Earlier this week, the National Baseball Hall of Fame announced the 10 finalists for its Ford C. Frick Award, awarded each year to a notable broadcaster. And fans of our Bay Area teams all have someone to root for.
The late Bill King, the voice of the Oakland Athletics from 1981 through 2005, is a finalist for the seventh time. Duane Kuiper, part of the San Francisco Giants broadcast team since 1987, is a first-time finalist. (Kuiper spent one year, 1993, calling Colorado Rockies games.)
I'll say, as a perfectly objective Giants non-fan, that I like listening to Kuiper and the rest of the team's broadcasters: Jon Miller, Dave Fleming and Mike Krukow. No one's better at creating a picture of the game than Miller, who won the Frick Award in 2010. Fleming is a promising up-and-comer.
The special perspective that Kuiper and Krukow give is that of well-traveled major leaguers (Kuiper played in the '70s and '80s for the Cleveland Indians and the Giants, mostly at second base; Krukow was a starting pitcher in the same era for the Chicago Cubs and Giants). "Kruk and Kuip" – yeah, they're a unit – have a way of communicating how a player thinks about a game but do it like they've spent years sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the fans.
Kuiper's also known for a trademark home-run call — "Outta here!" (representative sample below). Ironically he's also the owner of a sort of record for lack of power at the plate: He made 3,754 plate appearances in his career with only one (1) home run. There's no one else who's even close in the pantheon of light-hitting big leaguers.
Now, on to Bill King, and the more subjective portion of this post.