The Houston Chronicle reports:

Milo Hamilton, a signature voice of Major League Baseball who roamed the big league map for three decades before finding in the Astros and in Houston the team and town for which he had been searching through a long, storied career in broadcasting, died Thursday. He was 88.

Hamilton’s son, Mark, said Hamilton, who had been in hospice care for several weeks, died at 10:53 a.m., a fan to the end of the Astros and of the sport that was his profession and his passion.

Hamilton, the 1992 recipient of the Ford Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, made his final visit to Minute Maid Park in June and spent his final days listening and watching from afar as the Astros made their long-awaited return to contention and as their most storied player, Craig Biggio, was installed in the Hall of Fame.

“He loved the organization, and he loved what was going on with the ballclub this year,” Mark Hamilton said. “Even with his health, the one thing that kept him going until the end was how great these kids were doing.”

Hamilton called Major League Baseball games on radio and television from the 1950s into the current decade, working for the St. Louis Browns (1953), St. Louis Cardinals (1954), Chicago Cubs (1956-57, 1980-84), Chicago White Sox (1962-65), Atlanta Braves (1966-75), Pittsburgh Pirates (1976-79) and the Astros, joining the team in 1985 and serving as its primary on-air voice from 1987 through 2012. …

Hamilton’s most famous moment behind the microphone came in Atlanta, where he had the radio call of Henry Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run in 1974.

In Houston, where he spent more than half of his years in the major leagues, he will be remembered as delivering the soundtrack for many of the team’s greatest moments, including a half-dozen playoff series and its first and only World Series appearance in 2005.

And it was in Houston that he finally was able to achieve the longevity, and the enduring connection to a city and its fans, that had escaped him in other stops along the way.

“He loved the city and was passionate about the ballclub. You saw that over the years,” Mark Hamilton said. “He wanted to be involved, and the ballclub was so good to him up to the end by letting him remain involved.”

Curt Smith, author of the book Voices of the Game, said Hamilton’s small-town roots and traditional ways were a perfect fit for Houston and the Southwest.

“In coming to Texas, he found a home and a region that liked him to an extraordinary degree,” Smith said. “He hearkened back to an era where for many people there was only one sport, and that sport was baseball. He called other sports and called them well, but to Milo, there was really only one game, and that was baseball.”

Smith in one of his books on broadcasting history ranked Hamilton at No. 27 among the great voices of the game, “and you can make the case he deserved to be higher,” he said, “He had every took that a broadcaster needed – a wonderful, soothing, wearable voice. And he felt he owed the listener the best that was within him.

“I hope it gave him a sense of satisfaction that there were millions of people who loved him,” Smith added.

That was a very nice thing for Smith to say. It was certainly nicer than the quote about Hamilton in Voices of the Game from baseball sabermetrician Bill James, who in 1985 called Hamilton “a model of professionalism, fluency and comportment; he is, in short, as interesting as the Weather Channel, to which I would frequently turn when he was calling games. … He broadcast games in a tone that would be more appropriate for a man reviewing a loan application. He projects no sense at all that he is enjoying the game or that we ought to be, and I frankly find it difficult to believe that the writers who ripped the Cubs for firing Hamilton actually watch the broadcasts.”

That was when Hamilton was announcing the Cubs the second time. The Chronicle’s obituary lists Hamilton’s zigzag career and the vagaries of sports broadcasting at the highest levels:

He grew up listening to music and sports on the radio and hosted his first broadcast for Armed Forces Radio on the island of Guam at age 18 as a Navy Seebee during World War II.

He worked on radio stations in Iowa during his college days at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1950, and worked for a station in Davenport, Iowa, before he got his first major league job in 1953 in St. Louis.

Hamilton would spend the rest of his career in and around baseball, but circumstances and personalities, as he described in his autobiography, Making Airwaves, frequently conspired against his hopes of a long-term job such as the ones enjoyed by mentors like Bob Elson of the White Sox and contemporaries Vin Scully with the Dodgers and Ernie Harwell with the Tigers.

His job with the Browns in 1953 ended with the team’s move from St. Louis to Baltimore as the Baltimore Orioles, and his lone season with the Cardinals was undone by his enduringly fractious association with lead announcer Harry Caray and Caray’s desire to work with a former player, future Frick Award winner Joe Garagiola.

“Enduringly fractious” is right. (Of course, Caray eventually didn’t get along with Garagiola either, but given Garagiola’s reported ambition to a possible fault, there may have been blame on both sides. Caray also worked with Jack Buck, who was fired in 1959 to make room for another announcer, but rehired in 1961 after said other announcer left.)

Hamilton’s first stint with the Cubs in the 1950s ended when the team opted to bring former player and manager Lou Boudreau into the booth. A productive association alongside Elson with the White Sox, whose radio network stretched into Texas and across the South, led to an offer to join the Braves with their move to Atlanta in 1966.

The Atlanta job included the Aaron career home chase to which Hamilton’s voice is forever linked, but it ended in the midst of budget cuts as the ballclub was preparing to be sold in the mid-1970s.

Who replaced Hamilton in Atlanta? Skip Caray, Harry’s son.

Hamilton moved to Pittsburgh, where he called games for the only World Series champions of his career, the 1979 Pirates, but also had to battle the specter of Bob Prince, the veteran announcer who was let go in 1975 and who worked briefly in Houston before returning to Pittsburgh in the 1980s.

Another career setback came after his return to Chicago in 1980, where he was hired by WGN as the heir apparent to veteran announcer Jack Brickhouse on Cubs broadcasts. The team’s new owner hired his one-time nemesis Caray away from the White Sox, and Hamilton’s health also took a turn for the worse when he was diagnosed in 1982 with leukemia.

His contract in Chicago was not renewed after the 1984 season, and he came to Houston in 1985 to fill the job vacated when Dewayne Staats went from Houston to the Cubs. He split duties between television and radio duties, generally working in the booth opposite Gene Elston, the original voice of Major League Baseball in Houston, and became the team’s lead announcer when Elston was let go after the 1986 season.

Hamilton (who also announced Bulls games for WGN-TV) was to take over as the Cubs’ principal announcer with the retirement of Jack Brickhouse; by the second half of the 1981 season Hamilton was finishing games (which the lead announcer usually does). Harry Caray had replaced Hamilton’s mentor, Bob Elson, with the White Sox, and in the early ’80s WGN-TV carried Cubs and White Sox games. Before the 1982 season, the White Sox, under new ownership, planned to move their games to the Sportsvision pay-TV channel. Caray figured out he’d be seen in far fewer houses and bars, one thing led to another, and Caray moved to Wrigley Field, working (tensely) with Hamilton on WGN-TV. After one season, WGN moved Hamilton to radio for the first three and last three innings, with Caray working the first three and last three on TV, then they’d flip for the middle three innings.

Hamilton’s principal sin was not being as colorful as the aforementioned Prince and Harry Caray. In broadcasting you are told over and over again to be yourself, which is sound advice (pun not intended) until your own self isn’t adequate, at least for the situation. Like CBS and ABC announcer Chris Schenkel (also a Midwesterner; Schenkel was from Indiana and Hamilton from Iowa) and for that matter Elson (a Chicago native), Hamilton wasn’t controversial. He didn’t say things that were quotable in the early days of sports media coverage. I’m not sure I agree with James’ assessment of Hamilton as being dull; he was more vanilla, someone who did things correctly but not someone you’d watch to see what crazy thing he would do or funny thing he would say next.

To be candid without speaking ill of the dead, Hamilton didn’t exactly handle these hard-to-handle situations well. Buck was not happy to be fired, but he did the jobs he was given to do, so he didn’t burn bridges like, say, Keith Olbermann. It’s also ironic that Hamilton became the Astros’ top announcer after the Astros fired their original announcer, Gene Elston. (Although if you heard Elston’s call of the Astros’ division-clinching no-hitter, you wouldn’t be surprised. It made Hamilton sound like a screamer in comparison.)

Hamilton wrote his autobiography, Making Airwaves, in which, the Chronicle reported in 2006 …

… Astros Hall of Fame broadcaster Milo Hamilton writes about his childhood in Iowa, recalls his battle with leukemia, and remembers highlights from his 60 years behind the microphone.

Hamilton also doesn’t mince words when discussing a pair of ex-colleagues: former Astros manager and current broadcaster Larry Dierker and former Chicago Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray.

In Making Airwaves: 60 Years at Milo’s Microphone, a 252-page book co-authored by Dan Schlossberg and Bob Ibach, Hamilton opens up about, among other things, Dierker’s managing and a strained relationship with Caray. …

“I’m sure a lot of people will be surprised to know what was going on, and that’s why I wrote about it,” Hamilton said Wednesday. “It’s my book and my story, and it was time for me to say some things about some people that have been a part of my life and that I’ve had some bumps and bruises.”

In the book, Hamilton, 79, takes a shot at Dierker, with whom he shared a booth for several years before Dierker led the Astros to four division titles in five years as manager. Dierker had criticized Hamilton in his 2003 autobiography This Ain’t Brain Surgery.

“I didn’t think he would be a great manager,” Hamilton writes. “His teams did well in spite of him. He did let the guys play, as they say, but ultimately a manager’s got to make a difference in some games, and Dierker rarely did. He didn’t possess the sort of savvy or strategy that led to winning, especially in the postseason. That’s when a manager’s moves become magnified.

“His coaches openly questioned or raised eyebrows about some of the moves he made. He left his starting pitchers in longer than most managers because as a pitcher he was used to pitching deep into games. But the game has changed since he was a pitcher. With a bullpen of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-inning pitchers, why flirt with disaster?

“This is not to say that Dierker wasn’t a good manager — he simply wasn’t a great one.”

Dierker, who got an e-mail from Hamilton letting him know he would be mentioned in the book, didn’t take offense to what was written.

“I don’t think that’s bad at all,” said Dierker, who in his book made allusions to Hamilton’s ego. “It’s actually pretty truthful. Whether or not it’s good or bad, most managers tend to overmanage, and he think it’s better if you overmanage.

“A lot of guys make every little move, whether bunting or stealing, to make something happen. Generally, I tried to save my bullets. That was my style, and I still believe it.

“It’s a matter of opinion. I had good players. I’m not going to say I’m the reason we won four of five years, but I really didn’t think I messed anything up.”

Hamilton and Caray worked together in St. Louis in the 1950s and again years later with the Chicago Cubs before Hamilton left for Houston in 1985 because of what the Cubs called “personality differences.” Caray died in 1998.

“Being around Caray, day after day, was a real challenge,” Hamilton writes. “Harry’s handling of people was poor, to say the least. It didn’t matter if he was dealing with the starting pitcher, traveling secretary, the public relations person or an usher. He treated everyone the same way. In short, he was a miserable human being.”

Ibach, a former Baltimore Sun sportswriter and Cubs public relations director, recalled Wednesday a handful of examples when Caray put Hamilton through what he calls “a living hell.”

“When I first came to the Cubs at the end of the ’81 season, (former Cubs lead announcer) Jack Brickhouse handed the baton to Milo, and it was announced on air,” Ibach said. “All of a sudden, Milo got an invitation to a press conference. He shows up, and Tribune’s introducing Harry Caray as lead broadcaster. Milo was shocked. To his credit, he composed himself in the back of the room that day.

“Harry said, ‘What are you doing? I thought you’d leave town by now.’ “

Certainly we should try to be good coworkers, and multiple sources indicate Caray was probably not, at least in his younger days. (Though a lot of his on-air shtick was just that, according to his longtime partner Steve Stone.) However, sports announcers aren’t judged on how well they work with others; they are judged on what they sound like to the listeners and viewers. (That includes such areas as drawing fans to games and selling sponsors’ products and services, which Caray mastered.)

The Chicago Tribune wrote upon Harry Caray’s death in 1998:

Milo Hamilton has no problem picking a favorite among the Cubs telecasts he worked with Harry Caray. It was the final one–and that was reason enough for it to be his favorite.

“On the last day of the 1982 season–we hadn’t even packed up our briefcases yet–we looked at each other and said, `Well, we made it through the year, and nobody thought we would,’ ” Hamilton said over the telephone from Houston. “The next two years I did radio, and it was wonderful working with (Lou) Boudreau.”

More than 15 years after Caray first plopped down in Jack Brickhouse’s seat in the Wrigley Field broadcast booth, the chair Hamilton believed he had staked a claim on, Hamilton finds it impossible to mask his resentment.

 

Which prompted the Tribune’s Bob Verdi to write:

For fans of both men, and I include myself among them, it is an uncomfortable read, but perhaps an inevitable occurrence.

Anyone covering the Cubs during the early 1980s knew of the strained relationship between Caray and Hamilton, who worked on different wavelengths in a booth that could be described as chilly. On their best days, they coexisted.

Why Hamilton has chosen now, eight years after Caray’s death, to torch Harry as a “miserable human being” is Milo’s business, maybe brisk business. Hamilton’s venting figures to sell more copies than will chapters about his life and times with the Houston Astros.

However, in defense of Caray, who can’t defend himself, I must relate that Harry had the first crack at elaborating on this awkward situation, but he refused. He categorically refused, early and often.

In 1989, I ghosted Caray’s almost tell-all, “Holy Cow!”, and to borrow from one of his favorite phrases, duty compels me to report that I urged Harry to bare his soul. He was an icon throughout America, particularly in Chicago, and the juicier stories he told, the better chance those babies would fly off the shelves. Yes, working with Harry was a labor of love, but my motives weren’t entirely altruistic.

Harry, a serial spender, wanted to make a few bucks, too, but not at the expense of making waves. There were several evenings in spring training when I brought a tape recorder to dinner, even after fearfully accepting a ride from my comprehensively colorblind driver–“Bob, is that light red or green?” he would inquire while I recited the Lord’s Prayer. But one subject was non-negotiable.

“Harry,” I would say, “what about Milo?”

“Not in my book,” he would say. “Waiter!! Menus!!”

Often, with my machine off, Harry let it hang out on everything–his childhood as an orphan, his loneliness at Christmas and Milo. I would scribble notes on a cocktail napkin. But come morning, either the phone would ring or I would see him at the ballpark. You know, he would say, what we talked about late last night, that’s not for publication.

Caray and Hamilton did not get where they got without having egos. Obviously, their deep freeze began during the mid-’50s, when they were starting out in St. Louis. And Hamilton was not the lone ranger in that anti-Harry lobby. See: Joe Garagiola.

But a “miserable human being”? When Harry passed away, Thom Brennaman, a terrific young broadcaster, and Ron Santo, were joined at the funeral home by Josh Lewin, who didn’t get much air time on Channel 9 beside Harry but respected the legend anyway. A class act, and a fitting tribute. Space does not permit a litany of Caray’s gestures, with checkbook in hand or by interrupting meals to accommodate his fans.

Hamilton also could be fun to be around, especially when he launched into his imitation of former White Sox sidekick Bob Elson. But, much as it hurt, Hamilton cannot honestly dispute Caray’s arrival at least coincided with an attendance spike at Wrigley Field, where he starred for a reason. He possessed more passion than some players.

When Caray died, Hamilton’s tart remarks roiled Harry’s son, Skip, voice of the Braves. Talk about chilly, and one can only imagine how Houston-Atlanta games this season will play along press row. I wish this animosity would go away. I also wish I had saved those cocktail napkins.

Roiled, you ask? The New York Daily News reported in 1998:

Skip Caray, mourning the passing of his father, Harry Caray, yesterday ripped into Houston Astros voice Milo Hamilton for comments he made following the Hall of Fame broadcaster’s death. Hamilton, who worked with Skip Caray in the Braves broadcast booth and also teamed with Harry Caray in the Cubs booth for one season (1982), said Caray, who died Wednesday, had a Howard Cosell-like ego. “Harry felt he was bigger than the game. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” Hamilton said. “He told me one time, ‘The only reason they come out to the ballpark is to hear me sing in the seventh inning.

“So I said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Thursday is an open date. Let’s announce that you’re going to sing at 3 o’clock and see how many people buy a ticket.”

Skip Caray said he wasn’t surprised by Hamilton’s comment, saying it was “typical” of the Astros announcer, who he called “gutless.

“What kind of a man says that about a colleague two days after his death? A very sick man,” Caray said. “Milo Hamilton is a laughingstock among people in this business because of his ego. “This disgusts me. He wouldn’t have the guts to say it if my father was alive,” Caray continued. “Milo Hamilton is a sanctimonious little man and I can’t, in good conscience, let this pass without answering. This says more about the kind of person Milo Hamilton is than the kind of person Harry Caray was.”

Hamilton obviously was able to find the place he belonged, with the Astros; he got to announce the 1986 playoffs and 2005 World Series, and Astros fans are mourning the death of the man they considered the Astros’ voice.