Caray Carries On a Family Broadcasting Tradition

As Baseball's Lead Play-by-Play Man on TBS, Caray Enjoys a National Stage

Chip Caray can still remember the moment he knew he wanted to be a baseball play-by-play man, just like his grandfather, Hall of Famer Harry Caray, and his own father, Skip Caray, the voice of the Atlanta Braves for the last 32 years.

He was driving home from a game in Atlanta with his dad late one night when one of his father's home run calls was being replayed on the radio. He was a junior in high school at the time, but 25 years later, he still remembers the night his life would change forever.

"We were in the car, a four-door, light blue Volvo," Caray recalled the other day. "It was one of those thunderbolt moments when I said to myself 'this is what I want to do.' My dad was my hero, and when I told him what I was thinking, he said to me 'we'll start working on it tomorrow.'"

Chip's education began almost immediately with a production internship at Atlanta cable superstation TBS that summer, and a young man who grew up in St. Louis when his parents divorced continued to learn the broadcasting business with more internships through college at the University of Georgia. After graduating, he worked as a weekend anchor on stations in Fla. and N.C. and over the years he's also done Orlando Magic games as well as University of Florida and Florida State football and basketball for the Sunshine Network.

By 1991, after a year of calling minor league baseball for the Orlando-based Double-A club of the Minnesota Twins, he broke into the bigs doing play-by-play on Braves games for two years, and then spent another three years broadcasting Seattle Mariners games. In 1998, Caray became the voice of the Chicago Cubs on WGN, a gig that lasted for seven years.

That was followed by stints with Fox and TBS and last fall, he found himself calling baseball for a huge national audience because TBS owns the rights to televise all four Major League Baseball division series in the playoffs and one of the League Championship Series over the seven-year length of the contract.

The deal began with the 2007 playoffs, and after a season spent focusing primarily on the Braves for WTBS, Caray was thrust into the national spotlight only days after the regular season had ended. He was working with a broadcast crew that essentially had been put together right before the playoffs and never really had much time to develop chemistry.

Still, in the view of some critics, particularly the man from the N.Y. Times, Caray was not yet ready for baseball's prime time.

Richard Sandomir, the long-time sports media specialist for The Times, was particuarly scornful of Caray's work during Game 3 of the division series between the N.Y. Yankees and Cleveland Indians, and devoted more than 800 words in a scathing review of Caray's work to explain why.

"His play-by-play ¿was packed with errors and silly strategy, enough to give me agita," Sandomir wrote the next day, and then proceeded to offer a long and particularly specific laundry list of Caray mistakes "and an annoying air of certitude" to back up his complaints.

He concluded by asking "Why isn't he better prepared? If his producer, Jeff Gowen, is listening to what he is saying, why isn't Caray improving? And why should I have to keep rushing to MLB.com to fact-check his facts?"

Caray read those words the following day, and obviously was not pleased. Six months later, the memory of that column still stings, but to his credit, Caray said in a telephone interview that unlike many of his thin-skinned broadcasting colleagues who usually blame the messenger rather than the message, he actually paid attention. He said he viewed the criticism as an opportunity for some serious self-evaluation as well as something of a mandate to make certain it wouldn't happen again.