How a TV innovation built my love for baseball
· Yahoo Sports
It’s early April, and we’re into one of my favorite times of year, and it’s been that way most of my life.
In fact, it started about April 1980, when I walked home from school, turned on the TV and discovered a dozen extra channels along with the four local stations (channels 2, 9, 33 and 27).
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Cable TV had just come to town, and the thought of 16 stations seemed unfathomable.
I discovered a lot through cable, particularly old movies and wrestling on TBS — a guilty pleasure of mine back then.
We also had WGN. Yeah, it had some fun shows as well, including “The Bozo Show,” in which the title character was played by Bob Bell, who had that “two packs-a-day of Lucky Strike Cigarettes” voice.
The real fun, however, was a certain program that became my “must see” TV.
It was the Chicago Cubs. The announcers included Milo Hamilton, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray.
All three are Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famers, but Caray was the show-stealer.
As with Hamilton and Brickhouse, Caray started in radio and transitioned into TV between the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Hamilton had that classic voice, and Brickhouse was quite good but less rigid than Hamilton.
Nobody was quite like Harry Caray.
He’d go on some strange tangents over the course of a game. He got exceptionally loud at times and sometimes made some silly wisecracks along the way.
In the fashion of an old local broadcaster, he’d sometimes mention people in the crowd:
“Harold and Mildred Polarski are here today from Peoria celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary,” Caray said. “You know, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a day than watching the Cubs while drinking a few beers, and maybe even bringing the wife along.”
A Cubs home run made him ballistic, while a Cubies strikeout only follow with a sickly groan.
The main attraction was hearing him sing — if that was what it was supposed to be — “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch at Wrigley.
In his autobiography, Caray wrote about his longtime friendship with Frank Sinatra. He may have learned a few things from “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” but singing was not one of them.
He slowed down in later years, but somehow kept chugging until he died in February 1998, less than two months before opening day in Major League Baseball.
As a Cubs fan, I fell to few teasers along the way, including a 1984 National League championship series loss to San Diego (who eventually lost to Detroit) and the notorious 2003 collapse to the Florida Marlins, in which spectator Steve Bartman deflected a pop foul back into action.
I had given up for a few years after that and figured they weren’t meant to be champions.
But then came 2016, which was a strange year. I was covering the 100-year flood in Livingston Parish, one of the worst — and most surreal events — of my career.
Nothing could match the sheer unbelievability of that event. Or so I thought.
I watched the Cubs make it to the World Series for the first time since 1945 and they had not won it since 1908. The United States did not even have 48 states, much less 50, at that time.
It seemed hard to believe that they made it, and it was seemingly poetic justice that they faced the Cleveland Indians, another long-cursed ballclub.
When Cleveland tied the game in the seventh and rained forced a delay, I was certain the Cubs were doomed. Rain delays almost always worked against the Cubs.
Boy, was I ever wrong. It took me a few days to fully grasp the notion that the Cubs won the World Series.
Nothing will measure up with that in my favorite MLB moments — even if it’s still hard to believe 10 years later. ‘
Who knows? It might take them 100 years to win another World Series.
This article originally appeared on Plaquemine Post South: How a TV innovation built my love for baseball