Dave Niehaus gets Hall of Fame call

A giant blackboard hung on the wall at The Palace Pool Room in tiny Princeton, Ind. For the baseball fans in that town, in that era, that blackboard was their cable TV. It was their news-crawler, their scoreboard.

D.A. Keimer would sit on a stool in the pool room, watching the news clatter across his Teletype machine. Periodically, he would dip his chalk into a small glass of water and, as neat as a calligrapher, he would write the inning-by-inning account of the major league baseball games.

At the bottom of the line score, he would write the names of the winning and losing pitchers and the names of the home run hitters.

At first the wet, white chalk would be faint against the blackboard, but as the chalk dried, the numbers became vivid and the stories of the games would come to life in those names and numbers.

In the mid-1940s, a young man named Dave Niehaus began his lifelong love for baseball watching Keimer delicately drawing those stories on the blackboard.

"BKLN. Home Run. Hodges. Fourth/2 on," Keimer would write, letting the citizens of Princeton, population 7,000, know that one of their own, Brooklyn first baseman Gil Hodges, had struck again.

"I used to sit there and be mesmerized by that," Niehaus said, remembering Keimer and that scoreboard. "That had as much to do with my baseball love as anything else. Watching those numbers pop up on that blackboard."

Niehaus learned the magic of baseball from those names and numbers. He first understood the idea that one person's imagination can be fired by this game. He first saw that baseball was both a great game and a wondrous story.

In the Palace Pool Room, in Princeton, Ind., in the late 1940s, the first seeds of a Hall of Fame career were planted.

And Tuesday morning, on his 73rd birthday, while Niehaus was in the shower, Dale Petroskey, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, called to tell him he was the 2008 recipient of the Ford C. Frick award.

Petrosky told Niehaus what listeners in Seattle have known for decades.

Dave Niehaus is a Hall of Famer.

"My mind just turned to mush," said Niehaus, who has been the Mariners' play-by-play man since the franchise's birth in 1977. He will be inducted into the broadcaster's wing of the Hall on July 27.

Rarely does an entire region get to share something this profound. But this is an award all of us who have lived in the Northwest and listened to Dave can share with Niehaus.

For Mariners fans, for baseball fans, Niehaus had been our brother, our dad, our favorite uncle, our grandfather. He has been family.

His voice has wafted through summer breezes at picnics and playgrounds. It has bounced down sterile hospital halls and echoed from transistor radios since the Mariners' first game against the Angels in 1977.

It says something about the breadth of people Niehaus has touched that one of the first to call with congratulations was former Mariners center fielder Ken Griffey Jr.

"I'm just glad I beat you there," Niehaus joked with Griffey.

Everybody who loves the game, loves Dave Niehaus.

As dependable as the tides, he has been, and continues to be, the voice of our springs and summers. A storyteller who writes his stories on the fly.

When baseball was nothing in Seattle, Niehaus was something. When the Kingdome was as empty as a Roman ruin, his voice was filling the silence in our living rooms and competing with the hum of the engines in our cars.

"The people of the Northwest got me there," he said of the Hall. "The wonderful, wonderful people of the Northwest beat the drums for me."

Niehaus got to the Hall the hard way, calling games in Seattle, the most remote outpost in the game. He did it calling a lot of losing games for 18 years, before magic struck in 1995.

That year, when the Mariners went to the postseason for the first time, Niehaus' call of Griffey's late-season home runs and Randy Johnson's clutch wins and Edgar Martinez's series-winning double against the Yankees, were played and replayed on "SportsCenter."

Finally, the rest of the country got to hear what we heard. The entire country got to listen to his greatness.

"I feel like melted butter right now," Niehaus said at his afternoon news conference.

I can't imagine being happier for anyone than I am for Dave Niehaus. Good things happen to good people.

And even better news for the Northwest, he said Tuesday he has no interest in retirement. He said the last time he uses his famous home-run call probably will be "when that thing that will be flying away, will be me."

Mercifully, that destination is a long way off.

Dave Niehaus' next stop is Cooperstown.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com