Skyrocket

A few years ago Yogi Berra was asked what he thought of Mel Allen as a sportscaster. "Too many woids," said Berra.

Last week 51 -year-old Mel Allen's protean output of woids dropped momentarily to zero. As the World Series opened, the Voice of the Yankees was in Stamford, Conn., watching the game on television with friends. In his place the Yanks installed Phil Rizzuto, the once Yankee shortstop who has been broadcasting Yankee games as a colleague of Allen's for eight years.

Words & Scholarships. Questions started rising like pop flies, asking who held the hatchet. But clearly the Yankees had sacked their own man. Allen's contract runs out this year, and the Yankees have been holding secret talks with other announcers for weeks.

Allen has been gabbing for pay ever since his student days at the University of Alabama, when, as Mel Israel, he broadcast Alabama baseball and football games and was so renowned for his glibness and precocity (he matriculated at 15) that he was nicknamed Skyrocket. Son of a dry-goods merchant, he studied law but before he started practice he got a call to big-time broadcasting and could not resist it. Almost at once he was assigned to the Yankees, and the Yankees have been a major part of his life for 25 years. He has never married. He shares his home in Westchester with his parents. In 1950 the Yankees gave him a Mel Allen Day in Yankee Stadium and handed him $55,000 worth of gewgaws, including a Cadillac and $10,000 in cash. Allen contributed the cash part to college scholarships.

Pale Blue Filler. Up in the broadcast booth, he was indeed some rambler, take it from Berra. He could not resist telling TV fans in his cornpone drawl every last detail of what they could see for themselves. Moreover, with a journalist's eye for firsts and a statistician's mania for the minutiae of baseball, he was fond of confiding to his listeners that, say, the bunt that had just been witnessed was the first ever laid down by a left-handed rightfielder in an August night game with two men on base and one out. In the few moments when the 90 million known facets of the diamond happened to fail him, he always had a filler nonetheless. "International Falls is the coldest place in the U.S.," he once said out of the pale, pale blue. "Temperaturewise, that is."

Another reason Allen may be through is that for all his knowledge of baseball, he cannot speak with the assured insight of a fellow who has once played the major league game. In the booth where Allen would have been sitting last week were Rizzuto and Joe Garagiola, who once caught for the Cardinals. Baseball players, brainwise, used to be presumed capable of little more skill in the arts of communication than a repertory of meta-laryngeal grunts. But Rizzuto and Garagiola are both articulate, witty, catlike on top of the play by play, and full of first-person-singular remarks about how it is done. Example:

Joe (to Phil): "You could bunt and you could run--a good wheel, as they say."

Phil: "I had to be good, or I'd have been back in the minors . . . You need a slow third baseman, tall grass, soft dirt."

Joe: "No wonder I couldn't bunt."

Or, on chewing tobacco:

Joe: "You know, you have to chew on the side of your face away from the pitcher or you can't see the pitch right."

Mel Allen will continue his N.C.A.A. Football and weekend Monitor broadcasts for NBC. But now that baseball has found its own voice, it apparently does not need Skyrocket.

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