A sportscaster is defined by how he calls a game and tells a story. For baseball announcers, a home run call or exclamations like “Holy cow!” are signature phrases. And many live in the memory of fans for how they handled a moment in time: “I don’t believe what I just saw!” Jack Buck said when an injured Kirk Gibson hit a pinch-hit home run to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
But how do you judge the career of a baseball voice who worked generations ago on radio with little or no audio available?
That was the dilemma facing voters for the annual Ford C.