Skip Caray, 1939-2008

Skip Caray has been a part of my life ever since Braves baseball has been a part of my life. Baseball wasn't my favorite sport growing up -- that would be NCAA basketball and football -- but it wasn't long into my adulthood before I embraced America's greatest contribution to the world of sport.

We were always Braves fans in Chattanooga -- hey, it was either that or the Cincinnati Reds, and Atlanta was closer. When I moved to Athens Gee-Ay in the late eighties, the last vestiges of the early eighties contenders had faded and the Atlanta dynasty was almost in place. We were all crazy for Braves baseball, crazy for the Olympics, crazy for the Atlanta renaissance that put the town on the map at the end of the twentieth century.

Skip's old-fashioned, slightly twisted, highly idiosyncratic radio calls took me through many a long road trip. I fell asleep to his voice whenever the Braves were on the West Coast. And thanks to TBS, I got him on TV too. For years the broadcasting teams would switch after four and a half innings -- the pair that started on TV moving to radio, and vice versa. It wasn't unusual for me to turn off the sound on the TV and follow Skip over to radio after half the game.

His immortal call of Francisco Cabrera's game-winning single and Sid Bream's lumbering trip home from second in Game 7 of the NLCS against the Pirates in 1992 -- "Here comes Bream! Here's the play at the plate! He is -- safe! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!" -- was my System 7 startup sound for years afterward.

I was sad when Skip began to have less of a presence in my life and my continued Braves fandom, thanks to a move away from TBS broadcasting the Braves. I'm devastated that I'll never here him call a game again. Rest in peace.

Full moon

I spent most of the evening at a vestry meeting and the last 30 minutes hurriedly posting my TV Club post on How I Met Your Mother, so there's precious little blog energy left. Today has been a weird day. I've been flummoxed and bewildered all day by how people's minds work and what in heaven's name they are trying to accomplish with their bizarre strategies.

The radio summed it all up for me on the way home tonight. Our local NPR station was playing the usual evening jazz programming, but at the same time, a feed of All Things Considered was also going out over the air. This led to the strange combination of some cool west coast riffage under an interview about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and (even better) pre-war big band swing under a story about germs that have been experimentally shot into space.

I drove home thinking about the on-air monitors in the station control room that were turned down for who knows how long while the station, presumably, ran itself; about the channel left up while some late feed of news programming downlinked from the satellite service; about the dark, empty radio station full of flickering red lights and cool blue displays, and its lone caretaker down the hall feeding his wrinkled dollar into an uncaring Coke machine over and over.