The Best Broadcasters in Baseball

I first discovered baseball through the medium of radio, on broadcasts of Giants' games relayed to our small-town station, KDAC. The voice I first associated with the game was the gravelly, competent, always aware and witty tones of Lon Simmons. For my money, nobody has ever been quite as good. When the Giants were competitive but doomed, in the late 60s, I heard Lon do many a game, but it was in 1971 that I really began to understand. Juan Marichal opened the season in San Diego with a 97-pitch masterpiece, and Willie Mays hit the first pitch he saw into the left-field seats. I watched it on KTVU, Channel 2 out of San Francisco. Lon called part of the game on the TV side, and the other part on the radio. That season ended with a line drive to Tito Fuentes at second base, again in San Diego, and the Giants won the west in a close shave over the Dodgers. I heard that call on the radio. I remember when Lon called upon the "bluebird of happiness" to eat blackberries and "fly over Chavez Ravine" when the Giants lost in that last series and the Dodgers could have tied it with a win.

But the Giants won the west and got to face Pittsburgh for the NL title. The series was quick and clean, a sweep for the Pirates, who would lose in the World Series to a powerhouse Baltimore squad with Jim Palmer, Mike Quellar, Pat Dobson and Dave McNally winning 20 games apiece.

For the rest of the 70s, the Giants were a mess. There were some epic slugfests with the likes of Pittsburgh, but Marichal went to pasture in Boston, Willie McCovey's knees were bad, and Mays's career was over. Though he would finish up with the Mets and play in another series, the MVP days were over. There were the fateful trades of George Foster, Gary Matthews and Garry Maddox, and the debacle that sent Gaylord Perry to Cleveland for a washed-up Sam McDowell. The advent of Dave Kingman, which ended with his walk-off grand slam and seat cushions flying from the upper deck at Candlestick, came to me in the assured tones of Lon Simmons, and I'm sure I wouln't have a clearer memory of the day if I'd been in the park or seen it live on TV.

He called a great game, but, more importantly, he knew how to keep a bad game interesting.

Lost spent some seasons with the A's, then retired to Hawaii, but in recent years has been a guest announcer for many Giant games. One memorable afternoon in 2001 he called a Barry Bonds homer with what had to be the fewest possible words. In that season, if a pitcher was obliged to come across the plate, the assumption was that Bonds would hit it hard, so when there were runners on, the fans knew something was coming. You could hear it in Lon's voice as well.

I listened as the bases became jammed with runners and Bonds came to the plate. The crowd was intense. I can't remember who they were playing, or who was pitching, or even who won. But I remember the rising tension, which really began two or three batters before as the situation began shaping up. When Bonds got his pitch, Simmons said, "Swung on...hit deep..." and the crowd's roar overwhelmed him as the ball rocketed toward the bricks in PacBell'sdistant right field corner. Nothing more need have been said. I could see the crowd standing, the slumped pitcher, Bonds's bat-flip and first step, and the runners on base, looking down, beginning to trot. After a few seconds of pandemonium--it could have been 15, or 30, or maybe a minute, Simmons got back on the mike and picked up the action. He might have slipped in his trademark "tell it goodbye," but any Giant fan worth his garlic fries had already done so, if only in his minds's eye.

In the years after Lon Simmons was the regular voice of the Giants, we have been treated to a young Al Michaels, who very professionally handled them in the late 1970s, when John The Count Montefusco and Bill Laskey started the games and Randy Moffitt and Gary Lavelle finished them. But there were never quite enough wins. It was a bleak period in the team's history.

One evening, I listened to Michals' call of an especially dull loss to an eastern team, as I was hiking out into the woods with a transistor radio dangling from the frame of my backpack. At some point in the game, Michaels broke away from the action to deliver a lecture on what a mockery the uninispired performance of the Giants had become. It was a searing, scathing, critique, and all true.

Only a few years later, Michaels would make sports history at the winter Olympics, calling the Miracle on Ice in which the U.S. defeated the apparently invincible Soviet Union in ice hockey. Michaels never looked back, becoming one on the best in business, with his pick of top assignments, including Monday Night Football.

But not to worry, the Giants got through the 80s with a series of mediocre teams made familiar to us by the affable and always professional Hank Greenwald. When I saw Hank during TV broadcasts, I had to admit he had odd taste in suit jackets. But he knew enough stories to make even the hundred-loss 1985 season seem interesting. He introduced fans to the new era, after Will Clark greeted Nolan Ryan with a homerun to center to open the 1986 season.

Now, the Giants may still have the best broadcaster in the game. Jon Miller brings a true fan's appreciation to the events on the field, but he's smart enough never to take it all too seriously. When he's away working network games on Sunday nights, the Mike Krukow-Duane Kuiper team does an honest job of telling us what's goping on, both on the field and in the clubhouse. Former players, they're homers, but never pathetic or morose, like Ron Santo.

In 50 years of listening to Giants' games, there hasn't been a Series win to celebrate. SF Giants' fans can only guess what that might feel like. But we've been blessed with the greatest voices in the business.