The Detroit Tigers’ Paul Carey: Baseball’s Best Number Two Voice
In 1949, Paul Carey became a staff announcer for WCEN, Mt. Pleasant’s only radio station. At the time, staff announcers at small stations also wrote news and commercial copy, took transmitter readings, made coffee and emptied wastebaskets, and got temperature updates from the thermometer outside the back door.
Saginaw’s WKNX became his next radio home in April of 1953. On April 5 of that year, WKNX-TV signed on the air, on UHF channel 57 – so it’s very likely that Paul Carey also did some TV work in Saginaw. At the time, he was also bumming rides down to Briggs Stadium to watch the Detroit Tigers play.
He arrived in Detroit to stay in 1956, when he became the sports director of WJR, Michigan’s most powerful radio station. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he called University of Michigan, and Detroit Pistons, basketball games. He also compiled the Friday night high school football scoreboard heard after the midnight newscast, when stringers from metro Detroit to the distant Upper Peninsula phoned in results; when a group of voices as familiar as those of your parents, Paul Carey’s included, made the big station at 760 on the dial what it said it was in its top of the hour ID: The Great Voice of the Great Lakes.
In 1973, Paul Carey joined Ernie Harwell in the Tigers’ radio booth. The ’73 Tigers were defending American League East champs, and still respectable. They quickly bottomed, losing 102 games in 1975. But 1976 was the year of Mark Fidrych magic at Tiger Stadium, and then came Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, Kirk Gibson, Lance Parrish, and Jack Morris; the homegrown stars who would win a world championship in 1984.
While the Tigers were running away with everything in 1984, Paul’s wife Patti was undertgoing cancer treatment. On this side of the radio speaker, we never knew. We heard, at the top of every sixth inning: “with Ernie Harwell, this is Paul Carey, from . . . ” From Tiger Stadium, and from yards that are no longer around: the Kingdome in Seattle, Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Comiskey Park in Chicago. And some that were, like the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, before ball parks took on the names of phone companies and software manufacturers.
Patti Carey passed away during the winter between the 1984 and 1985 seasons. For Paul Carey, life and baseball went on. Tiger fans with a sense of radio history began to realize they were listening to someone special. Consistency, thou art a jewel, goes an old saying, and Paul Carey was consistent. Like your favorite old sweatshirt: there when you need it, a perfect fit, made you feel great. His powerful voice, often dubbed by enthusiastic sportswriters as “the voice of God” (think Barry White calling a baseball game) rattled the speakers of car radios and transistor portables and tube Trans-Oceanics, season after season. Yet he never drew attention to himself by calling a Kirk Gibson blast “Gibsonian” or shreiking “Ball game over! Tigers win! Thaaaa Tigers WIN!”
For years, the Tigers were the only team whose radio announcers worked without an engineer. Paul Carey produced the broadcasts. He set up the mikes and mixing board, checked levels, tore everything down while on the road and set it up at the next stop, and kept track of the out-of-town scores. His was the voice board operators listening in cue mode at the Tigers’ radio network affiliates heard during rain delays, letting them know when play might resume, and counting down the minutes until the start of another broadcast: “Starting in five minutes . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . WOOF.” (First time I’d heard anyone cue the network with “woof.”)
Tiger teams of the late 80s were good, but not great. It was around that time that I finished taking some pictures from the box seats behind the Tiger dugout one Sunday morning, turned around to head back to the right field overhang, and there was Paul Carey, on his way somewhere. No one else looks like Paul Carey. He said hello. No one else sounds like Paul Carey, either. Maybe he noticed the headphones I had looped around my neck, and knew I’d be listening to the broadcast. I smiled and returned his greeting, and thought: Gods really do walk among us mortals.
A few days before Christmas 1990, the Tigers revealed that they were giving Ernie Harwell one final contract, for one more season. In other words, pushing him out of the booth. You didn’t need a radio to hear the howls of outraged Tiger fans. It was as if the team had scrapped their wedding gown white home uniforms with the Olde English “D” for something stylish in red and teal. Forgotten afterwards was Paul Carey’s announcement that he was retiring after the ’91 season.
Paul Carey’s farewell tour of the American League took place in the shadow of his Hall of Fame partner and friend. His last game at the Tiger mike, on October 6, 1991, was also the last major league game played in Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. On the seven-inch reel in the tape archives, as Oriole stars of the past emerge from the home dugout in a Field Of Dreams-like ceremony, Paul Carey buttons up his last broadcast:
“Thus this season ends for the Tigers. And, for Ernie Harwell and me, it’s the end of a long association. It’s been marvelous these nineteen years with Ernie and the Tigers. Normally, at this point in the last broadcast of the year, I would invite you to join us for spring training broadcasts from Lakeland, Florida. But next spring, it will be somebody else I hope you’ll be tuning in to. Right now, I would like to extend just one more thank you for all these years . . . and, for the last time, for our engineer Frank Sorentino, and for Ernie Harwell, this is Paul Carey saying so long. Again, the final score: the Detroit Tigers 7, the Baltimore Orioles 1.”
That should be the end of the story. It isn’t. At one of Tiger manager Sparky Anderson’s auctions for CATCH (Caring Athletes’ Team for Children’s and Henry Ford Hospitals), Tiger players, and Paul Carey, were signing autographs. At an age when you’re really too old to have heroes — even if you do collect autographs and have boxes of baseball games on tape — I went and had a great time getting signatures and exchanging a few words and a smile or two with actual big leaguers. And the best number two announcer whom, unless you’re a Tiger fan, you may have never heard.
