Ron Fairly, Super Genius.
Here in Seattle, we have a baseball announcer for the ages. He is known by many names. He has a style all his own, and there's no one in the Great Game who quite compares to him.
No, not Dave Niehaus. He's good, too. But there ain't nothing on the airwaves quite like Ron Fairly. He played in the bigs for a number of years, and when he's on the air, he's like a combination of a high-school baseball coach and your uncle that could never shut up while you were watching tv.
Now, I love Ron Fairly. I love his style because he doesn't really have one. Sometimes he doesn't seem aware that he's on live television. He just falls into odd anecdotes, and he and Dave will start chatting about the Dodgers team of '52, and Dave will occasionally interject to mention that Ichiro just hit a double, and they'll resume their tale. Ron often sounds like the game is interrupting a good story.
The local sports guys like to call him Captain Obvious. Ron is the one guy in the booth who'll point out that you'll probably get a better pitch at 3-0 than at 0-2. If a game's tight, he'll tell you that it just takes a couple of hits to score a run, and if this team scores a run, then by golly, it's going to be tied up.
And sometimes he's a baseball arbiter, describing in minute detail exactly how the game is played. Ron would be the one to explain the logic behind the infield fly rule. Or the wisdom of pulling a double switch. And the stories are often, but not always, connected to what's happening on the field. Not always. Sometimes Ron just takes a story and runs with it until you can imagine some radio producer begging him to put a cork in it.
He just had one of those moments. The M's are playing the Red Sox. There was a nice play to end the last inning, where the shortstop caught a line drive and doubled off the first base runner. Nomar was on 3rd base. Ron starts describing what he calls the "4th out," whereby if Nomar had run home before the 3rd out was registered, the run would have counted, even though Nomar hadn't tagged up. it was, he carefully pointed out, because the baseball rules didn't say that you had to tag up to score. They just spelled out the consequences if you didn't tag up on a line drive or fly out.
In order to disqualify Nomar's run, the Mariners would have had to appeal and tag third base - therefore the 4th out.
Now, this story was so fascinating to Ron that he started thinking about other 4th out situations. He went to describing one such situation, while Bucky Jacobson was hitting. (For you non-Seattle types, Bucky is seen here as being the great second coming of baseball, the salvation of all that is good and decent and exciting. Mostly because the current lineup has become such a gigantic sucking machine.)
So Bucky strikes out. Scott Spiezio comes up to bat, another of the Mariners' great disappointments. Ron starts another example of the 4th out syndrome. "Say there's men on first and second..."
All of a sudden, Spiezio gets a hold of a pitch and sends it flying toward the right field seats.
Dave jumps over Ron and starts his home run call, which ends tragically when the pitch goes foul. The crowd groans. Grown men cry in the stands.
Ron waits for about a beat, and then resumes.
"First and second, and there's just one out..."
Thank goodness there are commercial breaks. He could still be coming up with 4th out scenarios.
8:35:43 PM
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