BUDDY BLATTNER, 89
Baseball player and broadcaster
Buddy Blattner, a former Major League Baseball player whose career as a broadcaster included seven years on "Baseball's Game of the Week" with co-host Dizzy Dean, died Friday of complications from lung cancer at his home in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield.
Mr. Blattner was the dependable straight man of the broadcast duo. The colorful Mr. Dean, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1930s, could be depended upon to mangle the English language, resort to such country colloquialisms as "he slud into second base" and break into a rendition of "The Wabash Cannonball" during on-the-field lulls. TV viewers could always rely on Mr. Blattner to at least give the score.
"People liked [Mr. Dean] giving everything but the score but wanted me to restore sanity," he told author Curt Smith for his 2005 book "Voices of Summer."
Mr. Blattner and Mr. Dean began broadcasting "Baseball's Game of the Week" for ABC-TV in 1953 and were together through the 1959 season, the last four seasons on CBS.
They also broadcast nationwide on the Liberty and Mutual radio networks at a time when Major League Baseball fans in the South and West, before expansion, had to rely on Mr. Blattner and other distinctive radio voices to follow the careers of Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Willie Mays and other stars of the era. The voices of the announcers, mingled with the crowd noise and the sharp crack of the bat, brought the game to life for radio listeners in neighborhood barbershops, on the factory floor and in trucks making deliveries.
Mr. Blattner tired of Dean's antics after a while, prompting him to ask for a release from his $75,000-a-year contract. "Diz can be charming," he told The Washington Post in 1959, "but he likes to push people around. I made up my mind he'd do it only once to me."
Mr. Blattner also had play-by-play stints for the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals, the California Angels, the Kansas City Royals and the NBA's St. Louis Hawks.
- The Washington Post
