Ernie

Thank you Paul and good evening everyone. Here's the first pitch of the ball game and it's a strike, and we're under way at the corner of Michigan and Turnbull.

That's an approximate recreation of how Ernie Hartwell typically began a radio broadcast of Detroit Tigers baseball. His on air partner, Paul Carey (who had a good baritone voice) would open the game and hand the reigns over to Ernie, who would take it from there. Facebook reminded me yesterday that my son and I had went, along with thousands of others, to pay our respects to the late broadcaster as he lay in state at Comerica Park after his passing in May 2010.

Eleven years after his death and nineteen since he called his last game, Ernie is still remembered fondly by the Tiger faithful. Perhaps I'm simply caught up in the sentimentality of the moment, but I don't know that anyone can ever match his vocal association with the Motor City Nine.

Having a sportscaster who almost is your team seems rare these days. It wasn't only a Detroit thing: there was Vin Scully with the Dodgers, Harry Caray with the Cubs and so forth across the land. Here in Motown we even had Bruce Martyn and his distinctive voice calling Red Wings hockey over the radio as well. Such associations, such distinctive voices, don't seem to be the case anymore.

I'm not going to make the mistake of the reactionary sentimentalists and try argue that sportscasting today is bad. But too many play by play callers are bland and Midwestern. It does, I think, take a bit of the intimacy away. Although I do like the current Tiger radio man (Dan Dickerson) he is in the unfortunate position of not being Ernie. 

To be fair I don't think even Dickerson would put himself in Harwell's class, and at the end of the day I'm not talking moral imperatives but merely differences. Still, no one filled the baseball airwaves like Ernie. Perhaps one day, but I don't see it.

Banking on it

It's not easy to feel bad for a bank. I'm not exactly overwhelmed with grief about it either. It isn't actually even closing, but rather moving into new digs a few blocks away. So it's getting a new building, that's all. Still, my bank, the building I've went to for over forty years, is closing.

In a bit of serendipity the new place is actually right smack on the corner of Michigan and Turnbull, the site of old Tiger Stadium. And I mean smack on the corner, right where the old ticket office was where I bought literally hundreds of tickets to Detroit Tigers baseball over the years. That part is kind of cool.

But the bank building I've went to is closing. I still have accounts there; at least one of my children still does, and they all live out of state. Just the same, when I walked out of it yesterday I thought, I've been coming to this bank a long time. Me Pops actually met Sparky Anderson there: it was the old Tiger skipper's bank.

Yes, I have had many more many worse changes in my life. This one obviously pales compared to those and I don't want to draw too fine of a point. It's more a shaking my head type of reflection: everything eventually changes, right now down to the mundane and trivial in life. 

Why we even think of such things as ours is perhaps the really interesting question. I'll leave that for another day.