Barber did this without a shred of pretentiousness (unlike the above rhapsody). And there was nothing phony about his folksiness, the “sittin’ in the catbird seat, tearin’ up the pea patch, havin’ a rhubarb” stuff that always went down like a slug of honey. Hey, let’s keep on being pretentious-there was poetry in what Barber did. Yes, he was a great reporter; nobody captured better the sequence of events that makes baseball unique-the fidgety tension of batter vs. pitcher, the blind destiny of the ball, the bang-bang climax. Didn’t he in fact invent “bang-bang”? And “squeaker”? And so many more instant epiphanies?
Those things were part of the poetry. But even more of it was just in the easy lilt of his voice, the voice of a man at ease with himself–a voice that intimated exactly how much fun the game was and how serious the fun was. A poet musicalizes the workaday task of language, and what I remember best is this lovely music of the ordinary that eased out of Barber-how he’d say something like “Here’s Gil Hodges, fourth in Burt Shotton’s hitting list of nine”-and, as nutty as it may sound, how those syllables would give me a rush of pleasure.
And of course there was a kind of moral drama in Barber’s career, triggered by Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Barber made an affecting American confession, how this religious Mississippian was confounded by the idea of a black player in the major leagues, and how he worked his way through this impasse through his religion, as well as the example of Dodgers president Branch Rickey and some others. I’ll never forget listening to Barber the day Robinson batted cleanup for the first time. Barber said Jack deserved it: “He’s a tremendous ballplayer.” And there was a kind of joy in the way he said “tremendous”-the self-redeeming joy of a good man who had broken through some barriers of his own.
No other broadcaster has supplied that kind of memory. Let’s not even mention integrity-Barber was after all the man who mentioned the 60,000 empty seats at Yankee Stadium in 1966 and got canned for it by Yankees president Mike Burke. That was the end of 33 years of broadcasting. Hey, Burke’s not in the Hall of Fame, Barber is. Let’s wallow in corn-Barber was a noble presence. Listening to tapes won’t do it-you had to be there, and my generation was lucky to be there. There’s a taint on baseball today-money and hype clog its veins. Barber’s voice was the voice, not of innocence, a concept that has too many fingerprints on it, but the voice of… maybe felicity is the word. Maybe we were deluded even then-the public is always deluded-but a certain gladness floated in those ballparks, not today’s media-bludgeoned hysteria. Barber was the graceful voice of that American felicity. He wasn’t the best anything. He was a class of one.
