Van Wieren was a Class Act

-I decided to look at the online Atlanta Journal Constitution today to see what the status of Tom Glavine's talk of returning to the Braves was. Before I could get to Glavine, something caught my eye that immediately took my mind off the forty two year old lefthander, and onto the man that helped broadcast almost his entire career.

If you hadn't heard by now, former TBS Superstation Braves Announcer Pete Van Wieren has decided to retire from broadcasting. Yes, this news came back in October, but it slipped so far underneath mine and everybody else's radar that I only learned about it just now. Van Wieren had good reason to retire. He saw TBS switch their format from covering the Atlanta Braves exclusively, to showing games baseball wide in accordance with TBS getting the rights to broadcast Baseball playoff games. Earlier in 2008, Van Wieren's long time radio and television partner Skip Caray died. (Yes, he's Harry's son) Even while Skip Caray was alive, he hadn't been given the opportunity to call games for TBS and their new format. Van Wieren saw the writing on the wall and retired and you can't blame him for it.

But with the retirement of Pete Van Wieren, we've seen some of the last remnants of a great sports broadcasting tradition: Atlanta Braves Baseball on TBS. In 1976, TBS Superstation owner Ted Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in order to keep the team in Atlanta. He immediately put them on his TBS Superstation which soon started to be picked up by cable companies throughout the United States, many of them notably outside of the southeast of the United States. With Braves games being shown regularly on TBS, the Braves gained a sizable fan base outside of their traditional media markets, and the voices they heard were Van Wieren's and Caray's. 

One of the things I enjoyed about the broadcasts Van Wieren and Caray did, was that they treated it like a radio broadcast. What I mean, is if you have ever listened to a baseball game on the radio (and chances are, if your reading this then you have) you'll notice that the two announcers aren't so fixed into the constraints of one broadcaster giving the play by-play, and the other giving color commentary. One will usually act as the play by play man with the other giving color for one inning and then they'd switch the next. Well since, Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren also announced Braves games on the radio together, they just treated their television broadcasts together like they would a radio broadcast. What you got from that were announcers who, because they didn't feel confined to traditional sports broadcasting roles, became very colorful with their announcing of the games. You didn't mind watching a blowout when these guys were announcing because you knew they'd come up with some conversation that would draw your interest and often times make you laugh.

But they also took their job very seriously, and while neither ever played the game seriously, both would offer great insight into the game. More often than not, I came away from watching a Braves broadcast on TBS learning something about Baseball that I hadn't known before.

With another former TBS Braves announcer, Don Sutton rotting away in Washington with an absolute yawn of a play by play man, Bob Carpenter, I realized that you Braves TBS guys are quickly dying out. Those guys could relate to any generation, because they spoke Baseball, and they spoke about it well. Pete Van Wieren, you'll be missed.