Video promoting Joe Buck's appearance with Chip Caray on Cardinals TV is huge nostalgic hit (2024)

It will be a night of nostalgia Friday as Joe Buck joins Chip Caray in the Cardinals television broadcast booth, a trip back to the days Chip’s grandpa Harry Caray and Joe’s father Jack Buck were in the team’s radio both to form a beloved team.

If this family affair turns out as good as the promotional video Bally Sports Midwest has produced, it will be a huge hit.

Nate Winkler, Bally Sports Midwest creative services manager, assembled a gem that incorporates audio, video and still photos that brings all four of the broadcasters into the spotlight and retrieves fond memories for those old enough to remember the Harry-Jack days.

Winkler has been with what now is BSM for nearly 16 years, and among his duties are putting together promotional and marketing materials. When he was approached about this venture, he knew he would be stepping far out of the ordinary.

“It called for something bigger, more elaborate,” he said. “Right off the bat, we knew it was something that would resonate with fans, with emotional impact, nostalgia.”

He estimates he put in about 80 hours on the project, which resulted in a video that runs just under two minutes — but probably could have gone two hours. Winkler said the initial plan was that the clip would be “a minute long at best. But it was impossible to find things to remove.”

Nonetheless, there is plenty of material he didn’t even get to that will be available for use Friday in the pregame show (beginning at 6:30), then also — time permitting — in the telecast of the Cards’ game at home against the Chicago Cubs that’s set to begin at 7:15 p.m.

“There were a lot of elements left over,” Winkler said.

So BSM's plan is to run historic calls in the pregame show and early in the game, as organized by producer Bryan Schapiro, then have more clips dropped in throughout the contest —especially following commercials and also in the postgame show. Expect comments from the booth as well.

With a chance for a thunderstorm Friday night, some of that material could be perfect for a rain delay.

“If there ever was a night for one …,” Buck said.

But there's no raining on Winkler’s splendid video, which includes audio taken from record albums that were produced after the 1964 and ’67 World Series championship seasons that featured many of the elder Caray-Buck calls. Those came from the personal collection of BSM programming director Rick Powers.

“Working here is a who’s-who of historians for the team,” Winkler said.

The video hit the social media circuit late last week, after Buck’s BSM appearance was announced. The reception by the audience has been at one of the biggest levels of anything Winkler has done in his career.

“The response has been huge,” he said. “There has been no shortage of nice things to say.”

That includes from Buck, who after seeing it posted on X: “... Thanks for this video. Makes me smile BIG.”

The elder announcers who will be saluted Friday worked in an era in which their voices told the story on radio as opposed to their descendants, who are on television on which the pictures tell tale and their voices augment the scene.

To that end, Winkler said the sound is the key to his video.

“Even though it’s a visual medium, I started with audio,” he said. “... It’s really an audio project with video put over the top of it.”

He knows that his work merely serves as an appetizer — a tasty one — for the main course.

“It was all about teeing up the event itself, I did my part,” Winkler said. “It’s part of a team effort on the endeavor.”