Did You Hear That? Part Two
The top 3 are revealed.
Welcome back to Powder Blue Nostalgia’s first ever two-part post. We join part two already in progress, picking up where we left off last week as I countdown my top five baseball announcers. And as always, if you like what you read, make sure you subscribe and share!
3. Harry Caray & Skip Caray
“Holy cow!” In the words of Harry Caray himself, I’m cheating a bit with this one. That’s right, I’m coming out swinging in Part Two. Watch out!
Harry Caray is the cultural icon, a blustering, loud, and outgoing everyman who occasionally broadcast from the bleachers with a cooler of beer and comically butchered player names like Rafael Palmeiro, Delino DeShields (Delino DeSanders), and Hector Villanueva (Venezuela, Villanova, etc.) Definitely make sure you check out the clip of him attempting to pronounce Mark Grudzielanek.
Harry was a man of the people, red-faced and sporting his oversized thick glasses, who often held court in the neighborhood bars after games, earning himself the nickname the “Mayor of Rush Street.” A notorious homer, he had a freewheeling style of calling a game that sometimes went off the rails completely. This could be extremely frustrating for his color analysts, and why he often preferred to work alone. There were two exceptions, Jimmy Pearsall during his White Sox days, and Steve Stone with the Cubs.
I remember him paired with the latter. Technically, Caray and Stone were team-specific announcers, but because WGN carried Cubs games out to the entire country, they were famous nationwide. So even kids in rural northeast Kansas were familiar with his home run calls of “It might be… it could be… it IS! A home run! Holy Cow!” and his routine of leading the crowd in a rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch.
It's the same reason he was famous enough for Will Ferrell to impersonate him on Saturday Night Live, and why MLB used a hologram of him to sing during the seventh inning stretch of their most recent Field of Dreams game in Iowa between the Cubs and Reds. The guy was a national institution.
His son, Skip, was not quite the same type of household name. But he wasn’t a no-name either. As one of the lead voices on TBS’s Braves telecasts (along with Pete Van Wieren, Don Sutton, and others), he was in a similar situation to his father— essentially a local team announcer beamed out on a national platform.
Skip was very different from his dad, however. While Harry was outgoing and exuberant, Skip was far more reserved. Don’t get me wrong— I loved Harry Caray and anytime I got to watch Cubs games on WGN at my grandparents’ house, I considered it a win. But even though it may be considered blasphemous by some, I’ve never made it a secret that I preferred Skip.
Harry’s enthusiasm was fantastic, but my personality more closely mirrored Skip. At times, I wished I could mute Harry, just to recharge for a minute. As much as I enjoyed listening to him call a game, I’m not sure I would have enjoyed hanging out with the man. I don’t know how Steve Stone managed it every day. I bet he really needed the offseason to collect himself.
But I think I would have clicked with Skip. Always quick with a smartass remark, he respected the game and took his job seriously, but he also made it entertaining in a number of ways, whether that meant poking fun at some outlandish fans or the TBS promo he was required to read. Plus, he never missed an opportunity to break out a groan-inducing joke. How can you not respect that?
Over the course of the PBN era, the Braves went from doormat to perennial powerhouse and eventual World Champions. Skip Caray provided the voiceover for that evolution, one of the most remarkable baseball transformations I’ve ever witnessed. In the space of a decade, Braves’ coverage went from him getting flack for describing the Braves as “lambs to the slaughter” when they took the field in the mid-80’s to his excited call of Marquis Grissom making the final out of the 1995 World Series.
And in between, he was also on the mic for a fan who nearly fell to his death reaching for a foul ball from the Upper Deck at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, before being pulled back from the brink by some alert bystanders. Skip called it all without missing a beat. That’s quite the range, if you ask me.
Harry, unfortunately, never got that World Series moment with the Cubs, though they did have some nice seasons, including a NL East title in 1989. To be fair, he got to call several World Series early in his career, when he was with the St. Louis Cardinals. More importantly, he and his descendants established a legacy as one of baseball broadcasting’s leading families.
It’s funny how things go full circle. St. Louis is where Harry got his start. It was on those early Cardinals broadcasts that he would tell “little Skip” goodnight over the airwaves, introducing his son to the profession at a very young age. And prior to the 2023 season, the Cardinals announced that Skip’s son (and Harry’s grandson) Chip, who has called Cubs and Braves games in the past, would be the new play-by-play man for St. Louis in 2023.
2. Jack Buck
Speaking of St. Louis, the gateway to the West was also the home base of our number two announcer, Jack Buck. The father of the previously mentioned Joe (see Part One), Jack Buck is generally viewed more favorably by the masses. Of course, that might just be because he’s been out of the spotlight for quite a while and never had to deal with Twitter mobs ganging up on him. Luckily for him, social media wasn’t a thing during the PBN Era. Let me tell you, it was a wonderful time to be alive.
Buck’s resume could fill a post of its own (the same could be said for any of these guys), so I’ll try to hit some of the highlights in short fashion. Just keep in mind that this is far from a complete account.
He called Cardinals games for essentially half a century, from 1950-2001, occasionally stepping away for short periods either by choice, or an a few occasions in the early days, against his wishes. These separations never lasted long, however, and he always found his way back to where he belonged.
For the first decade and a half of his Cardinals run, he actually worked with Harry Caray, and Buck was initially one of those announcers who found it frustrating sharing a booth with Harry, though the two eventually found their rhythm and grew to like each other. Then, in 1969, the Cardinals shocked everyone by announcing they were letting Caray go. The team, which was owned by Anheuser-Busch, blamed lagging beer sales and Harry’s inability to sell it on the broadcasts, but anybody who ever heard Harry Caray call a ballgame knew this was a stretch. Rumors circulated that the real reason was because he’d been caught having an affair with the daughter-in-law of team president and CEO Gussie Busch.
Whatever the truth might have been, the rest is Chicago and St. Louis history. Caray went on to become a Windy City legend with the White Sox first, and then the Cubs, and Jack Buck became the primary voice of the Cardinals.
That is how I think of him. Even with the whole state of Missouri between us, I could play around with the AM dial and pick up Cardinals games in my bedroom. It was probably the powerful KMOX signal, but I was a kid and never cared much about noting the call signal. All that mattered was that I could get more baseball when the Royals weren’t playing.
I listened to a lot of Cardinals baseball that way, personally delivered by Jack Buck. If Denny Matthews was like my favorite uncle who lived right across town and brought me Royals games all the time, then Buck was like my more distant, but still cool other uncle. We didn’t hang out as often, but it was always a treat when he showed up with a Cardinals game.
Buck didn’t have a Superstation spreading his Cardinals work across the country like the Carays had, but he was still one of the most recognized national voices in baseball. He called the Game of the Week on CBS radio from 1976-89, and headlined their World Series coverage from 1983-89, teaming with partners like Sparky Anderson, Bill White, and Johnny Bench. Memorably, he was in the booth with Bench when an earthquake struck San Francisco and interrupted the 1989 World Series.
This position afforded him the chance to watch his Cardinals make two World Series runs in 1985 and 1987. Unfortunately for Cardinals fans, St. Louis fell short on both occasions, but he was still present for many iconic moments along the way. Most notably, Ozzie Smith’s epic walk-off home run in Game 5 of the 1985 NLCS against the Dodgers, which was accentuated by his famous “Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!” call.
In 1982, even though he wasn’t working in a national capacity, he was able to break out his “That’s a winner!” call, which he used to punctuate every St. Louis win, in the World Series against the Brewers. With Bob Uecker in the opposite booth, he put a bow on the 1982 championship with “That’s a winner! A World Series winner for the Cardinals!”
In 1990, he took over play-by-play duties for CBS’s television coverage alongside Tim McCarver. The following year, he produced one of the greatest calls in baseball history when Kirby Puckett hit a walk-off home run to win Game 6 of the 1991 World Series and force a winner-take-all Game 7 versus the Braves. As the ball sailed over the wall, Buck simply said, “Into deep left-center… and we’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Despite providing a perfect soundbite that has been in constant use for the last thirty years as part of arguably the greatest World Series of all time, Buck was let go from his TV job that offseason. They claimed he lacked chemistry with McCarver, though Buck disputed this excuse. He said CBS executives told him he talked too much during the game.
Now, there is a difference between calling games on radio and TV. One requires the announcer to paint the scene with their words, and the other requires them to know when to sit back and let the images speak for themselves. It can be a fine line, and not every broadcaster is capable of navigating it. But I’m not going to be the guy who says Jack Buck needed to shut his trap.
Buck returned to St. Louis and continued to add highlights to his Hall-of-Fame resume. He called Mark McGwire’s record-tying 61st home run in 1998. “Pardon me while I stand up and applaud. What a Cardinal moment this is. What a baseball moment this is.” In hindsight, that moment has been spoiled. But— and I’m talking to my fellow seamheads here— before you trample over each other trying to crap on the spectacle (justified or not), just detach yourself for a second and live in the moment with Buck and his call. If you’re open to it, he’ll give you goosebumps.
He accomplished the same thing in a drastically different manner on September 17, 2001. Effectively retired, his body frail and thin, shaking from Parkinson’s disease and cancer, Jack Buck returned to Busch Stadium for the first game following the September 11 attacks. After reading a poem for the occasion, he addressed the critics who thought baseball was returning too soon. “I don’t know about you,” he said to a full house hanging on his every word. “But as for me, the question has already been answered. Should we be here? Yes!” The crowd wiped away their tears and roared their approval.
Tough to top that, but perhaps the perfect Jack Buck call occurred during Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, when a hobbled Kirk Gibson stepped to the plate for the Dodgers against Oakland closer Dennis Eckersley. Trailing 4-3 and facing a 3-2 count, Gibson muscled one of the greatest home runs in baseball history over the wall, winning the game and setting the stage for the heavily-favored A’s to be upset in the series, much to the stunned delight of the Dodgers Stadium crowd.
No one was more shocked than Buck, whose famous call was highlighted by the repeated statement of “I don’t believe what I just saw!” He added, “I’m stunned… I have seen a lot of dramatic finishes in a lot of sports, but this one might top every other one.”
The same might be said of Jack Buck’s call.
1. Vin Scully
Of course, Buck has competition when it comes to the Gibson call. Vin Scully was the television play-by-play man for NBC during the 1988 World Series, and his day job as the Dodgers’ announcer only added to the emotional weight of the moment. When he said, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened,” he knew what he was talking about. Scully had been with that Dodgers team since the first day of Spring Training, and when he expressed the mixture of amazement and ecstasy that the Dodgers organization and fanbase was feeling at that moment, his voice conveyed the full breadth of that experience.
That came as no surprise to anyone who had ever heard Vin Scully call a baseball game. Whether you prefer Buck’s or Scully’s call is simply a matter of personal preference, and ultimately doesn’t matter one bit. For the record, I was watching on TV, so Scully’s call is the one I heard live, and the first one I think of when the subject of Gibson’s home run comes up. But in the years since, I’ve heard them both many times. There’s really no need to compare them. Unlike the sport they were broadcasting, it’s not a competition. They’re both fantastic and have stood the test of time.
The same goes for the announcers themselves. They’re both legends, but if you’re going to rank them, with all due respect to the late Mr. Buck, there can be only one choice for the top spot. No broadcaster in any sport has ever reached the level of professional excellence and cultural significance that Vin Scully accomplished.
His voice and cadence are unique and have to be heard to be properly appreciated. And once you’ve heard it, no one else will ever quite match it, no matter how talented they might be. A video recently circulated of him reading a grocery list, and I’m not going to lie, it’s a compelling listen. The guy’s pipes just have that special it factor. He and British actor Matt Berry are probably the only two people in the world I could listen to reading the phone book.
He’s regularly parodied in pop culture, though not so much as the target of a joke. It’s more that his voice is so instantly recognizable and associated with baseball and sports in general, and if you’re going to portray a sports announcer, why wouldn’t you use Scully as your foundation? Every announcer character Harry Shearer does on The Simpsons is a homage to Vin, and Hank Azaria’s Brockmire owes a lot to him as well. The aforementioned Jon Miller does a brilliant Scully impersonation, and hell, even I break one out on regular occasions, although I’m more than willing to admit it isn’t very good. It’s probably as much of an impersonation of Shearer as it is Scully, if I’m being honest.
Every baseball fan of a certain age knows Scully’s standard greeting when the cameras began to roll: “It’s time for Dodgers baseball. Hi everybody, and a very pleasant afternoon/evening to you, wherever you may be.” That was gospel to us, even if we’d never seen a local Dodgers telecast in our lives. When he was broadcasting a national game, he simply dropped the Dodgers part.
And when I say a certain age, I’m talking about generations of baseball fans. Scully started with the Dodgers in 1950, when they were still in Brooklyn, and made the move with them to Los Angeles in 1958. He stuck with them for sixty-six years, retiring after the 2016 season. In between, he regularly worked on the national stage, broadcasting baseball and other sports for a number of providers. Like Buck, he called baseball for CBS radio in the 70’s and early 80’s, before taking the reins of NBC’s televised game of the week from 1983-89.
The NBC gig was my chief exposure to him, and it provided Scully with no shortage of opportunities to shine. He called four All-Star Games (’83, ’85, ’87, &’89), four National League Championship Series (’83, ’85, ’87, ’89), and three World Series (’84, ’86, ’88).
His World Series work put him on the mic for two of the most iconic plays in sports history. Gibson’s home run was actually the second of the two. The first came in 1986, when Boston 1B Bill Buckner let Mookie Wilson’s grounder get through his legs with two outs in the tenth inning of Game 6 of the World Series. “Little roller up along first, behind the bag. It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight and the Mets win it!”
The Mets went on to win Game 7, capping their phenomenal season with a title, and Buckner would be run out of Boston as one of the biggest goats in baseball history while the Curse of the Bambino officially kicked into high gear. The two moments, Gibson and Buckner, represent the beauty and cruelty of the game as well as any other examples in its century-and-a-half history, and Scully was front and center for both of them.
Vin Scully was there for a lot of other great moments in between those two extremes as well. One of my favorites was the 1989 All-Star Game at Angels Stadium in Anaheim. During the first inning, Scully’s broadcast partner, Tom Seaver, ducked out of the booth so Scully could talk with former President Ronald Reagan. As Reagan rambled in his typical fashion, Bo Jackson stepped to the plate and forced Scully to interrupt the former commander-in-chief. “…Look at that one! Bo Jackson says hello!”
It would be an overstatement to call that Bo’s national coming out party, since he was already one of the most famous men in America, but it might have been the moment when Bo started to win over the doubters that he could be a legitimate baseball star. We’d been seeing it all season in Kansas City, but that was when the national audience took notice. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in the long term— not because Bo couldn’t play, but because a major injury derailed his career. But at the time, we didn’t know that, and it was a big moment for me and other Royals fans with Scully on the call.
After he parted ways with NBC, he largely focused on the Dodgers, and I probably went years without hearing him call another game. Fortunately, MLB Network was created and began carrying out-of-market local broadcasts across the country. I won’t get sidetracked into a rant about how difficult it still is for me to watch a Royals game with their ridiculous blackout policies and all the other ways MLB makes it challenging to follow your local team, but the Network has provided me with the opportunity to watch a number of Dodgers games over the years.
I don’t consider myself a Dodgers fan, but they generally put out a quality baseball product and I’ll always stop flipping through the channels when I hear Vin Scully’s voice. I’m glad I got the chance to get a few more games in with Vin, even if none of them stand out specifically in my mind. The memory of listening to Vin Scully call a baseball game in general is pleasing enough.
One year after he retired, the Dodgers advanced to the World Series in 2017. They hadn’t been there since 1988, when Gibson hit his miracle home run. Not surprisingly, fans immediately petitioned for Vin to come out of retirement to call the series. Surely, he’d earned that. His successor even offered to stand aside, but Scully graciously demurred, saying he’d “called enough of them.” It was someone else’s turn.
Having never personally met Vin Scully, I can’t vouch for his character, though I’ve never heard an ill word spoken about him. Regardless, this gesture is indicative of what made him the best announcer in baseball history. He spent over half a century bringing the game into our homes, doing whatever was in his power to make it better and more entertaining, and even when he had the chance, he never made it about himself.
That’s why Vin Scully was the best to ever do it.
Thank you for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Hit the subscribe and share buttons, and let me know your thoughts on my announcer rankings in the comments below. Some tough calls had to be made, and I know I left off some good ones, so make your case for them if they’re in your top five!
WOW Patrick you hit the ball out of the park with your selection of announcers! Loved the read about them all. I have a lot of the same memories growing up in Wichita KS listening to Cardinals baseball and later KC Royals. Fun fact, I happened to throw a no hitter the evening of the 1989 earthquake in SF. I was playing for a SF Giants team in a over 30 League in Orlando, it was too much fun...
I noticed I am free subscriber, are you looking to take this to paid subscription at some point? Or just sharing your memories & thoughts? I believe your a very good writer and have enjoyed the articles I've read. I did have some trouble trying to set up a login or account, so just gave up.
Skip and Harry Caray bring back so many great memories of my early baseball fandom. Wish I could have heard more of Vin Scully. I remember his WS and ASG calls and they were great.