Get the Feed
| D I S P A T C H E S
Announcing Dreams Veteran radio journalist Neal Conan, host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, spent the summer of 2000 on leave from NPR as an announcer for the Aberdeen Arsenal, an Atlantic League baseball team in Maryland. His account of that experience, Play by Play: Baseball, Radio and Life in the Last Chance League, has been published by Crown. Adam Baer, a PopPolitics editor, spoke with Neal Conan about the less glamorous — and more inspiring — side of baseball.
Q. Why did you decide to leave NPR to announce games for a minor league baseball team? Most people’s quality of life improves as they progress in life. You traded a steady, high-profile job for the life of a common ballplayer. As I looked ahead, I could spend six months covering what looked to be a joyless presidential campaign, or do baseball. The schedules called for four nights in Philly at the Republican Convention, or a four-game set in Bridgeport against the Bluefish. Baseball seemed like a lot more fun. In retrospect, I was bored, mostly with myself. To some degree, I think the emotional let-down after the Gulf War played into that [Conan was one of three dozen Gulf War correspondents held hostage by Iraqi nationals in 1991]. In one of those truly Freudian moments, a friend asked me why, and I said, "It’s a chance to recapture myself."
The players are older, if not wiser, and, I thought, more interesting. A lot of the guys I met in double A had stories about battling through injuries and learning new pitches or new positions, but they simply couldn’t match the experience of the guys in the Atlantic League. We had former major leaguers — you never see those guys in double A unless they’re on a rehab assignment — guys who were a step too slow, or one pitch short. We had the knuckleheads, troublemakers, drinkers, the terminally unlucky and the hopeless dreamers. Guys who played one year in community college and guys who’d played everywhere from Taiwan to Italy. These guys had both literal and figurative scars. The kids in the affiliated minors have promise, these guys have stories.
Oh, yes. You have to understand that I worked alone — no engineer, no producer, no color guy. It was fun to get back to a simpler kind of radio than I do at NPR and renew my acquaintance with operating my own equipment. I suspect I’ll take a Shure mixer [microphone and audio equipment] with me to the grave. But I was totally unprepared for the vast expanses of airtime I had to fill, and, until I got to know the players a little, with the total lack of stories and anecdotes to fill it.
Only because I didn’t know very much about them at first. Any major league media guide has at least a page on every player, and the stars get small chapters. And even without that material, I knew that Derek Jeter, for example, will often try to pull a first pitch fastball and use an "inside-out" swing to take the ball to right field later in the count. Most of the teams in the Atlantic League didn’t have a media guide, but, once I got to know more, I could describe Danny Perez’s habit of chasing high fastballs at any time in the count.
[I earned] $75 bucks a game, plus $25 a day meal money when we were on the road. My wife told me she was amazed that I’d managed to find a sector of the broadcast industry that paid less than public radio.
Swank is not a word heard often in the Atlantic League, though I have to say that we stayed at a very nice Hilton on Long Island that had a health club. The bottom rung was a stinky Comfort Inn outside Atlantic City that faced the ruins of a drive-in theatre on one side and what may have been a toxic waste dump on the other. It was so far out of town that Atlantic City actually looked good from that distance. The HoJos in Newark was near the airport, across from lots filled with shipping pallets, and offered a steady stream of jumbo jets to rumble through your dreams. But at least it had a coffee shop. Staying in the same set of hotels over and over, I came to identify them by smell — the air at the Holiday Inn in Nashua was crisper than the stuffy stuff at the same chain’s affiliate in Bridgeport.
To be honest, I think losing is harder on the team and on the fans, but yes, it can be a challenge to inject meaning into a mid-August doubleheader between two teams going nowhere. Winning makes the bus and the hotel far happier places, but one of the dirty secrets of play-by-play is that an exciting game is loads of fun to broadcast, even if your team loses. Blowouts are hard, admittedly harder when your guys are losing, but, as a broadcaster, I’d rather lose a close one than win a runaway.
Dreams die hard. Of more than 300 players in the Atlantic League that season, there was exactly one with a real chance for a major league career. Bobby Hill didn’t get the contract offer he’d hoped for from the major league team that drafted him out of the University of Miami and played for the Newark Bears for the season so he could re-enter the draft and take his chances with a new team. There were a few other guys who might get signed as a backup catcher in the majors or maybe as a relief pitcher, but that would be a shot, not a career. But even the guys who should have known better, if you asked them deep down, still believed. If they developed that new pitch they’d been working on, or if the shoulder finally felt right again, they could play their way to the big time. There were utility infielders in the Atlantic League who honestly told me that, given a chance, they could still make it. The only guys who seemed to be immune to the dream were way over 30 and knew they were at the end of the string. Me? I don’t know that I could hang in that long, but I’d like to think so.
If you’ve ever been in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, you know that the game is just a rumor from out there. At a modern minor league park — and all the fields around [New York] City are new — you’re close enough to hear the infield chatter. The amenities — the seats, cup holders, microbrews and crab cakes — are just as good as in a major league park and maybe half the price. You can take your wife and two kids to a minor league game for about what it would cost you to go to the Bronx by yourself, and you can have them home in bed by 11.
It’s easy to dismiss a minor league ball team as less important than the local dry cleaners, but the value of a team goes far beyond its economic impact and the numbers of jobs it generates. All over the country, take Akron, Ohio as an example, communities have used minor league ballparks as the centerpiece of downtown redevelopment in much the same way that Oriole Park at Camden Yards played such an important role in the development of downtown Baltimore. When the Bridgeport Bluefish started to build their ballpark at Harbor Yard, it was an abandoned factory site squeezed between the railroad tracks, I-95 and the United Illuminating plant. The idea that people would voluntarily visit downtown Bridgeport after dark seemed ridiculous. Now a 10,000-seat arena has risen next to the ballpark, along with a multi-level parking structure. Bluefish baseball did that, and it’s helping to change the city’s image as the South Bronx of the Connecticut coast. Beyond that, a team is a community rallying point. With good local newspaper coverage and a radio station to provide play-by-play, it’s a way to build community identity and give people from all kinds of backgrounds a common cause. And, until you asked about it, I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose there are some parallels with public radio. A local station literally gives the community a voice, new ways to communicate. And, in their perverse way, I think on-air fund drives bring people together — the volunteers who come in to answer the telephones, the callers and the station’s staff members.
I always steal [NPR correspondent] Susan Stamberg’s line: "The pictures are better on the radio."
No contest. Jon Miller. I was lucky enough to hear him for many years doing Oriole games. He’s now the Voice of the San Francisco Giants and handles play-by-play for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, along with Joe Morgan. He’s good on TV, but he’s great on the radio. The last couple of years, he’s done the radio side for the World Series, so even if Bob Costas is on the tube, turn the sound down and listen to Miller.
Well, I suppose in a way I’m like one of those older ballplayers who doesn’t know how to do anything else. Even when I made the leap from news to baseball, it was still on the radio. After all these years, it’s still a thrill. I came away from a season doing baseball determined to find a way to be on the radio every day. I loved working without a script. I sometimes describe live radio as thinking with the last 10th-of-an-inch of your tongue, and the thing I like about that is that it’s never the same, and it’s very, very hard to do well. I’m back in news, but live, two hours every day, and there are good days and bad days as we prepare for the show. But the moment I sit down in front of the mike, my palms tingle and my throat tightens just a hair and I just have to smile. Like the ballplayers say, if you still get butterflies before your first at bat, you still want to play. – Adam Baer P O P F O R U M Related Sites To purchase Neal Conan’s Play by Play, click below |
