Young Doug Rice By Mike London [email protected] GRANITE QUARRY — Broadcasts of Atlanta Braves baseball games drifted clear as a bell on summer nights in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with low-key former pitcher Ernie Johnson providing the color and balancing the bombastic play-by-play delivery of Milo Hamilton.
Line drives were never caught by Atlanta infielders on Hamilton’s watch. They were SPEARED! Hamilton’s home run call — There’s a drive, way back! That ball is outta here!” was a solid one. In the 1970s, he got to call Hank Aaron’s 715th homer, one of the bigger ones in baseball history.
It was either “We’ve got to hold ’em, Braves!” or we’ve got to “Go get ’em, Braves!” Those were Hamilton’s pet phrases whenever the ninth inning rolled around. The struggling Braves needed to go get ’em a lot more often than they needed to hold ’em. One of the people listening to the Braves games in Rowan County was an impressionable young sports fan named Douglas Eugene Rice.
“The Braves were usually bad, but the broadcasts were very good,” Rice said. “Milo and Ernie, it was like you were right there with them at the ball park, with all the sounds. They told these great stories.
I’d stay up all night and listen if the Braves were on the West Coast. Milo would describe the crowd in detail. He’d tell you if the wind was blowing in from the stockyards in Chicago.
I started thinking that what they were doing had to be the coolest.
