Atlanta Braves Announcer Skip Caray Dies

Memory works on us delicatley, in our sleep, through dreams. In my mind, a film projector plays the reels of my childhood, and I can hear two sounds. One is similar to that of a train's climb up the first hill on an old, wooden roller coaster. It's the sound of clanking chains, spinning gears, and creaking timbers. It's the harsh whisper of a machine. The second sound is a voice that allows me to smell freshly cut grass in April, feel the sun tanning my skin in July, and to taste the crispness of cool autumn air in October.

This voice holds in one syllable the exuberance of a sprout breaking through the soil for a chance at life and the decay of a leaf turning from green to red to brown as a victim of how life always ends, and because this voice holds these two extremes together in one moment, it is the stopping of the clock. It is forever the hopes of the first pitch on opening day, and the painful failures of last place and losing the World Series again and again and again.

When I hear Skip Caray call a Braves game, there is no tic and there is no toc. There is only baseball.

He was the voice of my Atlanta Braves for over three decades, and he passed away this past Saturday; and he will be missed because he offered hope and romanticism in the face of life's inevitable mechanics. He narrated the summers with a style and grace for all of us Braves fans who stayed up late listening to TBS.

When the 1980's made us believers in the harsh realities of historical determinism, he was our voice of reason and understanding. If the gears of the roller coaster were hurtling us forward in a manner that made us want to hurl, then he calmed our stomachs, saying, "as long as you promise to patronize our sponsors, feel free to walk the dog." He knew when we were in for a rough ride, and he never lied about it. He talked us through it.

Skip Caray also made the good times better. When the roller coaster made us giddy on adrenaline, he taught us to embrace euphoria, yelling, "Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!"

Skip made the moments like Francisco Cabrera and Sid Bream into things of magic and miracle because he showed us unabashedly that, yes, it is okay to care this much about something such as baseball. These moments do matter because we feel them in our blood and in our stomachs, like the highs and lows of those wooden-framed fortresses we invade as kids to prove our courage and our might. These moments when we overcome the impossible and beat the Pittsburgh Pirates show us that we are tall enough to ride through life.

Skip assured us of this, and he did it with such ease: "Andruw Jones, on his horse"..."a chopper to Chipper"..."and we're out of the inning, but it sure would be nice to have some insurance."

Skip was our insurance through the good and the bad, and if there's baseball in heaven, then he's calling a game with his dad right now; and in that game, there is no roller coaster track that leads to an end, there is no set number of innings, no game seven's, no first places, and no last places, just one, unending game of baseball.

I watch and listen to it in my dreams.
(Wait for Skip at the end of the video. It's just a classic call from a classic announcer, and if anyone can find a better clip of this, let me know. RIP Skip)