Leland Milo Hamilton was an American sportscaster, best known for calling play-by-play for seven different Major League Baseball teams from 1953 to 2012.
28 Facts About Milo Hamilton
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Milo Hamilton received the Ford C Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1992.
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Milo Hamilton served in the United States Navy during World War II.
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Milo Hamilton graduated from the University of Iowa in 1949.
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Milo Hamilton next moved to the Chicago Cubs, working alongside Jack Brickhouse and Vince Lloyd.
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Milo Hamilton's voice was already somewhat known in Atlanta; local station WGST had been part of the White Sox radio network in the early 1960s.
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Milo Hamilton soon became so popular in Atlanta that executives with Braves flagship station WSB-TV credited the Braves' high ratings on television in part to Milo Hamilton.
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Milo Hamilton refused to gloss over this issue, and the Braves' owners fired him after the 1975 season.
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Shortly thereafter, the team was sold to Ted Turner, who made the Braves a national phenomenon via then-cable "superstation" WTCG with Milo Hamilton's replacements Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren, and with Johnson continuing in the booth.
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Milo Hamilton briefly considered a return to St Louis after Jack Buck left the Cardinals for NBC, but pulled out of talks after learning that Buck could return to the team to reclaim his job if the NBC project failed.
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Milo Hamilton was the subject of biting criticism by sportswriters and by fans.
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Milo Hamilton proved to be relatively thin-skinned to the criticism, and even felt that Prince manipulated Pittsburgh sportswriters against him, as well as attempting to track down people who wrote critical letters to newspapers about his commentary.
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Unhappy in Pittsburgh, Milo Hamilton jumped at a chance to return to Chicago in 1980 to join the Cubs' broadcast team alongside Brickhouse, Lloyd and Boudreau.
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Milo Hamilton was under the impression that he was heir-apparent to Brickhouse upon the latter's retirement; indeed, he later said that he had been "guaranteed in blood" that he would replace Brickhouse on Cubs television broadcasts in 1982.
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Milo Hamilton claimed that Caray said on the air that he had mailed alimony checks to all of his ex-wives.
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Milo Hamilton told the writer Curt Smith that officials at WGN-TV spent an hour praising him, but they told him that they had to dismiss him because Caray didn't like him, and Caray was more important to the Cubs.
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Hamilton made comments critical of Caray that were published in a story after the latter's death in 1998, but Hamilton claimed in his book Making Airwaves: 60 Years at Milo's Microphone that his comments quoted in that story were actually part of a magazine article from 13 years earlier, and that he did not in fact make the comments after Caray's death.
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In 2006, Milo Hamilton related his experiences with Caray in his autobiography.
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Milo Hamilton spent two years as the number-two announcer behind longtime Astros voice Gene Elston.
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Milo Hamilton's teammates have all the hits in the game.
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On July 29,2005, Milo Hamilton announced that starting with the 2006 season, he would no longer accompany the club on the road, announcing only home games, although he has traveled with the club when Busch Stadium, Nationals Park, Citi Field, and Marlins Park opened respectively.
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Milo Hamilton announced his plans to retire as an active broadcaster after the 2012 season, though intending to remain active with the Astros in a more limited way.
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Milo Hamilton was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2000 and later inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame.
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Milo Hamilton was elected, as part of the inaugural class, to the Houston Astros Hall of Fame in 2019.
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On October 7,2007, Milo Hamilton suffered a heart attack while eating lunch with his son in Houston.
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Milo Hamilton was taken to Houston Methodist Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, where doctors discovered that one of his coronary arteries was 99 percent blocked.
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Milo Hamilton underwent a successful angioplasty and recovered to return to his sportscasting career.
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Milo Hamilton died on September 17,2015, at the age of 88 after having chronic lymphocytic leukemia since 1974.