I Miss Skip and Pete - Page 3

Baseball has lost the common touch.

That's it. That's what really bothers me. The "giddy" baseball experience is becoming a thing of the past. What I mean is that sometime during the last half-century, when the MLB's business was booming, it started to lose the ability to make a legitimate connection with its fans. It's very hard to pin down a specific cause or a specific date when things went wrong, but you can see its effects all around us in the modern sports world.

The easiest place to see this is right there on TV. Baseball's problems with television have been well-documented by people with a better understanding of the business than I. Still, think about how manufactured and distant the TV product has become in recent years. As for an example, I don't know where to start: graphic designs copied directly from football without recognizing the fundamental difference between the sports, announcers who have become so bland and inane that even the casual fan is forced to mute, or maybe just the sense that what you're being shown is just a well-funded ad campaign with little or no sincerity. Some fans would point to the MLB's attempt to put the Spider-Man logo on the bases as a tipping point. I'm more annoyed by the WebMD Injury Update, which uses 21st century medical imaging technology to show me a "sore knee."

That's why I miss Skip and Pete — that is, Skip Caray and Pete van Wieren. It was a sad day for me, a lifelong Braves fan, to watch TBS cancel an old favorite and replace it with the most generic baseball broadcast in recent memory. Gone was the familiarity, the coziness and the sincerity of a guy like Skip, my favorite announcer. My favorite Skip moment came during a game in the late '90s, when the Braves exploded for a ten-run inning. Skip asked when the Braves had last put ten runs across in one inning, and was told (I believe) that it was sometime in the late '80s. To which he responded, "Back then we didn't score ten runs in a week."

But it's unfair to focus the blame on television; it's merely a symptom of a wider problem. Ballparks today are built and priced for the upper-middle class, leaving a crowd of rich white people wondering why African-Americans are choosing to play basketball and football. The lyrical and inventive sports writing of Rice, Lardner, and Runyon has been bequeathed to a narrow-minded and insecure minority, bent on opposing the few progressive voices that do emerge on the national scene.

Article Author: Aaron Whitehead

Aaron, 28, lives in southern Kentucky and works at the local community college. He spends his spare time working in the theatre and cheering for the Braves ... against his better judgment.

Visit Aaron Whitehead's author page — Aaron Whitehead's Blog