice speaking the words of Victor Hugo that he had quoted on one New Year's broadcast: "Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones, and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."
In Sanford, Florida, where Red grew up, a municipal park bears his name. In Tallahassee, where he lived his last years, Florida State University's Center for Public Broadcasting sits at 1600 Red Barber Plaza. In Gainesville, the University of Florida annually awards the Red Barber Radio Scholarship -- $700 to a junior or senior majoring in telecommunications, with a preference to students planning to pursue careers in sports broadcasting. In Los Angeles, Red's heir, Vin Scully, is the voice of the Dodgers.
Source Notes
The essential history of baseball broadcasting is Curt Smith's Voices of the Game (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications Inc., 1987).
Smith's The Storytellers (New York: Macmillan, 1995) is an oral history featuring reminiscences by many prominent broadcasters from Barber's era and afterward - but not including Barber himself, although Smith's earlier book indicates that he did interview Red.
Barber's autobiography, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968), written with Sports Illustrated's star writer Robert Creamer, presents his perspective on the events of his life, ending with his firing by the Yankees, and his and Creamer's insights into the history of baseball on the air.
Barber's The Broadcasters (New York: The Dial Press, 1970) contains valuable personal reminiscences about the earliest announcers and an interesting "how-to" section, but otherwise it repeats much of the material in his autobiography.
A unique and irreplaceable source is From the Catbird Seat: Red Barber, a 1993 radio documentary written and produced by Greg Rhodes for public station WVXU in Cincinnati. This is where the present-day listener can find Red Barber: http://www.wvxu.org/html/catbird.html. Enjoy excerpts from his play-by-play broadcasts and his later interviews.
Bob Edwards's Fridays With Red (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) documents Barber's later years on National Public Radio.
Other Sources
Barber, Lylah, Lylah. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1985)
Barber, Red, Walk in the Spirit. (New York: The Dial Press, 1969)
Barber, Red, Show Me the Way to Go Home. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971)
Barber, Red, 1947 - When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1982)
Golenbock, Peter, Bums. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1984)
Kahn, Roger, The Boys of Summer. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)
Thurber, James, "The Catbird Seat," The New Yorker, (n.d.) 1942, reprinted in The Thurber Carnival (New York: Modern Library, 1945.
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