Audio interview: Curt Smith on MLB.com

Curt Smith is a man I alternately hold feelings of respect and disdain for. Respect in that the man has a large understanding of baseball broadcasting history, and disdain for how he has let his personal subjective biases come to influence so much of what we know about baseball broadcasting history, not to mention the fact that he really hasn’t written a readable book since “Voices of The Game.”

I’m a Yankee fan of longstanding. I grew up in the late 70s, long after Mel Allen and Red Barber’s day was done, and for me, the announcers who made me a Yankee fan were the best local trio that’s ever done a game, Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer and Bill White on WPIX-TV and WMCA, WINS and WABC radio. Oh sure, there were other great broadcasting triumvirates, but those have always been cases of three great individual announcers on team. What made Rizzuto-Messer-White special was the unique on-air chemistry they possessed in which all three men got along with each other, all three men were capable of good rapport with each other, and all three men brought something unique to the booth. Rizzuto, the partisan ex-Yankee homer with his inimitable style, White the great straight man foil for Rizzuto, but also a solid player analyst, and Messer the lone professional voice in the booth who provided the nuts and bolts details that the two ex-players couldn’t really provide, and who also provided the necessary tonic as well. Nine innings of just Rizzuto and White would have been overkill. Messer, rotating off with the other two every three innings, provided the buffer role and also could demonstrate his own rapport with them, and also warm, friendly connection with the fans.

All that I mention to say that I remain outraged that Curt Smith dismissed the importance of this trio that spent 15 years together, which in those days was something you didn’t see happen often, but he had the nerve to dismiss Messer, a professional of 30 plus years in the business as someone he considered “dull as a greasepocked pan”. I was so furious when I read that passage I threw the book across the room and since then, the only way I can tolerate the book on my shelf is to have that sentence whited out. If Smith didn’t care for Frank’s work, okay, but did it ever occur to him, that those of us Yankee fans who didn’t become turncoats over a broadcaster’s firing (like Smith did when he said Mel Allen’s firing is why he became a Red Sox fan), and who grew up after Allen, might have actually *liked* the work Frank did? That for us, we could get a thrill listening to Frank say at the start of a broadcast, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, wherever you might be listening to Yankee baseball” and feel a connection to the game? For me, it’s outrageous that a good announcer’s hard work has to languish in obscurity because of one man’s subjective views of the announcers. Hell, I can’t stand Jon Miller, whom Smith butters up throughout his work, but if I were writing a book on broadcasting history, I wouldn’t ignore the man’s accomplishments!

The other gripe about Smith is that the man is incapable of writing anything fresh. Go through all his books since “Voices Of The Game” and you will find inevitably the SAME chapter headings recycled over and over again when talking about the same time periods (“Stargazer”, “Down On My Knees”) and the SAME meanderings you saw in earlier books, only more disjointed. And you will also see Smith keep making the SAME mistake of saying Lon Simmons was at the NBC Radio mic in the 1962 World Series when McCovey lined to Richardson, when it was for the millionth time, George Kell!

Smith’s newest book on Mel Allen reflected all of those bad traits. I leafed through it to see if Smith had anything new on Allen’s firing. All I saw was the SAME interview with Mel from “Voices Of The Game” talking about a regretful Topping (Red Barber’s two autbios showed Topping later that afternoon not being so regretful, saying of Mel, “I’m tired of him popping off.”) and opining that it was Ballantine’s doing in a cost-cutting measure, something Ralph Houk ruled out in David J. Halberstam’s superior “Sports On New York Radio” (if only Smith had written “Voices Of The Game” like this one!) and which the much superior Allen biography by Stephen Borelli also discounted. As a result, I didn’t waste my money on Smith’s book.

The pity of it is that Smith has the knowledge about baseball broadcasting, but putting that knowledge to good use in books that should stand the test of time, has sadly been a failure for the most part.