Skip Caray, son of the late Cubs broadcaster Harry and the voice of the Braves over the course of 3 decades, passed away Sunday in Atlanta. Caray’s announcing career included stints working football (Tulsa Oilers), basketball (St. Louis/Atlanta Hawks), while his tenure calling games for the Braves on TBS made him one of the sport’s iconic voices (even if some of us weren’t particularly big fans). From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Carroll Rogers :
“I figured Skip Caray is as much a part of Atlanta Braves baseball as any of us,” said Chipper Jones, who will rejoin the team in Arizona later this week. “We all grew up listening to Skip, whether it be on TV or radio. Any time the guys on ESPN imitate [you] calling the highlights, you’re pretty much a legend. From a fan’s standpoint, he’s going to be a huge loss for them because he relayed the games to fans for so long.”
“Behind the humor there was an honesty and a commitment to telling it like he believed it to be that never, ever varied,” longtime partner Pete Van Wieren said. “If he didn’t like it that a game was two minutes late getting started, everybody knew about it. If he had an opinion on a player, he said it. And he had a way of saying it that was sometimes humorous. The way he could take a bad ball game, in some of those bad years especially, and turn it into a fun broadcast, whether it was by talking about something in the game or whether it was talking about something that didn’t have anything to do with the game, maybe it was a movie that was coming up after the game or maybe it was a restaurant that he’d gone to. It could have been anything. He was just a very entertaining broadcaster and a very good one. The game was still the most important thing, but if game was decided by the fourth or fifth inning, people would still watch the rest of the game just to hear what he had to say about things. That’s a very, very unique ability.”