WASHINGTON - After the game was over, grim duty on a terrible afternoon, the Phillies all had their stories about Harry Kalas. Not surprisingly, Jamie Moyer's were the oldest.
"I heard Harry's voice for the first time probably as a 9-year-old kid," said Moyer, 46, the starting and winning pitcher on the day when Kalas died. "I grew up listening to Harry and Richie Ashburn. That's what I knew as a kid.
"I came over here in 2006 and it was the same voice. Got to know him a little better. Funny story: I was dating my girlfriend at the time and now it's my wife, Karen. We were at a restaurant in Chicago and he happened to be there. We were quite young - I was over 21 - and he bought us a bottle of wine. Kelly Mondelli's in Chicago. Just a super person to be around. Always brought something to the game. He'll be missed."
Kelly Mondelli's is no longer a restaurant on Clark Street. Moyer is no longer asked for identification in restaurants. Ashburn has been gone for more than a decade. Now, Kalas is dead at 73 after collapsing in the television booth at Nationals Park about 2 1/2 hours before the Phillies played the Washington Nationals.
After the game, a 9-8 Phillies victory, they all had their stories. Over at his locker, Ryan Howard quietly delighted in how, even when he was a rookie, the Hall of Fame broadcaster used to come over and call him "Big Fella."
A couple of lockers down, Shane Victorino - Kalas' "Flyin' Hawaiian" - talked about how he and Kalas used to talk about Hawaii (where Victorino grew up and Kalas began his broadcasting career), and about how, "When I got here, I realized, 'That's Harry Kalas.' That's the voice I always used to hear as a kid on NFL Films."
On the other side of the room, relative newcomer Brad Lidge was saying, "I came over to Philly and heard him talk, and it just goes off in your head . . . Everyone loved him. Everyone knew him."
And then there was Jimmy Rollins, the longest-tenured member of the team. His memories, he said, come from airplanes.
"Him in the back of the airplane, asleep, mouth open, drooling," Rollins said, his teammates mostly cleared out of the clubhouse by that point. "There were a number of times where people said, 'We should get him. We should get him.' But in the end, it was always, 'No, that's Harry. You can't get Harry.' He's sitting there waiting to be victimized, and it was like, 'Nah, you can't mess with Hall of Fame.' Nobody had enough courage. I wasn't going to get him."
They all played yesterday, and they appeared to be unanimous in their desire to play. The Nationals made the offer to postpone the game, but the Phillies decided to go to work. As Moyer said: "It wasn't easy, but life goes on and the game goes on. I'm sure Harry wouldn't have wanted it any other way."
They were united in that feeling, and they seemed to be united in their ability to take at least a small measure of comfort in the notion that Kalas died at the ballpark, a place he loved.
They are baseball people. They live their lives at work in ways that normal people don't. They honor the park. They cherish the park. Stunned, yes, they still kept coming back to that point.
"It sounds like he passed in the place where he probably would have wanted to," Howard said. "He was up in the booth. I don't think too many people can pass doing something that they loved doing. If that was the case, I'm cool with that. Because you know he was happy and he was in a place where he wanted to be and he loved to be." *
