Chicago Cubs: What would Harry Caray think of the Marquee Network?

Chicago Cubs: Would Caray join Marquee?

The Hall of Fame broadcaster called games for the St. Louis Cardinals for 25 years. Then Caray spent a year with the Oakland Athletics before calling games for 10 years with our South Side neighbors the Chicago White Sox. When Caray arrived to the Chicago Cubs WGN broadcast booth in 1982, he had no idea he was about to start a 16-year journey toward immortality.

It’s easy to look at Caray’s career and see that he had no issue with jumping from one organization to another for pay or better work climate and all the usual reasons someone would leave or take a new job with an organization.

The difference is WGN brought Caray to families around the nation. WGN was offering its content to cable companies across the United States for free, so subscribers in Arizona were watching Caray and the Cubs a couple times a week.

Caray had a sense of this and felt overwhelmed but humbly always brought his answers back to the broadcast booth by justifying he just wanted to call the games and not get in the center of controversies or love fests.

Although Caray had scored fans across the nation with WGN, he wanted to call games and so would most likely have taken a job with Marquee calling Cubs games had it been offered to him.  If not, the longtime broadcaster would most likely have had little trouble catching on somewhere like with the Los Angeles Dodgers after Vin Scully departed.

Although Marquee moves away from the national brands of NBC and WGN with which Caray was very familiar, he would most likely have followed the Cubs and joined the Marquee team.  Could the Harry Caray, one-man branding machine make it on Marquee?