Close your laptop -- Barry Bonds is up
Crafting the Call, Episode 16, was an episode about describing Barry Bonds' greatness and turned into an ode to Journalism
Crafting the Call is a YouTube series that I developed along with Jesse Goldberg-Strassler. Each week, we examine different aspects of baseball play-by-play announcing, offering our perspective as working professionals for fans and advice for fellow broadcasters.
What I really enjoy about recording episodes of “Crafting the Call” is that Jesse and I purposely don’t script out the episodes. We settle on a topic, find some examples to watch, and then it’s just spontaneous reactions.
This week’s episode is the perfect example.
The theme: describing Barry Bonds’ greatness.
We analyzed how play-by-play announcers described key moments of Bonds’ career: his first home run in 1986 to his record-breaking 71st homer in 2001, the time he was intentionally walked with the bases loaded, and a stolen base to join the 40/40 club.
Then we looked back on Bonds’ 39th birthday, when he threw out a runner at home plate to preserve a tie, hit a walkoff home run, then left the ballpark to go visit his ill father in the hospital.
We pulled up my old story from The Oakland Tribune from that day and we got into a discussion about how my decade as a print reporter made me a better broadcaster.
I had a philosophy that I shared with some of the other Giants beat writers that sat next me in those years, Daniel Brown from The Mercury News and Jeff Fletcher from The Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
Laptops down.
When Barry’s up, close your laptop. Don’t write something. Don’t look up anything. Don’t miss the show.
Journalism principles ended up becoming the theme to this week’s episode.
Then we finished with Bonds’ epic at-bat against Eric Gagne when both were at the top of their game and both were, ahem, almost certainly at the peak of their chemical peaks too.
Here’s a list of previous episodes:
Episode 1 – How to call an inside-the-park home run
Episode 2 – Vin Scully’s perfect words to describe Koufax’s perfect game
Episode 3 – Eck vs Gibson, four legends with four different calls
Episode 4 – How calling a Triple Play can be treacherous
Episode 5 — Harry Caray without the shtick
Episode 6 — Clocking a broadcaster’s fastball
Episode 7 — Opening Day philosophies
Episode 8 — “Touch ’em All Joe,” four voices call the end of the 1993 World Series
Episode 9 — Don’t blink … someone might Steal Home
Episode 10 — Early season check-in … how’s your voice?
Episode 11 — Appreciating longtime Reds announcer Marty Brennaman
Episode 12 — One Day in Baseball, May 1 through the years
Episode 13 — How did he catch that? Plus catchphrases to capture the moment
Episode 14 — Chris Caray analyzes his grandfather Skip Caray
Episode 15 — The calls that defined the 2001 World Series