Skip Caray, RIP

by Christopher McIntosh
08/04/2008

By now I'm sure you've heard the news.

Skip Caray died in his sleep last night.

And I'm totally at a loss for words.

What do you say when someone like this dies? It's impossible to overstate the importance of Skip Caray to the Braves baseball experience. Skip started calling games about a year before I was even born, 1976. To say he's been calling the Braves my entire life is an understatement.

As others have pointed out already. he had great calls - like the Cabrera hit that ended the 1993 NLCS and nearly killed Sid Bream. There was the time, just this year in fact, he watched Dusty Baker walk out to the mound and say "the bases are loaded and Dusty Baker wishes he was too."

He was ours. That's it. Nothing more.

He was ours. He was Braves baseball. He'd been there during the bad old days of the powder blue uniforms and the debates about whether to trade Dale Murphy. The days of less than 2500 showing up at Atlanta Fulton County to see the game.

What'd he say? Some platitude? Ignore the situation? Nope, "plenty of good seats available folks."

If anything commercial can be held responsible for my sense of humor, watching Skip over all these years has been it. Skip had a way of saying things that resonated, was irreverent, and yet somehow he never laughed at his own jokes, unless he was cutting up with Pete Van Wieren or even Ernie Johnson back in the old days. Wouldn't laugh at himself. He epitomized what a dry wit was supposed to be.

Skip Caray, almost more than John Smoltz, Chipper Jones, or Bobby Cox, was emblematic of the Braves. He traversed the entire arc of the team from the days of Captain Outrageous sitting ringside with Jane Fonda to the AOL buyout to the final straw, TBS' decision last year to sell the rights to the Braves in exchange for one national game a week.

I watched his last game on TBS. It was vintage Skip Caray. He got to sit in the booth with his son and talk baseball, but more importantly, he talked about how TBS was making a mistake. And that they were treating him poorly.

Those are the two things I remember. Skip somehow kept calling a game and remained in tune with his son while he railed, and I mean *railed* against TBS' decision to give up the Braves and perhaps no less importantly, the decision to kick him to the curb. I'm still amazed they didn't take the mic from him right at that moment. Of course, that wasn't the first time I remember thinking that. Maybe the TBS guys thought he was a homer who couldn't call a national game. Must never have watched the telecasts. He was a homer all right, there is no doubt, but it was like watching with my grandfather. Someone booted a ground ball (Andres Thomas, I'm looking at you) and a sarcastic quip followed. Never doubted that he liked the team, it was just that he called it just like a fan would - boot a ground ball, get a sarcastic metaphorical slap on the back of the head. Doesn't mean he didn't love the team and it sure as hell doesn't mean he couldn't be objective.

The second thing I remember? He handled a potentially emotional situation with grace. He was in the booth with his son ending a thirty year career with one team and a network that didn't want him anymore. He started to crack at one point, and no one would have thought less of him if he did, but before the dam could burst, he caught himself. Of course, it was after he'd said his peace.

It was just like him. He made the call, he made the memorable call, and then stood back from it to let us decide whether we liked it or not.

We did.

We'll miss you, Skip.