Broadcast team braves the shadows of Skip, Pete, Ernie

A new airwave era has begun. For the first time in 34 years neither Skip Caray nor Pete Van Wieren pronounced the beginning of a Braves season from on high in the broadcast box.

Instead, Friday at the Turner Field home opening, it was Jim Powell ushering in that night while acknowledging yesterday. “From the newly anointed Pete Van Wieren radio booth, up next, the Braves and Nationals,” he said in his best seamless, honeyed delivery.

Enlarge this image

Elissa Eubanks/eeubanks@ajc.com

Jim Powell, in his first year as a Braves announcer, grew up listening to Skip Caray, Pete Van Wieren and Ernie Johnson. Don Sutton (background), who worked with all three, helped cement the new team.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

RELATED BRAVES LINKS

• Schedule • Beat blog • Stats
• Rate Atlanta broadcasters

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

And it was the eternally curly haired Hall of Famer Don Sutton who took the broadcast from there, finding a fresh experience even after all his time on the business end of a microphone. “I think that’s the first time I’ve opened an opening night broadcast in 20 years,” he said, somewhat amazed, off-air and between innings.

Theirs is a profession in which the hard part is making it sound so easy. That was the trademark of their predecessors. But inevitable change arrived last season. Caray, who had faced mounting health problems over the years, died in his sleep in August. Van Wieren soldiered on until October, then retired at the age of 64.

They went back with the Braves to 1975, to the close of the Vietnam War, to the same year Tiger Woods was born and Bill Gates began Microsoft. They made the 90-loss seasons of the 1970s-80s tolerable and the more recent run of 14 straight division titles glorious. Caray’s call of “Braves win, Braves win, Braves win” when Sid Bream slid home with the NLCS-winning run in 1992 became a franchise anthem.

Now it is left to the radio tag team of Sutton and Powell to talk baseball with Atlanta and the South.

One important initial review was encouraging.

“There’s not a lot of screaming, it’s just an easy listen,” Van Wieren said, sounding content in his retirement. “I listen for the accuracy and how comfortable it is to listen to. They sound real good together.”

Van Wieren’s immaculate knowledge of the game paired with Caray’s curmudgeonly wit to make for one of Atlanta’s — and baseball’s — great buddy acts. They were the voice of “America’s Team” in the days when the Braves were a staple of TBS’ national television broadcasts. And later, when ownership and broadcast alliances changed, they continued to speak for the Braves over their 150-station, seven-state radio network.

This is a season of major adjustment for the audience, many who grew up in the company of those two voices. You find a favorite song, there’s nothing else that ever sounds quite so good.

That adjustment reaches across the South. “It’s not the same. It never will be. Pete and Skip were the Braves in so many ways. We’ll move on, and I’m sure we’ll grow to love Jim Powell. But it will take time. Lots of it,” South Carolina listener Joe Vermilyea wrote in an e-mail to the AJC.

In another e-mail, Alpharetta’s Nick Nunziata noted that Powell “thus far feels too stiff and serious to fit in with the Braves vibe.” He then added, “There was a very warming presence in the radio booth for a good stretch of the modern team’s success, and I will long for the radio team to find a comfortable balance.”

It’s also a big adjustment for Atlanta native Powell. Caray, Van Wieren and their predecessor Ernie Johnson “are my heroes,” Powell said last week.

Invoking Braves players of yore, the new guy behind the mic added, “Ralph Garr was a hero, Rowland Office was a hero, Buzz Capra was a hero, and those guys [the broadcasters] were bigger heroes to me. Because they never left. They were always there.”

As is his nature, Van Wieren doesn’t quite see what the hubbub is all about.

“I keep hearing about the big shoes to fill,” he said. “They’re only size 10.”

The Braves sensed that the void would be larger than that, and in attempting to fill it, wanted to go with someone familiar.

Sutton, who turns 64 this month, was part of the Braves’ broadcast team for 18 years before leaving for a job with the Washington Nationals in 2007. He would be comfortable anchorage for the listeners. An ajc.com poll before his hiring showed 90 percent in favor of his return.

” ‘Welcome home,’ that has been the phrase I’ve heard most,” said Sutton, clouding up with emotion as he said it.

Sutton won 324 games pitching elsewhere — primarily with the Los Angeles Dodgers — but the Alabama native feels a strong bond with Atlanta.

“So many major events in our lives happened here,”

he said. “From Mary and I being married, to our daughter’s birth [Jacquelin is 12 now], to getting into the Hall of Fame [1998] to my being diagnosed [with kidney cancer in 2002].”

Powell is so Atlanta that he was the first baby born at Grady Hospital in 1965. The Braves broadcast was the background music of his youth, as he waded through Roswell High and the University of Georgia. Serving his time in the minors, broadcasting in Columbia and Charlotte, Powell landed his full-time major league gig in Milwaukee in 1996. Now there are three young daughters to convert from Brewers to Braves fans.

Powell and Sutton say they were able to strike up a quick rapport over a series of dinners in Orlando during spring training. Powell is a tennis player, not a golfer like Sutton. But they both appreciate a good wine, a good game and all the historical minutia of baseball.

“Even if you have things in common, you don’t know how you’ll get along,” Powell said. “The bottom line is being on the air and the two of you having fun. That’s what Ernie, Pete and Skip had. People back home are listening to have fun. They want to hear how the game is going and hear the guys enjoying each other’s company. I don’t think that is going to be a problem, based on my experience with Don so far.”

Sutton agrees. “We’re going to be fine.”

Most importantly, they sense the aura of Skip, Pete and Ernie around everything they do. Rather than run from the memories to which they inevitably will be compared, Sutton and Powell say they will embrace them.

“There won’t be a day when Jim and I walk into this booth you won’t get some bits and pieces of Skip, Pete and Ernie because both he and I learned from them,” Sutton said. “He and I can’t be them. We will establish our own identity, but there will always be Pete and Skip and Ernie.”

“I ended up dedicating my life to baseball and a lot of that speaks to the influence they had on me,” Powell testified. “I’ll never forget it, and I’ll never allow the audience to forget it. That is the holy trinity of baseball broadcasting as far as I’m concerned.”

There are at least 162 stories to tell this season, and on many nights at least one retiree will choose to mix and match his mediums. He’ll mute the television and turn up Don and Jim on the radio and harvest the details on his terms.

“I’m a radio guy and always have been,” Van Wieren said.