San Diego — On the one-year anniversary of Skip Caray's death, former colleagues planned to raise a toast late Monday in San Diego to honor the venerable Braves broadcaster, who was known to have a good time now and again.
“It still knocks the wind out of me a little bit every time I think about it,” said Braves TV analyst Joe Simpson, who was flying with the team to San Francisco a year ago when word came that Caray had died at home in Atlanta.
The witty, often-acerbic Caray was a beloved figure of the Braves organization, working alongside Pete “The Professor” Van Wieren in the broadcast booth for 33 years. Caray died at 68, and Van Wieren retired after the season.
Caray was the son of the late Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray, and father of current Braves and TBS broadcaster Chip Caray. The younger Caray is doing radio work on the Braves games in San Diego, including Monday’s series opener.
“It’s just hard,” said Chip Caray, who worked with his dad for three years before his death and said they became closer in that time. “On the one hand, it’s great because everybody’s been coming up to me the past couple of days and telling stories about my dad, all that stuff.
“But it’s weird. Because the Braves were coming to the West Coast [as they were a year ago when Caray died]. And I was coming from San Francisco [where he called the Giants-Phillies game Sunday on TBS] ...”
Chip said he couldn’t stop thinking about his dad Monday morning. In the past, they might have gone for coffee at the team hotel and a walk around San Diego.
“Those rides to the ballpark are awful lonely now,” he said. “It still isn’t real to me, for lack of a better way of putting it. We’re no different than anyone else, any family that loses a dad. But after games, one of us would pick up the phone and call the other — ‘What the [expletive] happened?’ ‘What’s going on with this guy?’
“There’s no one to call anymore.”
He paused.
“Our lives were so intertwined in this,” he said. “When you don’t have someone to share it with, a lot of the fun is gone. Plus, there’s no one to mess with [Braves travel director] Bill Acree or ask Bobby [Cox], ‘How the hell could you double-switch there?’ ”
He smiled. “And there’s no one to pick up the bar tabs.”
The man known simply as “Skip” is gone, but hardly forgotten.
“We miss him,” Braves third baseman Chipper Jones said. “We wish he was still here. We’ve got a little piece of him here with Chip calling the games this week. It’s probably going to be a little tough on him.
“Skip will not be forgotten. He was as much an icon in Atlanta as any ballplayer who ever came through here.”
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