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 MARLINS' RADIO VOICE ...STILL DIALED IN | Palm Beach Post | Find Articles at BNET
Dave Van Horne got into radio on a dare. A lifetime later, tuning out has yet to cross his mind.

         The voice of the Florida Marlins echoes what you hear from broadcast booths all around the majors. Those fortunate enough to achieve any kind of longevity doing baseball play-by-play feel truly blessed, so few are the opportunities, and truly honored, so focused and familial is the nightly conversation.
"That's particularly true for broadcasters who have stayed with the same team for several generations," said Van Horne, who offers as an example Marty Brennaman, who has been calling Cincinnati games since the days of the Big Red Machine.

 "There are fathers who listened to Marty Brennaman, and now the sons of those fathers are listening to Marty Brennaman, and those same fathers authentic Tim McCarver jersey Cream are introducing their grandchildren to Marty Brennaman."
Van Horne, 69,  hasn't reached that iconic status in South Florida for the simple reason that he's been working Marlins games only since 2001, but his 32 prior seasons as the main TV and radio voice of the Montreal Expos demonstrate more than staying power.
Van Horne, a Palm Beach County resident since 1982, works a game the traditional way, minus the shtick, and trusts listeners to ride along with the particular rhythms of baseball itself, whether it be dropping in for an inning or two or signing on for the full ride. It's how this game always has worked, and how it always has sounded in the familiar cadences of the most reliable broadcasters.
The death of Philadelphia authentic Lou Brock jersey Blue broadcast legend Harry Kalas in April surely struck millions of people as the loss of a friend.
       How many little kids listened to Harry past lights-out, hiding a radio under the covers with a whispering speaker pressed to their ear as some extra-inning classic played out in their imaginations?
Kalas was the Phillies' voice for 39 years, knitting together generations of fans just as Vin Scully has with Dodgers fans in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and the way that Jack Brickhouse did in Chicago.
"I personally think," said Van Horne, "that those days are kind of gone by, those days where people sat on the back porch and had the radio going, where you could walk down the authentic Stan Musial jersey Cream street in the summer and hear one radio after another and listen to the Cardinals game or the Expos game or the Mets game or whatever. Every game is available on television now. Everybody that's interested can bring it up on their home computers.
"And yet, with all the media changes, baseball on the radio has survived. I still think there's something very special about it."
Once I thought of becoming a major-league broadcaster, until the audio of my amateur attempts at play-by-play in college came braying out of a home tape recorder. A little like Gomer Pyle, that annoying voice, but with far less natural enthusiasm and considerably less clarity at all the important moments, like whenever a ball was hit somewhere and someone instantly did something with it.
Try it some time. Turn down the sound and see if Matt Holliday official jersey you can do a passable job for one half-inning, much less 41 seasons in the big leagues.
Van Horne has been at it that long, from his foundational days doing English-language broadcasts with the expansion Expos of 1969 to today's carpool commutes from Palm Beach Gardens to Land Shark Stadium for Marlins games. He shares the ride with Tommy Hutton, the Marlins' TV analyst, and what do they faithfully listen to on those late-night trips back up the turnpike? A sampling of other major- league games on XM authentic Tim McCarver jersey White Radio, of course.
Somewhere further down the road may be a spot for Van Horne in the broadcasting wing of baseball's Hall of Fame. He's one of 10 finalists for the 2009 Ford C. Frick Award, awarded previously to press box giants such as Mel Allen, Red Barber, Curt Gowdy, Jack Buck and, in 2001, Felo Ramirez, the voice of the Marlins' Spanish- language radio broadcast.
"It's just a matter of time until Dave gets that award," said P.J. Loyello, the Marlins' vice president of communications and broadcasting, who grew up listening to Van Horne in Montreal. "Already he's a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame."
Wrong, though, to think of baseball's forever voices as museum pieces. They're always changing, pushed by new electronic technologies, dragged through new airport security procedures, presented with entirely new rosters of young baseball talent to learn and to turn into part of the never-ending radio Tim McCarver official jersey drama.
Van Horne couldn't have seen this coming, not from his boyhood home authentic Matt Holliday jersey White in Easton, Pa., where the nearby Bethlehem Steel mill filled the air with smoke and the faraway sounds of the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia A's filled the night with hope.
Later, as a college student in Virginia, he went with a group of friends, just for kicks, to audition for a Top-40 disc jockey job at the local radio station. That went surprisingly well, and, after a short period of broadcasting high school sports in the Richmond area and a little Virginia Tech basketball and the experiment of calling Triple-A baseball, there came another audition and an even greater shock.
John McHale, the Expos' first president, chose Van Horne from a few hundred applicants to bring the Vince Coleman official jersey inaugural Major League Baseball season to Canada on radio and television, and to connect with fans from Newfoundland to British Columbia in the process.
"It was an adventure," Van Horne said. "John McHale told me, 'I'm not going to put anything in writing. I'm going to give you a one- year authentic Lou Brock jersey Cream verbal agreement because I don't know where any of Stan Musial official jersey us is going to be a year from now. We don't know whether this is going to work or not.'"
The Expos eventually faded away, relocating to Washington in 2005, but Van Horne is still at the microphone.
I dare you now to find somebody who's better suited for that seat, not for a night, but for as long as baseball sounds right to him.
~dave_george@pbpost.com