CURT Smith, author of “Voices of the Game” and chronicler of all that binds baseball to broadcasting, had a frightening thought.
“What if the next Vin Scully is out there and no one will hire him? What if he can’t find work because his audition tape isn’t loaded with screaming and shtick and hyperbole? Look at it this way: When’s the last time ‘SportsCenter’ chose to replay a classy, dignified call of a team announcer’s call?”
But Smith’s concern might be wasteful. After all, is there an aspiring play-by-player who would dare submit a tape that’s not loaded with forced catch phrases, history-in-the-making bluster and fabricated hysteria?
“And yet,” says Smith, “for all the pandering to shock-valued audiences, what would happen if a 20-year-old were presented with a Vin Scully? He wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, this guy’s terrible.’ He’d say, ‘Hey, this guy’s good.’
“But our culture has de-emphasized class. Even the baseball fan has changed to the point where the person who makes the biggest spectacle of himself is identified as the best fan.”
Bob Wolff, 20 years a voice of baseball and forever a teacher of the craft, says that audition tapes have changed to promote self-promotion.
“They’re now stacked to demonstrate the home-run call or the final-out call. He wants to sell you on how eager he is to holler at everything and at nothing. But the real artistry can be found at most other times. Those moments are omitted, as if they don’t count. And maybe they don’t, at least not as much as they once did.”
Jerry Girard, the former Ch. 11 sports anchor and, as accidents happen, an astute and devoted sports fan, is approaching the breaking point. “Frankly, I listen less and less because all I hear is hype followed by hype.”
And so, while listening to the A’s-Yanks on the radio last week, it struck me that the nation’s greatest sports franchise is a leader in killing baseball as a leisurely leisure-time activity. Charley Steiner absolutely erupted – he became hysterical – over a line drive caught by Jason Giambi, leaving this listener to wonder the worst: Was the catch the greatest Steiner had ever seen or was his call exaggerated?
And, “Do I believe him?” is the worst question a radio play-by-play man can generate among listeners.
The sweet notion that a summer’s night on the back porch or front stoop could include a radio tuned to a Yankee game has been lost to a broadcast team that plays top-this while competing in a sensory-deprivation contest with the kid down the block who drives with his windows open and his sort-of music blaring.
John Sterling we know about. He’s a lost cause. He’s a narcissist who uses a microphone instead of a mirror. But if consistency is the mark of greatness, he was an inveterate shill and self-promoter as the radio voice of the Islanders, the Nets and as a TV voice of the Braves.
Sterling’s going to tell you what he feels like telling you. And the facts – the accuracy of his smug and self-smitten calls – become a matter of chance. Heck, it took years before he decided to tell us whether “Strike three!” was swung at or taken.
Steiner, on the other hand, wasn’t always this way. As a Jets and USFL Generals radio play-by-player, he called games with either no time or inclination toward over-the-edge hype. And he was, for years, a trusted anchor on ESPN.
The Yankee radio booth, and perhaps its dynamics, has turned Steiner into a hype machine that churns out mutual stress. Every pitch, it seems, becomes an opportunity to embroider and frame, every swing is marked for the historical and hysterical. An auditory pounding ensues, like new-age Madison Square Garden during a Knicks’ timeout, like the kid down the block.
And the radio broadcasts of the greatest franchise in sports history are no longer suited for a summer night’s listening from stoop or porch. There’s no ease or breeze to the sounds. Everything’s a speech, a stab at broadcasting immortality, a chance to be heard again, the next day, when WCBS Radio and its sibling stations and perhaps ESPN replay the calls.
It’s no big deal, I guess. But still, it’s a shame.