In ‘40s And ‘50s, Allen Was Yankees

The New York Yankees were a first-place team on the day Mel Allen dies. He would have liked that.

He loved the Yankees and Yankees fans loved him, loved the sound of his voice describing another victory. He was more than a play-by-play man. He was the sound of the Yankees.

The players were on that incredibly distant place called the field. They were larger than life and even larger than that, more like gods in pinstripes. If that seems too dramatic a description, it’s only because you weren’t a Yankees fan in the ‘40s and ‘50s. All they did was win - How about that! - and Mel Allen was their voice.

The Dodgers had the brilliant-but-understated Red Barber, and Giants’ fans had Russ Hodges, whose one great moment was Bobby Thomson’s playoff home run. For Yankees fans back then, when it seemed the winning would never stop, Allen’s robust Southern voice was as much a part of the team as the great Joe DiMaggio’s batting average.

My friend, Steve Singer, was a fan who grew up with Allen. “For a kid rooting for the team - and it was a very good team - he made it an exciting broadcast,” Singer said. “Strikeouts, hits, homers, Ballantine blasts, he really made you feel it.”

Not long ago, Singer heard old tapes of Allen broadcasting the pennant-clinching game against the Red Sox in ‘49 and the World Series of that year.

“He was a master,” Singer said. “He told you everything about the game, how the shade was starting to cover the infield, and he followed the ball on every hit. He gave you an accurate description of the game and infused it with a sense of energy that broadcasters don’t give you anymore.”

I covered the Yankees the last year Allen was in the booth, 1964. He spent a quarter-century with them and was fired at the end of that season. At spring training the next year, and this was a Yankees team defending its American League championship, the only question people wanted answered was about Allen. Why had he been fired? We didn’t know, and didn’t work hard enough to find out. The question was asked for the entire season, as the Yankees dropped into the second division.

Jim Bouton, a pitcher on that team, says, “I think they got rid of him because he lost that wonderful timing he had. He just talked too much, went on and on. But he loved baseball, he really did. It was his whole life.”

Tony Kubek, who came before Bouton, remembers a “gentle, kindhearted man. I never socialized with Mel, I don’t think any of the players did. But we knew he was a giant. Sometimes, we’d be in the clubhouse, listening to him do the game, and that wonderful voice would pierce through everything. He let the game carry the moment. He let the game’s rhythms come through. But he didn’t root for the Yankees. You could never call him a ‘homer.”’

Kubek, when he became a television color broadcaster for NBC, worked a single Saturday afternoon game with Allen, who was brought in to pinch-hit for Kubek’s regular play-by-play man. “We had a nice time,” Kubek remembers. “I listened to him.”

The Yankees brought Allen back for old-timers’ games, and special events. The voice was the same. If you shut your eyes, when he was introducing DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, it wasn’t hard to imagine him behind the old radio microphone.

And when I told Kubek I was calling because Mel Allen had died, this was his immediate and splendid response: “When does his plaque go up in the Stadium?”