Most definitely a part of baseball past

Somehow, I suspect that baseball broadcasting up in the heavens became a heck of a lot more interesting, if not downright infuriating for the ballplayers themselves.

For while Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Caray has been gone from this earth for nearly two decades, his one-time partner in the Chicago White Sox booth, Jimmy Piersall, didn't leave us until Sunday. He was 87.

LIKE MANY CURRENT broadcasters, Piersall got the job because he was a former ballplayer -- some 17 seasons with various teams, primarily the Boston Red Sox (although he was a New York Met when he hit his 100th career home run and celebrated by running the bases backwards).

But anyone who tuned in to White Sox baseball back in the 1970s remembers that Caray and Piersall were the pair that told it like it is (or at least how they perceived it), and managed to stir up a whole lot of ballplayers (and sometimes even their spouses, because those of us of a certain age all remember what Jimmy said about ballplayer wives). Just envision the pair now broadcasting that baseball game being played in the heavens and what they're saying about Babe Ruth and his carousing ways?

That style made for interesting broadcasts back in those days when the White Sox were on WSNS-TV. Channel 44 hadn't yet been converted into a Spanish-language affiliate of the Telemundo network. We didn't have an all-sports channel like Comcast now offers in Chicago.

But even if you didn't care about the White Sox, the pair was so raucous that you couldn't help but look and listen. Many fans still remember the rant that Piersall went into on that night in 1979 when Steve Dahl fans stormed the playing field in between games of a double-header to express their contempt for disco music.

BUT IT WASN'T just those moments. It was the fact that the two were capable of doing anything at any time in a way that broadcasters just don't do anymore -- not even Caray who became a timid version of himself once he went over to the Cubbie side of Chicago.

Now we can give Piersall an R.I.P. by remembering this particularly intriguing moment of a long-ago White Sox game.

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EXTRA: Gimme un cerveza

I couldn't help but notice the reports Friday about the change in brands of brews to be made available at Chicago White Sox games beginning this season.

No more Miller Beer products. No more Miller Lite. No more "tastes great, less filling" debates in between verbal brawls about why the White Sox are playing so putridly.

THERE'S ALSO THE part of the announcement that has Modelo Especial becoming the official import beer sponsor of the White Sox.

Which sounds like something exotic, until one realizes that Modelo brand beer is one of several Mexican brews owned by Grupo Modelo, which is part of the larger conglomerate that already owns Anheuser Busch products.

In short, Budweiser!

Although to tell you the truth, the notion of Mexican beers being available at White Sox games is something I can remember as far back as the first games I ever went to at Comiskey Park back in the 1970s.

BACK THEN, AMONG the advertising signs displayed in the ballpark were ones for Carta Blanca, a brand I occasionally drink. Because when it comes to a Mexican brand of cerveza, I'm more likely to desire a Tecate.

And as for those who want to think that Miller brand beer products are an essential part of the White Sox experience, I recall the days when Harry Caray was the face of the White Sox who guzzled down Falstaff beer because that was the ball club's sponsor.

All that "Cub Fan and a Bud Man" nonsense came along later when Caray became an aging caricature of the Hall of Fame-quality broadcaster he had once been in St. Louis and on the Sout' Side.

Besides, when I think about baseball and beer, I remember the 9 bucks I had to pay the last time I actually splurged for a cup of mediocre brew at the structure now known as Guaranteed Rate Field.

WHICH, TO MY mindset, is way too much to pay for a drink. I wonder how anyone is capable of getting seriously plastered at a ballpark these days. It costs too much, unless they're literally sneaking the liquor into the ballpark with them.

Although I'll have to admit that watching the World Baseball Classic matchup Friday between the United States and Colombia was frustrating.

What with the way White Sox ace Jose Quintana pitched near no-hit ball for five innings and left the game with a two-run lead -- only to see his team's relief pitchers immediately blow the lead!

Certainly one of those moments where I wish I had a supply of cerveza readily on hand. Perhaps a Carta Blanca, to trigger old beisbol memories of the days of peloteros such as Jorge Orta and Francisco Barrios.

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… it isn’t. Union hits political foul ball

Learning that the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates refused to give its approval to a settlement that could have put Chicago Public School students back in the classrooms as early as Monday gave me the same gut feeling as watching a baseball blown foul.

In my mind, I could hear the Harry Caray “home run” call when I learned last week that a tentative deal was in place.

HARRY GETTING ALL worked up (“It might be,”) over a deep fly ball that definitely is headed (“it could be,”) for the stands.

But then at the last second, that gust of wind from the south blows the ball just to the left of the foul pole – turning the would be “it is!” into a foul ball.

What makes this particular shot galling is that it is the delegates who seemed to be determined to will the ball foul. Picture the '75 World Series Carlton Fisk waving his hands in the opposite direction!

The explanation given Sunday for the lack of a vote was that the delegates for the teachers felt rushed – even though a vote originally was expected Friday. They want to take their sweet time reviewing this deal.

I DON’T THINK they fully appreciate how much people were pleased to know that this “strike” was only going to be a week-long thing. The fact that it now will go into a second week is bound to shift the will of the public toward the tyrannical antics of Rahm Emanuel.

That’s the Rahm-bo who got his butt whupped by teachers union boss Karen Lewis. Yet it seems that her own delegates want to give Emanuel some first aid so he can resume the fight.

Which he seems determined to do. His reaction to learning of the lack of a vote of approval was to say that he will get a judge to issue an order that forces the teachers to go back to work.

If that happens, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chicago Public Schools suddenly rescinded a lot of the points they were willing to concede.

SO HERE’S HOPING that these same delegates follow through with what Lewis says is possible – a vote on Tuesday that could result in classes resuming Wednesday. If they open any later, I could see the mood getting downright U-G-L-Y!

Those two days might not be much in the short-run. But the teachers have managed to give up some serious good will with the way they have handled this.

Talk about the potential for turning victory into defeat. This is the kind of maneuver that I would only expect the Chicago Cubs to be capable of doing. I wouldn’t have envisioned it possible in the field of labor negotiations.

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AT&T spot captured essence of “Chicago Cubs Caray,” not the man's whole broadcast career

I hate to think that the career of comedian John Caponera will suffer a lasting blow due to his latest acting gig – portraying the essence of late baseball broadcaster Harry Caray in a television commercial for AT&T.

But considering the irrational level of thought often achieved by Chicago Cubs fans (who else would root for a ball club that is going to go at least 100 full seasons without a World Series victory), it might be, it could be, it is.

CAPONERA COULD GO through the rest of his acting career as the guy who “besmirched” the reputation of Caray – a decade after his death.

At stake was the television spot that AT&T used to promote its telecommunications services. It consisted of Caponera doing a third-rate impersonation of Caray’s shtick, or at least what it had devolved to by the time he began broadcasting baseball for the Cubs.

Caponera as Caray doing corny puns and words spelled backward while speaking in a slurred voice that was supposed to resemble Caray’s unique speech pattern (which itself was influenced by often imbibing too much Budweiser).

Caray’s widow, Dutchie, remains miffed about the spot, although I understand AT&T felt the need to appease her with an apology for taking the name of Caray in vain.

NOW I CAN understand that since she knew the real man (instead of the drunken caricature most of the rest of us saw on television), she is likely to take anything related to Harry just a bit too seriously.

And I have to confess – I hated the ad as well.

But I couldn’t stand it for a very different reason than all the other people who have supported Dutchie in being disgusted with AT&T for using the Caray image in their effort to promote their products.

What does a long-dead broadcaster whose professional peak occurred decades ago in another city (St. Louis) have to do with AT&T?

I DON’T KNOW.

I never could figure out what the point was of having a Caray impersonator in their advertising. I still don’t know how the Caponera routine in any way promoted AT&T products or services.

It wasn’t even particularly clever in a way that would make us think associate humor or intelligence with AT&T. In short, the commercial deserved to get lost in the shuffle of advertising images that bombard us through our television sets.

Yet to listen to Cubs fans, it was insulting. It degraded the public persona of a wonderful man who ought to be above public criticism. How dare they treat Harry with anything less than respect. We all ought to genuflect before the image of the great Harry Caray, whose five-plus decades-long career as a major league baseball broadcaster reached such intense highs that he is one of the few broadcasters honored in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

GET REAL, CUBS fans.

I’ll be the first to admit that Caray as a broadcaster was a true talent. He was unique when he was in his prime. Listening to old tapes of Caray doing baseball (being the “Voice of the Fan” who would think nothing of trashing a ballplayer if he got lazy on the playing field) makes us realize how just about all contemporary broadcasters are mediocrities who don’t deserve to say they worked in the same profession as Caray.

But those old recordings would be the Harry Caray who was the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals on KMOX-AM and the network of small-town radio stations across the south and southwest that carried Caray’s accounts of Cardinals games from Alabama to Oklahoma and made the Cardinals “America’s Team” in a way that the Dallas Cowboys could only dream of being.

LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, age causes a person to deteriorate physically. Those of us who followed Caray back in the 1970s when he was the voice of the Chicago White Sox got to see touches of the Harry Caray of old (I still remember him trashing second baseman Jorge Orta by saying, “How could he lose a ball in the sun, he’s from Mexico?”), particularly when he was paired up with Jimmy Piersall – making the two possibly the most sarcastic pairing ever to broadcast baseball games.

By the time Caray got to the Cubs, he was 68. Nobody is going to be the same at that age as they were in their physical prime (the Vin Scully of today is terrible compared to his peak in the 1960s broadcasting the Los Angeles Dodgers – only the fact that most modern broadcasters are absolutely awful allows Scully to still be thought of as one of the best).

Hence, the Caray that did Cubs games often became a god-awful parody that butchered names (particularly of any ballplayer from a Latin American country) and did the awful puns (“Mets spelled backward is Stem,” he really said it on-air). There is a sense that what Caponera did in the commercial was nothing more than capturing the essence of Chicago Cubs Caray, rather than focusing on Harry in his prime.

Cardinals Caray is the broadcaster who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, while Cubs Caray was tacky and sometimes hard to watch. (White Sox Caray was a different breed altogether – he said and did things no other ball club would have tolerated because Sox owner Bill Veeck was such a maverick himself).

I ALWAYS THOUGHT that Caray should have seriously considered retiring some time about 1984. That would have allowed him to end his career with a winning ballclub (the Cubs won their first division title ever that year, and finished a regular season in first place for the first time since 1945).

It also would have allowed him to get a sense of revenge against the White Sox, where he was cut loose after 1981 because then-new owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn wanted to reshape the broadcasts in their own image (Does anybody else remember the Chicago broadcast work of Don Drysdale?) rather than Caray’s image of a hard-drinking South Sider (which in some ways is so fitting for the Sox).

Caray would have been able to retire on his own terms, and on top of his game. We never would have had to endure the aging man whose performance diminished his reputation. And he wouldn’t have provided fodder for half-wit impersonations like the one done by Caponera.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: John Caponera says he wasn’t trying to be insulting to the memory (http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/hoekstra/872646,CST-FTR-harry02.article) of Harry Caray. Lots of Cubs fans (most of whom take themselves way too seriously) disagree.

The restaurant chain (http://www.harrycarays.com/) that pays tribute to the broadcaster who made “Holy Cow” a baseball catchphrase, even though fans of Phil Rizzuto of the New York Yankees like to think he said it first (he didn’t).

Some words of wisdom (http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quocaray.shtml) from Harry Christopher Carabina.

In an era when sports broadcasters are nothing more than former ballplayers who need a job, Caray (http://www.radiohof.org/sportscasters/harrycaray.html) is a unique breed. He was an actual broadcast professional whose concern was being on the air, not just being inside the ballpark so he wouldn’t have to work for a living.