TULSA, Okla. — The visiting radio booth at ONEOK Field is small, claustrophobic enough that its two occupants nearly rub shoulders as they sit and study the field below. Then again, they are used to being this close.
Chris and Stefan Caray are identical twins. They began as one bundle of genetic material that split into two embryos, although that biological process did little to truly separate them. They have spent most of their 22 years at each other’s sides, growing up alongside a mirror image of themselves. As babies, their mother had to paint their fingernails different colors to tell them apart. As adults, they have grown into spindly, nearly indistinguishable young men, 6-foot-4 and 170 pounds, with curly mops of brown hair atop their heads.
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They are the newly minted broadcasters for the Double-A Amarillo Sod Poodles and, the team claims, the first set of identical twin broadcast partners in baseball history. That makes them brand new, but in another sense, they are anything but. Their father is Chip Caray, the longtime broadcaster for the Braves. Their grandfather was Skip Caray, who preceded their father in Atlanta. Their great-grandfather was Harry Caray, the Cubs and Cardinals broadcasting icon and the voice who launched a thousand impersonations.
A Caray has been broadcasting professional baseball games every year since 1945, and now Chris and Stefan are taking their first steps toward continuing that legacy. They have been on the job less than a month as they settle into their seats to call a mid-April road game, their knees nearly knocking against each other in the booth. In late March, with the start of the regular season just around the corner, the Amarillo position suddenly opened. At the time, they could not have predicted they would fill it, or that they would fill it together.
Yet here they are in this tiny booth, where Stefan welcomes their radio audience in the first inning by introducing the duo as “Stefan Caray and the guy who looks like me.” They lean into that dynamic — brotherly and playfully combative — throughout the broadcast. This is just the sixth professional game they’ve called together, but their chemistry with each other is evident. They’ve spent their whole lives developing it. Though they alternate play-by-play and color commentator duties every two innings, they have a schtick. Chris is the straight man. Stefan is the cut-up.
It’s a helpful reminder for the audience that, despite their shared DNA, they are different people. And though their genome is filled to the brim with base pairs passed down from the broadcasting scions in their family, Chris and Stefan don’t want to be defined by that lineage. (Chris could go by Harry Caray IV, which is his legal name, but he chooses not to. Skip and Chip — a.k.a. Harry Jr. and Harry III — did the same.) Yet as much as they seek to carve a distinct path for themselves, they have spent much of their first few weeks on the job grappling with what exactly that legacy means.
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They are just 22, yet they have jumped from the University of Georgia — from which they have yet to graduate — straight to a plum minor-league job as co-lead broadcasters. They don’t deny that their last name had something to do with that. They also feel a need to prove their worthiness. Not so they can survive comparisons to their more famous predecessors, but so they can justify their presence on the airwaves to those who may be skeptical that they’ve earned it.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t think we deserve this job, whether they haven’t listened to our tape or whatever or if they think it was Harry or Chip or Skip that did it. That’s fine,” says Stefan. “We want to continue to work every day to prove to ourselves and to prove to people who may be on the fence about us that we’re good enough to be here.”
They hope they can win you over. Welcome, as they tell listeners on this overcast Oklahoma night, to the Broadcasting Offices of Caray and Caray.
Baseball may be a slow game interrupted by sudden bursts of action, but to watch the Caray twins in the booth is to take in a frenzy of activity.
They are hyper-invested in each other’s performance. There’s Chris thrusting his phone into his brother’s face, the weather app open so that Stefan can report an accurate first-pitch temperature. It’s not uncommon for one to reach across the body of the other to point emphatically at something on the other’s laptop. They are in constant conversation for three hours, yet they also communicate almost silently. At times, they frantically gesture to each other like soldiers relaying information on the battlefield. At others, they signal to each other with a subtle tap on the leg.
They use those taps during a lunch interview too, indicating to one another who should be the first to answer a question. (Want to tell them apart? Chris orders tater tots with his burger while Stefan goes for the fries, although they both order an extra side of mac and cheese. Also, Stefan has a more square jaw and Chris has a slightly higher voice.) Their chemistry is just as apparent in this setting as it is in the booth. Over an hour and a half, they don’t so much finish each other’s sentences as they build on each other’s paragraphs. They play so easily off each other that you’d think they’d been preparing to call games together their entire lives.
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And they have, but they also haven’t. Chris and Stefan grew up “thick as thieves,” Stefan says, and at their childhood home share a room with two queen beds, but they did not grow up obsessed with what has become the Caray vocation. Nor were they really around it all that much. They never knew Harry, who died in 1998 before they were born, and they barely got to know Skip before their grandfather’s death a decade later. Both are abstractions to them more than real people. To a lesser extent, the same is true of their father.
Being in the business meant Caray men have always had to work at father-son relationships. Chip says his father lamented that he was raised by Harry Caray, not by Dad. Skip and Chip didn’t become close until Chip found his way into a big-league booth. Chip has sought to do better with his four children, but working a dream job comes with tradeoffs. Chip settled his family in Florida, near his wife’s parents, meaning that he’s away for work six months out of every year.
“There’s an incredible amount of guilt that I have,” Chip says, “because I’ve seen them for half their lives.”
As a result, Chris and Stefan didn’t grow up with microphones in their hands. Calling big-league games was just what the old man did, and yearly visits to Atlanta tethered them more to baseball than to broadcasting. Nor were they raised to carry on the family tradition. Skip had felt tricked into the business by Harry, Chip says, so he made sure to never do the same with Chip. The twins similarly felt no paternal pressure. Until their senior year of high school, it appeared that Chip might be the last Caray in a major-league booth.
That’s when Chris got the itch to follow in his father’s tracks, although the notion of a Caray-and-Caray pairing didn’t take off until a couple of years later. The twins went to separate colleges, Chris to Valdosta State and Stefan to Wingate to play collegiate lacrosse. But by their sophomore years, they were together again at the University of Georgia. It was there that they took the first serious steps toward a career in broadcasting.
Carays or not, they had to hustle to get better. As an SEC powerhouse, Georgia makes it difficult for students to broadcast games in any sport, so the twins and two classmates struck up a relationship with nearby Georgia Gwinnett College. Multiple times a week, they would trek the 35 minutes from Athens to Lawrenceville to get some reps in headsets. They would also grab some gear and find nearby high school games to call. When they were home in Florida, they called travel basketball tournaments. It didn’t matter if anyone was listening.
After their junior year, the twins landed a coveted spot calling games in the Cape Cod League for the Cotuit Kettleers. (It was then they first shared the airwaves with their father, continuing a multi-generational tradition that began with Harry in 1991.) In the fall of their senior year, they took a class taught by Vicki Michaelis, the director of the Carmical Sports Media Institute, who put them through the paces of all the other roles besides calling balls and strikes, including sideline reporter, studio analyst, behind the camera and social media.
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Whenever their opportunity came, they wanted to be ready. “They wanted to make sure that no one was going to be able to say, ‘The only reason you are there is because you have that last name,’” says Michaelis. Yet when the opportunity did come, despite their hopes to the contrary, it unavoidably had to do with their last name.
Amarillo general manager Tony Ensor grew up a Braves fan, and he couldn’t resist going to the World Series. There he was before one game last fall, enjoying a meal and a drink in the Chop House restaurant at Truist Park that overlooks right field. And that’s when an usher pointed out a woman sitting a few tables over. See her? That’s Susan Caray, Chip’s wife.
Ensor approached to say hello, and it turned out to be a fateful conversation. Susan introduced her twin sons, noting they were broadcasting hopefuls. Ensor collected their information, walking away from the chance meeting thinking how wonderful it would be to have them both in the booth. But that was a distant idea. At the moment, his booth was occupied by a talented broadcaster named Sam Levitt, who was set to enter his fourth year with the club.
And then months later, just a couple weeks before the season was set to start, Levitt was hired as the pre- and postgame host for the Padres’ flagship radio station. In a crunch to find a replacement, Ensor’s mind immediately turned to the Caray twins. He fired off a cryptic email to Chris, their first communication in months. “We might be getting together sooner than you think,” it said. Ensor says he conducted a wider search and ran through a list of candidates recommended by Levitt, but he couldn’t get the idea of the Caray twins out of his head. Identical twins and the great-grandsons of Harry Caray? It was irresistible.
“My marketing mind was going crazy, obviously,” Ensor says. “But also I knew they had the talent to be able to do this.”
It is here, perhaps, that the narrative must pause to examine the generational weight of being a Caray. It’s a subject to which the twins return even when not asked directly about it. Answers about technique turn into defenses of their credentials. Six games into their careers, it’s something to which they’re clearly still very sensitive.
If their hire was met with some criticism — they say they’ve seen a fair amount on Twitter — it’s criticism that has left them with mixed feelings. On the one hand, as much as they have sought to blaze their own trail and as much as Chip has avoided putting his thumb on the scale, they have clearly benefitted from being Carays. “Let’s set the record straight,” says Stefan. “For all intents and purposes, I was born on third.” They were not résumés in a pile — although Chris says he was rejected for multiple jobs with minor-league clubs leading up to his hire, often because he hadn’t finished school — and doors opened for them that others might not have been able to unlock. But though life may have grooved them a pitch down the middle, they are adamant that it takes talent to clobber a home run.
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“People who say we didn’t get it based on talent, it’s a ludicrous statement,” says Chris. Chip, who dealt with all of the same stuff but before the internet, feels similarly. “Nobody should be playing a violin for us,” he says, but he also thinks criticism of his kids “stems from professional jealousy.” He strikes a middle ground between acknowledging the privilege of being a Caray and dismissing the importance of that privilege. “To have even a handful of people say, ‘Well, the only reason you’re here is because of your last name’ is grossly unfair,” Chip says. “It’s not completely inaccurate, because the keyword is ‘only.’”
Ensor says he wouldn’t have hired Chris and Stefan just for their name. There was the twin angle, sure, but that’s a gimmick as well, and one that even the twins expect to lose its luster after a while. Ensor hired them for all that but also because he listened to their tapes and felt they could do the job. That’s why the Amarillo GM wound up on a Zoom call with the entire family in late March — Chip and Susan in Florida, Stefan at school in Georgia and Chris in North Carolina, where he thought he’d be starting his first day as the backup broadcaster with the Low-A Fayetteville Woodpeckers — to offer them the job.
They accepted, of course, and made a hasty trek to Amarillo to begin their professional lives. And, advantages though they’ve had, they are determined to show they belong. He may have been born on third, Stefan says, but that doesn’t mean “I’m not going to sprint as hard as I can to get home.”
It’s midway through the game, and Chris and Stefan meet in the middle of the booth — they don’t have to travel far — for a vigorous high five. Sod Poodles hitter Nick Dalesandro has just clubbed a fifth-inning home run, but that’s not why the two are celebrating. They’re jubilant because Stefan just nailed the call.
In previous broadcasts, Stefan had been quick to the ball, which creates the potential for mistakes — misidentifications, misreading of trajectories, et cetera. But this time, he’d followed the action perfectly, building the tension as the ball cleared the fence. To Chris, who has more experience in the booth because he turned to broadcasting earlier, that deserved praise.
“I was really happy to see him be able to do that,” Chris says.
They are each other’s biggest supporters and harshest critics, and they take each broadcast very seriously. They spend several hours each morning prepping for each game, taking separate notes so they’re not regurgitating the same information. When one screws up, the other points it out off the air. The strength of their relationship allows for such direct criticism. They squabble like all brothers, but Stefan doesn’t think he’s “ever been mad at Chris for more than an hour at any given time in my life.” Whatever the disagreement, they have each other’s backs. They want to help each other get better.
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That same trust allows them to adopt a sort of faux rivalry in the booth. (Outside of it as well. When Chris explains that he was the more introverted and emotional of the two growing up, Stefan jokes that “what he’s saying is I got chicks and he didn’t.”) When Stefan cracks jokes in the booth — some that land, some that don’t, many of them knowingly bad puns — Chris will respond with a verbal eye roll. At one point during the game, with Dodgers prospect James Outman at the plate, Stefan returns the favor. “Drey Jameson would like to get James out, man,” Chris ventures. Instead of responding, Stefan lets the wordplay hang in the silence of dead air. “Sick,” he says dismissively after a few seconds. The comedic timing was perfect.
But not everything is. As would be expected from a pair of 22-year-olds fresh from college, the broadcast this night is shaggy in places. There are occasional flubs of names. In a pet peeve the twins themselves have identified, they can too often fall back on the same words to describe the action. Some of Stefan’s jokes work and some don’t, and some aren’t meant to work in the first place. There is a balance to find there. “How many of those jokes are inside jokes which exclude the audience?” their father says. “I don’t know. They don’t know. The audience will tell them that.” Chris and Stefan are six games into their careers, and they’re feeling it out.
They know they will get better with time, as does Ensor. “Were they ready-made Double-A perfect broadcasters? No, absolutely not,” he says. “But I knew that talent was there.” Chris and Stefan are confident in that talent, but they still feel the weight of expectations that come with the Caray name. The glare focused on them probably isn’t as bright as they perceive it to be — the Sod Poodles punch above their market size in terms of the attention they attract, but this is still the minor leagues — yet the brothers experience it acutely.
They want to call major-league games someday, like their father before them, and the father’s father, and so on. To do that, they’ve got to show they at least have the Double-A goods. “There are other 22-year-old broadcasters who are solid, who are really, really, really good,” Chris says. “But they’ve made small mistakes too and they’ve never been noticed before ever. For us, it’s different.” They’re Carays. It’s a name they have to live up to. They will be compared to all the other Carays to command a microphone. They have a ready-made brand, but they want to prove they also have the chops.
“You have the last name, and that is going to open doors for you. Undoubtedly,” says Michaelis, their professor at Georgia. “But when you walk through that door, you better be ready to do the job.”
It’s the bottom of the ninth now, and Junior Garcia is on the mound for Amarillo. The bases are loaded, with the winning run at the plate. Stefan is on the call this inning, and Chris raises his palm into the air, motioning for his brother to build the energy of the moment. Tulsa Drillers infielder Justin Yurchak skies a pop-up in foul territory. “Junior says Gar-see-ya later!” Stefan bellows as the ball settles into an infielder’s glove for the final out.
The brothers sign off, pack up their equipment — much of it in boxes still sporting masking tape with Levitt’s name, now crossed out and replaced with theirs — and head downstairs to catch the team bus back to the hotel. The sixth game of their professional career is in the books. Tomorrow they will prep for game No. 7. A whole season awaits beyond that.
They hope, like the men whose name they carry, they will be broadcasting baseball games for years to come.
(Top photo of Chris Caray and Stefan Caray: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)