The Red and Black

To some, baseball is just a game. To others, it's a national pastime.

But to the Caray family, baseball is life, and they know all the details.

And after spending what has seemed like an eternity in the national spotlight, Skip Caray and his youngest son Josh went back to their roots Tuesday.

They went back to seeing the game the way it was meant to be played.

"This is the way baseball used to be," Skip said Tuesday night at Foley Field, as he and his son watched the Bulldogs roll over Wofford 23-1.

"This is a game played by players who don't make hundreds of thousands of dollars."

That's something Caray isn't too used to seeing, as he is the voice of the Atlanta Braves, a team whose players' salaries look more like their social security numbers.

And though you can complain all you want about how much athletes should make, one thing you can't put a price tag on is the contribution the Caray family has made to the national pastime.

Skip's father Harry spent his whole life loving baseball before passing away Feb. 18.

But at its core, the Caray's trip to Foley Field was more than just a trip to see a baseball game. It was about getting reacquainted with life after watching a little piece of it die last month.

"Baseball hasn't changed, it's just lost its primary ambassador," Skip said of his father, who for the past 16 years had been the voice of the Chicago Cubs.

"Nobody loved the game more than my father."

That may be true, too. Even when baseball did everything to turn fans away, there was Caray to welcome the fans back. Caray inspired us with his singing of "Take Me out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch. He made the game more than just a contest to see who can put more runs up on the scoreboard.

Harry worked for a franchise that has become synonymous with losing, yet he made the fans' trip to Wrigley Field - and anyone watching on television - a winning experience.

He made watching the game fun. He made us want to stand for that minute or two and sing a simple song. And when he died, the Carays were left with only one thing to do.

Throw a party, a big party.

"That's what my father told us to do," Skip said.

"He told us to throw a party, so we did."

So following the funeral, instead of grieving the loss of one of the game's most illustrious figures, they celebrated what he brought to baseball.

"I didn't know it was possible to laugh and cry at the same time," Skip said. "Everything was great, everything was wonderful - just like my father would have wanted it."

Now Skip is left with the unenviable task of trying to measure up to the legacy his father left behind. But Skip has no intention of doing this. He has created his own niche in Atlanta.

All Braves fans know where they were when Sid Bream came chugging home in 1992, with Skip calling out the play at the plate.

"Braves win! Braves win!"

But that seems like an eternity ago, as Skip describes the last three weeks of his family's lives "a blur."

So on Tuesday, it must have been nice to get back to the basics, at least for a day.

"We try to get up to Athens each season to catch a game," Skip said. "We've been coming each season for the past four years. It's fun."

And with that, Harry and Josh went back to watching the game. It was the bottom of the sixth inning, almost time to stand up and take a stretch.

I wonder who they were thinking about.

– Jon Gallo is a staff writer for The Red and Black.

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