Score Knew the Score - The Fans Came First

For a generation of Cleveland Indians fans, Herb Score is the voice they will always remember.

It wasn't a particularly mellow voice. He had a peculiar accent, one unlike any I've heard before or since. And he wasn't a polished announcer by any stretch of the imagination.

Instead, Herb came across as one of us, a fan, someone who was enjoying the games he was broadcasting, and who wanted us to enjoy them, too.

That was a pretty tall order during most of the three decades he sat in the Tribe's broadcast booth, first on television from 1964 to 1967, and then on the radio from 1968 to 1997. As Joe Tait, a former broadcast partner of Score's, once said, "Herb Score has seen more bad baseball than anybody."

Score died early Tuesday morning at his home in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland. He was 75. I remember when he was on TV, calling the games with Harry Jones; and his earliest days in the radio booth, with Bob Neal. He teamed with Tait in the mid-1970s, and they were the tandem calling the games when I left Ohio for the West Coast in '76.

So it was remarkable, to me, that Herb was still broadcasting the games more than 20 years later, when I moved back to Northeast Ohio in 1997. By then, the Indians were actually good. They had been to the World Series in 1995, losing to the Atlanta Braves. And they returned to the fall classic in that summer of '97, coming oh-so-close to winning it all before losing to the Florida Marlins (it still pains me to say that -- the Marlins?) in seven games.

The tributes began as soon as the news of Score's passing broke -- understandably so. Score was once a budding major league star, with the Indians in the late 1950s. It's been said that he was Sandy Koufax before Sandy Koufax came along -- meaning, of course, that he was the fireballing lefthander who was expected to take the baseball world by storm. But fate wasn't so kind. He was struck in the eye by a line drive off the bat of New York's Gil McDougal in May of 1957 (just a month before I was born), and his once promising career was derailed after that. Score never blamed the incident -- he insisted he encountered arm problems and was simply never the same.

Known for his humility, and his faith, Score jumped at the chance to give broadcasting a try in 1964, and it started a 34-year broadcasting career that became the stuff of legend in Cleveland lore.

Any of us who grew up as Indians fans in the 1960s. '70s, '80s and even '90s cut our teeth on Herb's descriptions of the games. They were simple, direct and free of fluff and bluster. He described what he was watching, to the best of his ability. If that ability was sometimes lacking, he more than made up for it with his knowledge of, love of, and respect for, the game.

Those descriptions of Indians games meant so much to us as fans because we couldn't just turn on the TV and see every game, every night. In those days, only occasional Indians games were televised on weekends, and then only if they were on the road. Home games could be heard only on the radio, and that's where Herb, and his long line of broadcast partners over a 30-year span, came in. We depended on them, and nobody came through quite like Herb.

Herb Score was a legend to multiple generations of Cleveland sports fans. He was already missed, having stepped away from the microphone after the 1997 season. Now, he'll be mourned, too.