Without Don Orsillo, the Red Sox Don't Have a Voice

If it wasn't enough that Red Sox fans were asked to watch Hanley Ramirez try to field fly balls this season, on Tuesday, in their continuing effort to ruin everything about being a Boston fan, the Red Sox fired announcer Don Orsillo. Well, technically, it wasn't the Sox but the network that they own, NESN. Technically, too, Orsillo isn't getting fired so much as not having his contract renewed at the end of the season. But the prospect of watching Red Sox games without Don Orsillo sucks, so nuance can take flying leap.

The relationship between broadcaster and fan is an odd one. Play-by-play announcers are not your friends—I don't know Don Orsillo, and he sure doesn't know me—but it seems undeniably strange to call them anything but. To listen to someone talk for three or four hours a day for 162 days a year is to give them a lot of your attention, and much of your life. You will get to know some things about the people talking: their sense of humor, their likes and dislikes. The rise and fall of their voices become part of the texture of the game.

Following the Red Sox means following Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy as much as David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia. To take this months-long journey with them each year is not unlike going on a cross-country road trip with a stranger. Either you're going to be best friends at the end or you'll end up hitchhiking before you see the Mississippi River. So as bad as it could have been, with Don and Jerry it was good.

Don Orsillo was my friend and I never met him. The sounds of his voice and Remy's have filled my house more evenings than I care to recall. I listened because they were the guys calling the Red Sox, but it became more than just the Red Sox. Their camaraderie has often made me smile or laugh, which is no small thing given the baseball being played or the broader world in which the game was happening. Orsillo and Remy are good baseball announcers; they are also friendly, funny stewards of summer evenings. They've been on the job long enough that a significant percentage of their audience grew up with them—they are not just the sound of Red Sox baseball but a living connection to the past.

The best part about Don Orsillo is that, for all his professionalism, he is a goofball. He knows when a moment has gravity, and conversely he knows when it's OK to dissolve into high-pitched giggles. (He's professional enough to make the possibility that he has some control over dissolving into giggles seem like a possibility.) There are numerous examples through the years, and they are well cataloged on the internet.

Their names are often self-explanatory. There is "Jerry Remy Loses a Tooth on Air," in which (spoiler alert?) Jerry Remy's tooth came out during a live broadcast. There is "Fan Struggles to Put on a Poncho," in which we all laugh at an older man who can't seem to figure out the intricacies of a poncho deployment during a summer sprinkle. Then there is the pinnacle. Friends, it is called "Here Comes the Pizza."

Baseball is a serious sport that takes itself very seriously. It's played by multimillionaires on teams that are owned by billionaires and run by Ivy League elites. This sort of thing needs a periodic injection of humor, if not a helpless all-out giggle fit, which means that Don Orsillo was just perfect. For 15 years, he and Remy have broadcast Red Sox games on NESN. Orsillo also spent five years calling games for Boston's Triple-A team in Pawtucket. They've done it through the heartbreak of 2003, the euphoria of 2004, and two other World Series championships besides. Through it all, Orsillo has been likable, funny, and down to earth. He's a New England kid with a New England kid's dream job, but he managed not to be too reverent or too casual. It didn't take much time watching the team's broadcasts to recognize how lucky Red Sox fans were to have him.

At some point in a relationship, objectivity becomes impossible. I can't tell you, really, whether Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy are great baseball broadcasters. I don't know about their relationships with their bosses, although that appears to be the motivation behind Tuesday's move. I can tell you that they are two guys who love baseball and the Red Sox and laughing like I do, and who by chance happened to be on TV every time the Red Sox were on. That was, or at least it felt like it was, enough to become the basis of a long-running, if distant, friendship.

Now it feels like my friend is moving away. I might see him here and there at a party or something, but mostly he'll be gone. Don Orsillo is good at what he does and surely some other station will hire him, and he'll do a good job there. He'll be fine. I have confidence in that if nothing else. But next year, when I turn on the game, the sound that signals summertime and warmth and baseball and the Red Sox won't be there any more. The Red Sox have lost a lot this year, but that happens. In losing Don Orsillo, though, the Sox are also losing their voice. It might take a little longer to get used to that.