Caray Carries On a Family Broadcasting Tradition

"From one side of it, you could say he was hair-splitting and we could agree to disagree," Caray said, adding that he had no intention of making any excuses for his work last fall. "But my overwhelming goal this year is to be more precise with my language. Look, my grandfather never had a perfect broadcast, my father never had a perfect broadcast and I certainly never have. But that doesn't mean we don't try.

"It was a great introduction of what's expected of me. What I learned from it was that this was a much bigger stage than just doing the Braves, and the biggest thing is the precision of the language ... Perception is reality, and I get that ... I just want to get it right and do it good and do our fans justice. The bulk of my work I'm very proud of. I want to earn people's respect and trust."

Caray will be back on that big national stage starting Sunday night. As part of the same deal, the network will carry 26 games-of-the-week this regular season, starting with Boston against Toronto this Sunday. He will also be the lead play-by-play man for all of them, working with analysts Buck Martinez and Ron Darling.

Clearly, WTBS executives still believe they've got the right man for the job, despite all the critical carping last fall.

Executive producer Jeff Behnke said in an interview that while he would not comment specifically about Sandomir's column, "if you look at (Caray's) body of work, we were very pleased. Yeah there were factual things that he presented that he regrets, as well, but it doesn't change our belief that he is a first-rate broadcaster. We have every confidence in the way he prepares and the way he presents the game."

Viewers will be able to judge for themselves starting this weekend and Caray is confident that they'll like what they see and hear.

"You learn from the past," he said. "What is that old expression -- if you don't acknowledge history, you're condemned to repeat it?"

Opening the Vault

Whenever I hear the name of former Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, no matter what the context, my mind always wanders back to the words "Wickedly Wonderful Wanda." That was the devilish description of Stabler's then 23-year-old girlfriend in an obviously memorable Sports Illustrated profile written by Robert F. Jones in 1977.

The other day, with a few clicks on the laptop to call up a new service -- The Vault --rolled out on the Sports Illustrated web site, SI.com -- I was able to quickly retrieve the story by simply typing in the words "Ken Stabler Wanda." I'm sure some fellow travelers sitting near me in the Atlanta Airport on Tuesday morning had to be wondering what was so funny as I giggled my way through the piece while waiting for a connecting flight.

Thirty years later, the read was still pure pleasure, and for me, there will be more of the same far more frequently courtesy of this totally no-cost service available to anyone with a mouse and a keyboard.

SI has unlocked a vault that contained every word and most of the photographs that ever appeared in the since the company then known as Time Inc. launched the groundbreaking and eventually the country's pre-eminent weekly sports magazine in 1954. It's truly a treasure trove of brilliant sportswriting -- Dan Jenkins on pro football, Curry Kirkpatrick on college hoops, Frank Deford on anything and everything.

"In the focus groups, to see people's eyes light up when they saw the mock-ups was really something," said Paul Fichtenbaum, managing editor of SI.com, the portal that will take readers straight to the vault. "Typically they would say 'I could really lose myself in this all day here.' I heard that and said 'Wow!"

There are 150,000 stories, 2,800 magazine covers -- yes boys and girls, including all the Swimsuit issues--and 500,000 photographs from the magazine archived on the site. Editors also plan to make the site topical on a daily basis.

On April 1, for example, readers were guided on the home page to the late George Plimpton's classic tale of a N.Y. Mets phenom pitcher named Sidd Finch, a budding star only in the mind's eye of the author for a piece of fabulous fiction intended as a massive April Fool's joke on the magazine's readers.

Back then, a good number of people were totally fooled, and many years later, perhaps a new generation again was snookered if they clicked on to the story earlier this week and had no idea that Sidd Finch ever, or never existed.

The SI.com site already draws more than six million unique views a month, and there is company-wide hope that another five million views will be added to the total because of the now wide open vault. Those numbers should also attract additional advertising that Fichtenbaum said would make the new feature a "profit center" for the company and allows SI to give away the service free of charge.

But enough techie-talk of page views and cash cows. After all, Wickedly Wonderful Wanda and so much more now is only a few simple key strokes away.

E-Mail of The Week

You could not be more spot-on in your March 25, 2008 entry, March Madness Musings and More on washingtonpost.com, where you talk about "That endless stream of commercials just keeps coming.

I, too, believe that with every substitution and out of bounds ball, there were five commercials. In one game, after returning from five commercials, an inbounds pass was deflected and went out of bounds. One game second, repeat, one game second, had gone off the clock. Another five commercials! It is very, very hard to watch. Your other observation that they do not switch to games like they used to (How True!), CBS has made March Madness into March Boring for me and I find myself switching channels MUCH more then I used to.

Mark Salajka

Washington, Mich.

Shapiro can be reached at: len.shapiro@washingtonpost.com.