The Sound of Summer

As I watched baseball highlights on SportsCenter tonight, I heard the news that Ernie Harwell, the great Detroit Tigers broadcaster, had succumbed to cancer. To know Tigers baseball meant knowing Ernie.

The news of his passing made me think of the voice I most closely associated with my team, the Minnesota Twins. Herb Carneal was the voice of my youth.

I vividly remember being 9 years old, lying in bed at night, listening to Herb Carneal’s play-by-play of the Twins games on a small transistor radio. We didn’t have air conditioning then, so my bedroom window would be open in a futile effort to find relief from another humid Minnesota summer. The sound of chirping crickets coming through my window and the whir of the small fan aimed at the foot of my bed created a soothing background to Herb’s call of the game. With my eyes growing heavy, I would struggle to stay awake – failing more often than not – just to listen to the final outs of my beloved Twins.

That was the final summer baseball was pure to me. The following season would shatter my sporting naiveté. The 1981 baseball season was interrupted by a players strike and marked the end of the old Metropolitan Stadium. Baseball never held quite the same fascination for me after that. The Twins moved to the soulless Metrodome in 1982. That move, along with the strike, exposed me to baseball as a business, not a sport. A little bit of my childhood died that year.

Oh sure, I kept cheering for the Twins and was thrilled with their World Series victories in ’87 and ’93, but it never lived up to memory of those summer nights in 1980.

This year finds the Twins playing outdoors once again with the opening of Target Field. Yet another business move, but this time a move toward baseball the way it was meant to be played, a move toward rekindling the baseball of my youth.

I imagine some lucky 9 year old out there today drifting off to sleep, listening to John Gordon’s play-by-play, and discovering the sound of summer.