Mario Impemba grew up in Sterling Heights in the 1970s with a scratchy AM radio. Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey called the Tigers on it, and they felt, he has said, like members of the family. When the Tigers were not on he spun the dial for ballgames from Cleveland, Chicago and Philadelphia. His father took him to Tiger Stadium for the first time when he was five or six, and he can still describe the green of the grass, the upper deck far away and the smell of Ballpark Franks.
He has said radio sparked something in him and he never considered any other career. So it is not a surprise to find what he did at Stevenson High School. He did Radio Speaking.
Third in Michigan
Radio Speaking was the forerunner of the event MIFA now calls Broadcasting: a student reads the news, against the clock, with the authority of someone who belongs on the air. Impemba qualified for the State Finals in it as a junior in 1980. He came back as a senior in 1981 and finished third in the state.
The long road to Detroit
At Michigan State he was sports director of the campus radio station and called Spartan baseball, basketball and hockey, graduating in 1985.
Then he did what baseball announcers do, which is ride buses. He called the Peoria Chiefs in 1987, and minor league hockey there in the winter. He called the Quad City Angels in Davenport, Iowa, where he met his wife, Cathy, who was working as an usher at the ballpark. He spent four seasons with the Tucson Toros, who won two Pacific Coast League championships while he was there. In 1993 he mailed a letter and a tape to every club in the major leagues.
The Angels hired him in 1995, and he spent seven seasons on their radio broadcasts. In 2002 he came home.
Seventeen summers
From 2002 through 2018 Impemba was the television play-by-play voice of the Detroit Tigers, first with Kirk Gibson beside him and then, for most of the run, with Rod Allen. For a generation of Michigan fans his was the voice of summer evenings. He has named his own favorite calls: both of Justin Verlander’s no-hitters, the 2006 clincher in Kansas City that sent the Tigers back to the playoffs for the first time in nineteen years, and Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown. He was also at the microphone for Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game in 2010, when the call had to turn around in the middle of a sentence.
For several winters he called Oakland University basketball on the radio as well.
He was named Michigan Sportscaster of the Year in 2011, won a Michigan Emmy and received the Ty Tyson Award for excellence in sports broadcasting. Ernie Harwell, the voice from that scratchy radio, once described him as a solid professional. He co-wrote a book of Tigers stories, If These Walls Could Talk, with a foreword by Dave Dombrowski, and later a guide for young people who want to do what he did, Major League Mindset. He paid to have Opening Day broadcasts sent on DVD to service members deployed overseas, and his MVP program gave game tickets to schools and charities.
His time in the Tigers booth ended after the 2018 season. He worked Red Sox games on the radio in Boston in 2019, and since then has described himself as mostly retired, writing a little and spending time with his family in Macomb Township. One of his sons played college baseball at Oakland. Another marched in the Spartan band. He has said Detroit will always be home.
A third-place finish in Radio Speaking is a good day at State. Reading the news to a judge in a classroom in 1981, and reading the lineup to the whole state of Michigan twenty-one years later, are the same skill. He just kept practicing.
On record
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