Nardi wrote:
pittmike wrote:
The problem is likely someone shouldn't expect a sports nerd play by play person to automatically be must listen radio.
Did anybody expect that?
Listen, he's still a huge improvement over the Get Off My Lawn guy. But...he should use that edit button in his head once in a while. HE thinks gems are coming out of his mouth.
I remember one night during a hawk/dj sox royals game there was a long uncomfortable 15-20sec pause in the commentary and then hawk just up and says "I like taffy" and then dj hurriedly did the verbal equivalent of Beavis going "yeah yeah" and hawk was downright sardonic in subtly giving him shit for it. There's nothing quite like the subtle disdain of the language old people use when they don't like you.
That said, after years and years of hawk's glorious disdain I think benetti and stone's shtick is that they actually like each other, which is something you didn't have with any sox announcers before them until you go back to the glory days of farmer and rooney.
I always loved that Rooney's call of the WS final out went out of its way to cement his catchphrase ("its a white Sox winner...") before acknowledging that the white Sox won the fucking world series ("... and a world championship!") It'd be interesting to go back over the WS winning calls over the years to see how many announcers made sure to have their catchphrases front and center in what would likely go on to be their most famous call.
The other thing I miss about hawk is that he had what we'd call legit memetic potential nowadays when he calls. No other announcer has ever gotten me to do things like yell STRETCH at a fly ball (cuz i'm not cultured enough to sprinkle in "get on back there") and he's even got retired ones like GASSSS that are better than the milquetoast stuff that most people are doing today. We're seriously losing a big chunk of baseball culture at its purest when guys like Hawk age out of the job and get replaced by the Len Kaspers of the world. Hawk was legitimately so much cooler than Len Kasper could ever be; even tho we all loved it when "Lennie" (- Terry Boers) would get a guitar and shred with brenly. It's like hawk used to say of hitting... you gotta go up there and make yourself dangerous in the booth.
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Curious Hair wrote:
Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?