New York Giants --> San Francisco Giants --> Toronto Giants?

MLB.com has an article today about Al Michaels and Bob Costas calling tonight's Giants-Mets game for MLB Network. The game is blacked out in the New York and San Francisco markets but not to worry. Michaels and Costas will call the 4th and 5th innings for SNY and the 6th and 7th innings for ComCast SportsNet Bay Area.

In talking about Michaels as a baseball announcer, MLB.com shares this interesting nugget:

"Many listeners might not have known just how good Michaels was when he called Giants games. Each San Francisco team he was associated with finished under .500 and drew less than 650,000 to Candlestick Park for the season. Michaels recalled keeping a parka in the broadcast booth to cope with the elements, naming the people in the sparsely populated stands one night instead of announcing the paid attendance and seeing the franchise nearly move to Toronto before the 1976 season. "It was all pretty negative," Michaels said."

The near move to Toronto was something I never knew about. Oddly, diehard baseball fans (especially fans like me that wanted to grow up to be play-by-play announcers someday) will share a memory of Michaels as a baseball announcer that has nothing to do with baseball. I will always remember Michaels being in the broadcast booth before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants when the big earthquake hit right before game time.



Having grown up in San Francisco, Michaels had intimate knowledge of everything being shown on TV and was, for a few hours that night, pretty much the entire ABC News and ABC Sports broadcast crew in one. I had just visited San Francisco in February of that year on a family vacation when I was 16 years old so it felt strange to me that even though I only spent a few days in the Bay Area I had just been to many of the places that were being shown on TV with fires and unspeakable damage.

So as a baseball fan, I'm looking forward to the 4th and 5th innings of tonight's game for no other reason than having a memory of Al Michaels calling a baseball game rather than calling earthquake rescue efforts in lieu of a baseball game.

And not to take away anything from Bob Costas, but my fondest memory of him doing baseball comes 10 years later, in Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS. He said something to the effect of 'the Braves have brought in John Smoltz in the top of the 7th to shut the door on the Mets', only to watch Mike Piazza hit a 2-run home run as part of a 4-run inning where the Mets took a 7-3 Braves lead and tied it 7-7. Then Kenny Rogers happened in the bottom of the 11th and I try to forget what ensued thereafter.