Silenced Voices in the Broadcasting Booth

January 25, 2021 Michael Olesker

(Kenya Allen/PressBox)

In a series of odd gestures that will not help them win a single baseball game this coming summer, or ever, the Baltimore Orioles have suddenly swept away the heart of their veteran broadcast lineup.

Go to war, Miss Agnes.

Going, going, gone are the familiar voices of Gary Thorne, Jim Hunter, Tom Davis, Rick Dempsey, Dave Johnson and Mike Bordick. None of them ever pitched a shutout nor smote a home run while perched behind a microphone, nor will their replacements.

And, hate to break the news, but the Orioles will remain a work in progress this summer, bullied by the bigger, richer kids in the American League and unaffected by any changes in the broadcast booth.

But make no mistake: Those voices matter immensely to any ballclub. They attach emotions to the primitive act of hitting a round object with a piece of wood, and they make it seem important.

And the hometown voices offer something else: their sheer familiarity, and their connection to local history, cement emotional ties between the team and the town. These are our guys, telling our side of the story.

For decades, when you heard Chuck Thompson utter a single line — “Ain’t the beer cold?” or “Go to war, Miss Agnes” — you felt something stirring: not only a ballgame’s triumphant moment, but the connection with an old friend speaking for the whole town.

They can do that in a heartbeat.

They can bestow some humanity on athletes who might otherwise be little more than box score agate. They connect yesterday with today, and thus hold on to extended family history.

Who gets custody of all the great stories when the storytellers are silenced?

You kiss off a lot of allegiance when you release former Orioles-turned-announcers such as Rick Dempsey and Dave Johnson and Mike Bordick.

You lose sheer journalistic professionalism when you silence a voice like Gary Thorne’s.

You lose a sense of history when you release Bawlamer guys like Tom Davis and Dave Johnson, and even Jim Hunter, who wasn’t precisely a hometown guy but spent a quarter-century working Orioles games.

It was Hunter’s original sin to arrive here as the great Jon Miller was leaving. Miller brought a sense of humor and a great storytelling gift as part of his broadcast equipment. Next to him, Hunter was as colorless as an AP bulletin. But he knew the game, and over 24 years became part of the community.

Tom Davis came out of the Vince Bagli school of broadcasting. When you heard Tom, you knew he could name every Orioles manager since Jimmy Dykes, and knew every tale about every player since then. Davis brought good cheer; more than that, he brought authenticity.

You heard Dempsey and you automatically recalled Demper as the scrappy soul of the great Earl Weaver clubs; you heard Dave Johnson and recalled his gutsy moments on the legendary “Why Not?” ’89 team, when it felt like one of our own neighborhood guys living the dream.

We’ll all survive. In last summer’s truncated season, the Orioles brought in some familiar folks. Scott Garceau’s a pro, and he’s at his best when attaching today’s memories with yesteryear’s. Ben McDonald and Brian Roberts bring a lot of charm, along with their playing histories. Brett Hollander’s whole life and career are attached to Baltimore.

And if there’s a single brain left in the Orioles’ front office, they’ll leave the Hall of Famer Jim Palmer alone.

In all the years of Orioles’ frustration, it’s easy for any of us to get cynical. The problem is, cutting loose all these familiar voices seems to indicate nothing more than cost-cutting for its own sake. At such moments, cynicism does not diminish.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.