JamesSlusher.com

Skip Caray, the voice of the Atlanta Braves, has passed away at the age of 68.  Skip was one of the good guys and he will be sorely missed, especially by me.

The number of times that I have looked at a television and cried tears of joy can be counted on one hand.  His voice was calling the play by play on each and every one of them.  He could be blunt, he could be abrasive, but he always called ‘em like he saw ‘em and that honesty showed brightly through his work.  He might have passed, but my respect for the man never will. 

Goodbye, Skip.  Peace be with you.

P.S.  I found this on youtube.  This was one of those tearful moments spliced with some shots of Skip as a memorial:

 

Mike Hampton is without a doubt the most worthless piece of human excrement ever to sully Major League Baseball and the Braves roster.  All these ailments cannot possibly be real. He is either a lying hypochondriac or the biggest wimp ever.  Perhaps both.  The Braves would be doing themselves a favor just to assign him to Triple A and hope that the indignity of it makes him retire early.

What a piece of crap.

I heard Chris Rock give one of the best replies to the whole “should Barry Bonds’ home run record have an asterisk” question.  He said, sure, if you put one next to Babe Ruth’s name.  He had 714 affirmative action home runs, he never played against black guys.

I think that is brilliant and a perfect encapsulation of my feelings towards the whole thing.  Different eras in baseball have different negative parts of the game.  In Babe’s era it was segregated, in Bond’s era there are performance enhancing drugs.  They both may have benefited from these negatives.  I say “may have” because Bond’s has never failed an MLB drug test.  Babe definitely benefited from not playing against all the best players out there.  So to talk of an asterisk is just silly and simple-minded.