The World Series creates lasting images. World Series announcers write the captions.
Both stick in the minds of baseball fans.
You remember seeing Kirk Gibson's dramatic home run in 1988, but you just as surely recall Jack Buck's call: "I don't believe what I just saw!"
So as the World Series begins tomorrow night, how much does the burden of history weigh on an announcer's mind? Fox's Joe Buck - son of Jack - said it can't be part of the thought process.
"It's something that just hits you at the moment," Buck said in a conference call yesterday. " ... You just do it, and if it's decent and if it's a big moment, it lives on.
"Otherwise, it goes into a black hole, like 99 percent of everything we say."
Buck said he learned his lesson when he was waiting to call Mark McGwire's record-breaking home run in 1998.
"It made me try to plan out what I was going to say, and I realized I can't do it that way," Buck said.
This will be Buck's ninth Series and the 17th for partner Tim McCarver, most ever for any announcer. Former Sun columnist Ken Rosenthal will work his first Series as a television reporter.
Fox is augmenting its pre- and post-game studio shows with Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder and ex-Oriole Eric Byrnes and former Florida Marlins manager Joe Girardi.
Fox will continue to use the dizziness-inducing Diamond-Cams imbedded in the field, and the network is introducing a CableCam to baseball. The device, familiar in football games, will run on a line between home and first base, suspended in foul territory over the stands. Which should thrill those people who paid big bucks for Series tickets, just to have their view blocked by a camera.
Now hear this
When Curt Smith wrote his fine history of baseball broadcasting several years ago, he called it Voices of the Game. And when you think about the men calling the games, it often seems the voices themselves - perhaps as much as what they're saying - make them stick in our minds.
That's not to say it's a matter of style over substance, because we've all heard guys with terrific voices who have nothing to say, but the best announcers have a certain tone and timbre that just evoke baseball.
The late Chuck Thompson and Jack Buck had it. Jon Miller has it. And Joe Buck has it. Of course, he has those good genes.
