Red Barber

April 17, 1934. Opening Day at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. A 26-year-old radio announcer named Walter Lanier Barber climbed into the booth to call his first professional baseball broadcast. It was also the first big-league game he had ever seen in person, from any seat, in his entire life. The Reds lost to the Cubs 6-0. Nobody in that ballpark could have guessed they were watching the start of one of the defining voices in the sport's history.

Everybody called him Red, for the hair. Over the next 33 years he'd call games for three franchises -- the Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Yankees -- and narrate some of the most important moments baseball ever produced. He'd also, eventually, get fired by the Yankees for doing exactly what made him great in the first place: telling people what he actually saw.

Hired by the Man Who'd Hire Him Twice

Larry MacPhail put Barber in that first Reds booth in 1934, a connection that would matter twice over. MacPhail was Cincinnati's general manager, an innovator who talked owner Powel Crosley Jr. into putting Reds games on the radio in the first place, and he liked what he heard from the young announcer out of the University of Florida. Barber called Reds games from 1934 through 1938, and on May 24, 1935, he had a seat for something nobody in the major leagues had ever broadcast before: the first night game in big-league history. President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House, an electric signal traveled 500 miles to Crosley Field, and 632 Mazda lamps turned a Friday evening into daylight. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1.

"As soon as I saw the lights come on," Barber said decades later, "I knew they were there to stay."

MacPhail moved to Brooklyn in 1938 to run the Dodgers, and in 1939 he brought Barber with him. That's how a broadcaster who'd never called a game outside Cincinnati ended up in the biggest media market in the country, at 31 years old, about to become one of the most recognizable voices in New York.

Brooklyn, and a Camera Nobody Knew What to Do With

Barber's first Dodgers broadcast came on Opening Day, April 18, 1939, against the Giants at Ebbets Field. Four months later he did something no one in baseball had ever done: on August 26, 1939, he called the first televised major-league game in history, a doubleheader between the Dodgers and Barber's old team, the Reds, broadcast on the experimental NBC station W2XBS. The signal reached maybe 400 sets in the entire New York area (more people read this sentence than watched that broadcast live). Barber worked with two cameras and no monitor.

"I had to watch to see which one's red light was on," he said, "then guess its direction."

He spent 15 seasons in Brooklyn, through the Branch Rickey years, through Ebbets Field's tightest pennant races, and he became the voice most associated with a franchise that hadn't yet won anything. He talked in a dialect all his own -- a player on a hot streak was "sittin' in the catbird seat," an on-field dustup was a "rhubarb," the bases loaded were "F.O.B., full of Brooklyns." None of it sounded manufactured. It sounded like a man from Mississippi describing baseball the only way he knew how, and Brooklyn adopted every word of it.

Telling It Straight on the Biggest Day in the Sport

By 1947, Branch Rickey had decided to integrate baseball, and Barber -- raised in the segregated South, uneasy enough about the plan that he privately considered quitting rather than call it -- ended up being one of the first people outside the front office Rickey trusted with the news. Barber worked through his own discomfort and called Jackie Robinson's major-league debut on April 15, 1947, the way he called everything else: straight, without editorializing, letting what happened on the field speak for itself. It's a decision he wrote about at length years later, and one that came to define how people remembered him.

That same October, still with Brooklyn, Barber had the call for one of the great near-misses in World Series history. Game 4, Yankees leading the Series, Bill Bevens one out from a no-hitter he'd walk his way out of ten times over.

Swung on, there's a drive hit out toward the right-field corner. Gionfriddo scores! Reiser scores! And the Dodgers win it on Cookie Lavagetto's double off the right-field wall!

Bevens lost his no-hitter, his shutout, and the game in the same swing -- the closest anyone has ever come to a World Series no-hitter, before or since. Barber was on the other side of that call, rooting for Brooklyn. Six years later he'd be working for the team he'd just watched lose.

Leaving Brooklyn, Joining the Enemy

Barber's exit from the Dodgers had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with money he thought he'd earned. After the 1953 season, he got into a standoff with the Gillette Company over the broadcast fee for that year's World Series. Owner Walter O'Malley wouldn't back him. Barber turned the assignment down on principle, resigned on October 28, 1953, and a young broadcaster named Vin Scully -- the man Barber had personally mentored into the Dodgers booth back in 1950 -- inherited the World Series gig that had once been his.

Weeks later, Barber signed with the Yankees for the 1954 season (a resignation over principle somehow ended with him in the enemy's booth), teaming up with Mel Allen, the club's longtime lead voice. It's an almost unthinkable career move by today's standards -- the signature Dodgers broadcaster of the Jackie Robinson era jumping to the crosstown rival -- but that's exactly what happened. Allen set the schedule and got top billing. Barber worked as his equal, not his understudy.

Thirteen Seasons in Pinstripes

Barber called Yankees baseball from 1954 through 1966, a run covering nine pennants and four championships (1956, 1958, 1961, and 1962), through the tail end of the Mantle dynasty and into the franchise's sudden collapse. His signature moment in the booth came on October 1, 1961, when Roger Maris came to the plate against Tracy Stallard needing one more home run to break Babe Ruth's single-season record. Allen had called Maris's 60th five days earlier. Barber had the call on WPIX-TV for number 61 (the asterisk debate was already starting before Maris had even circled the bases).

None of that goodwill survived five more years of losing. By 1966 the Yankees, a franchise that had drawn over two million fans as recently as 1961, had collapsed into last place under CBS ownership. On September 22, 1966, with a paid crowd of just 413 scattered around a 67,000-seat stadium, Barber asked his camera crew to show the empty stands and told viewers exactly what they were looking at. Four days later, the Yankees fired him for it. He never called another baseball game.

The Second Act Nobody Saw Coming

Barber didn't disappear after 1966. He moved to Tallahassee, became a lay reader in the Episcopal Church, wrote a newspaper column, and in 1981 started a Friday-morning segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" with host Bob Edwards. It ran for more than a decade and introduced Barber to a national audience that had never heard him call a single pitch. Edwards later wrote a book about their on-air friendship, and Florida State University's public broadcasting center now sits at 1600 Red Barber Plaza -- a strange kind of tribute for a man who spent 33 years describing other people's ballgames.

He died on October 22, 1992, in Tallahassee, at 84. The Yankees had fired him a quarter-century earlier for saying something true out loud. It's the same thing that made every broadcast he ever called worth listening to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Red Barber?

Red Barber (born Walter Lanier Barber, February 17, 1908, in Columbus, Mississippi) was a Ford C. Frick Award-winning broadcaster who called Major League Baseball for 33 seasons -- the Cincinnati Reds (1934-1938), Brooklyn Dodgers (1939-1953), and New York Yankees (1954-1966). He called baseball's first night game (1935), its first televised broadcast (1939), and Jackie Robinson's major-league debut (1947) before spending 13 seasons as Mel Allen's broadcast partner for the Yankees.

Why did the Yankees fire Red Barber in 1966?

On September 22, 1966, Barber asked his WPIX camera crew to show the nearly empty stands during a game that drew a paid crowd of just 413 -- the smallest in Yankee Stadium history -- and told viewers that the empty seats, not the game, were the real story. The Yankees fired him four days later, on September 26, 1966. Full account: the 413-fan game and Barber's firing.

What was Red Barber's most famous broadcasting call?

Barber called several defining moments in baseball history: the first night game in 1935, the first televised major-league broadcast in 1939, Jackie Robinson's debut in 1947, and Roger Maris's record-breaking 61st home run on WPIX-TV on October 1, 1961. He is also on record for Cookie Lavagetto's pinch-hit double that broke up Bill Bevens' no-hitter in Game 4 of the 1947 World Series.

Why did Red Barber leave the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Yankees?

Barber resigned from the Dodgers on October 28, 1953, after owner Walter O'Malley declined to support him in a fee dispute with the Gillette Company over that year's World Series broadcast. He signed with the Yankees for the 1954 season, joining Mel Allen in the booth for the next 13 years.

Was Red Barber inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Barber and Mel Allen were the first two recipients of the Hall of Fame's Ford C. Frick Award in 1978, which honors broadcasters in the Hall's broadcaster wing rather than through full Hall of Fame induction. Barber was also inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 1973 and, posthumously, the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.