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Hank Greenwald was a heck of a announcer! I grew up listening to him, his knowledge of the history of the game was astounding, much like Bluesduke's

Hank was great. I have his last game on audio tape ... I should put it on DVD while I still can. I'm almost done with his autobiography - very interesting. His sense of humor just tickles me. For instance, Hank taught me that the Alou brothers, of course, had other siblings: Boog, Bebop, Skip to My, among others.

Hank Greenwald was a heck of a announcer! I grew up listening to him, his knowledge of the history of the game was astounding, much like Bluesduke's.

I should only equal Mr. Greenwald's knowledge.

One of my library's treasures is Mr. Curt Smith's Voices of the Game, which speaks wonderful volumes of the great baseball announcers through the 1980s. I was privileged to grow up still having Red Barber on the air, albeit on the Yankee team: the Ole Redhead was the sole reason I did listen to Yankee games at all growing up in the 1960s, and I happened to be watching the game that ended up getting him canned - the Yankees had hit their nadir in 1966 (they finished...you can look it up...dead last in the American League) and Yankee Stadium was practically empty; Barber called for a camera pan of the empty ballpark saying that was the real story of the game. When the lords of CBS, who owned the team at the time, got wind of it, they all but rousted Barber off the announcing team.

I grew up as a Met fan from the day they were born (I saw my first Met game in the Polo Grounds in 1962 - the game in which Marvelous Marv Throneberry, as a pinch hitter, whacked a walkoff three-run homer...and ended up taking a curtain call from the old center field clubhouse for the bleacher fans in nothing but his underwear and his uniform stirrups!) and, thus, listening to Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy (who still does Met games on radio, bless him), and Ralph Kiner. I was watching on television when Lindsey Nelson did three innings of play-by-play from the ceiling gondola in the middle of the Astrodome the year it opened (Casey Stengel: My man Lindsey's become a grounds rule!; a batted ball hitting the gondola was ruled a grounds-rule double). Later, though in the Midwest with the Air Force, my cable system brought me WOR as a superstation and I got to hear the second truly great Mets announcing team of Tim McCarver, Steve Zabriskie and Ralph Kiner (it was in this period that McCarver coined "grand salami" to indicate a grand slam). I also got to listen to Harry Caray and Steve Stone doing Chicago Cubs games on WGN.

Over the years, I got to hear Bob Prince of the Pittsburgh Pirates (on some nights on Long Island you could actually pick up the faint signals of the Pirates' radio station and Prince was a gem - one of the only shameless homers who actually knew what he was doing on the air and didn't make you feel like you were just being beaten to death with the root-root-rooting; Pirate fans were blessed to have him) and Mel Parnell of the Boston Red Sox (the old pitcher made a Red Sox fan out of me when I picked up on UHF television - remember?! - Red Sox games at my home on Long Island, during that wonderful 1967 pennant race). And, to me, World Series time meant Vin Scully. I would, if ever they were fool enough to name me baseball commissioner, decree that Vin Scully should broadcast the World Series until the day he dies. Some gifts are too precious to squander.

(...after Joe Garagiola said he would "have to bet the house - he's got to bunt" of Met relief pitcher Jesse Orosco, batting with two men on in the eighth inning of Game Seven, with the Red Sox using the rotation or "wheel" play to foil the bunt with first and third basemen charging the lines and shortstop and second basemen hustling to third and first)...they're going...Swinging! and a ground ball into left center field...in comes Knight, it is 8-5, Mets, and Joe, you just lost your house! - Vin Scully, Game Seven, 1986 World Series.

But then I came to southern California and I have the pleasure and privilege of listening to Vin Scully on television down here.