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Weirdly enough, where I lived on Long Island (after my parents moved us out of the Bronx in 1963), there were times I could pick up radio broadcasts of games as far west as Chicago. Occasionally I would hear Brickhouse and I liked his way with the game. Likewise Bob Prince, the longtime voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Curt Gowdy when he was still doing Red Sox games. There was a time when, if the Pirates were playing in New York, you could sometimes pick up their home radio station broadcast pretty clearly on the beach, and I sometimes liked switching the Met/Pirate game to their station to listen to Prince when Bob Murphy or Lindsey Nelson weren't on the radio side of the Mets' broadcast.

I can't really knock Harry Caray. That he's so identified as the voice of the Cubs comes as much from fortuitous timing as anything else. If I'm not mistaken, Harry Caray joined the Cubs right about that point where WGN was going superstation. I think something similar happened to Tim McCarver - he joined the Mets' broadcast team right when the Mets' longtime station, WOR, went superstation for the 80s - when I was in the Air Force and stationed in Omaha (HQ, Strategic Air Command), I was surprised and pleased that my cable TV system offered both WGN and WOR, giving me plenty of Mets games and no few amount of Cub games to enjoy. (Oh, how P.O.ed I was that the Red Sox hadn't gone superstation or, if they did, that they didn't think of Omaha!)

The Mets team of the 1980s was damn near as good as their longtime original team of Nelson/Murphy/Kiner: Tim McCarver, Steve Zabriskie and Ralph Kiner. Zabriskie was replaced by Gary Thorne (better known for his NHL broadcasts) for a time, and Thorne was excellent with the Mets, especially on radio. I thought it was pretty stupid of the Mets to dump McCarver a few years ago - because he wasn't "positive" enough (read: shill enough) - and bring in Tom Seaver, who had been a Yankee broadcaster for several years and, while serviceable enough, it's fair to say of Seaver that as a broadcaster he was the outstanding pitcher of his generation.

You're right about Caray being so famous for being the Cubs' broadcaster while Brickhouse remained unknown--for most of the country and for those who became Cubs' fans after around 1982--that it had everything to do with Brickhouse retiring and Caray replacing him right around the time WGN went superstation. I remember the day Caray came on board and I couldn't believe it--the guy who tauntingly serenaded us back in '67 by singing, "The Cardinals are coming, tra-la, tra-la" . . . the White Sox announcer! for cryin' out loud--now announcing my beloved Cubs?! The funny thing was, Brickhouse and Caray were about the same age--in fact, Caray was probably a few years older, but he kept his real age a mystery--and Brickhouse retired, but Caray kept going . . . and going . . . and going. In time, I kinda accepted Caray. Sorta. But Jack was like a father figure to me (my dad died when I was one). The men's voices I heard the most growing up were Jack Brickhouse, Frazier Thomas (host of "Garfield Goose"), Mayor Daley (the real one), my grandfather, my uncle, and my pastor.

BTW, Brickhouse did TV only. Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau did the games on the radio.