When I was about six years old—which is as far back as I can go in the recesses of my mind to collect anything that resembles a memory—I watched my first baseball game on TV. This isn’t one of those “we could only afford bunny ears” kind of stories. My family wasn’t rich by any definition of the word, but we had cable TV and TBS. My favorite baseball team was the one showcased on TBS day in and day out: the Atlanta Braves. Living in Las Vegas, Nevada, I was always able to watch an Atlanta Braves broadcast at 4:05 p.m. local time.
Now, since the Atlanta Braves were my favorite team, I must have also had a favorite player, right? Well, you can ask anybody who remembers me around the age of six, and they’ll tell you, Dale Murphy was my guy. I told Wayne Hagin during our interview, “There were 26 teams in baseball when I first started watching. That’s 26 teams, 25 players each, which makes 650 professional players. To me, 649 of them didn’t exist. There was Dale Murphy and no one else.” To this day, I scratch my head in wonder about why Dale is not in the hall of fame. He had 398 performance-enhancing drug-free home runs in his career and back-to-back National League MVP awards in 1982 and 1983.
I’ll never forget the first time I went to see Dale Murphy play in person. It was my first trip ever to Dodger Stadium. By this time “The Murph” was at the tail end of his career, and unbeknownst to me, his final year or so with the Braves. I remember they pulled Murphy from the game for either a pinch hitter or pinch runner. I was storming up and down my row like an angry manager. I did not quite understand the strategies of baseball at the time. Murphy, being in his advanced years as a player, was probably pulled for a speedier set of legs.
A couple of years later, my baseball world was turned upside down, as Dale Murphy was dealt to the Philadelphia Phillies. I remember seeing the Phillies games against the Atlanta Braves, and when the trade happened, I had the thought, “How’s Dale Murphy going to play in those ugly uniforms?” I kept track of Dale a little when he played for the Phillies, but I didn’t have that connection with him that I had had through TBS and Atlanta Braves broadcasts. Skip Caray was my connection to Dale Murphy. I remembered Skip, Pete Van Wieren, and Ernie Johnson Sr., but there was one name among that broadcast team that wouldn’t surface until I met him face to face in May 2014.
When Murphy was cut from the Rockies, I went through another series of favorite players, beginning with Frank Thomas and ending with Cecil Fielder. I bought a Tigers baseball hat, and if you saw me from 1994 to 1996, I was wearing that Tigers hat. I named my dog “Cecil” and followed the real Cecil Fielder even more closely than I had followed Murphy. I became a Yankees fan the day Fielder was traded to New York back in late July 1996, which, any Yankees fan will know is the year Derek Jeter came onto the scene and helped the team to their first World Series title in almost 20 years.
As a Yankees fan, I could not get the broadcasts back in Las Vegas. The only time I got Yankees games were on the national broadcasts. John Sterling, Michael Kay, and, for a time Charley Steiner, were my link to the New York Yankees. Eventually Steiner would achieve his lifelong dream of broadcasting for the Dodgers alongside his childhood idol Vin Scully. There was something I couldn’t quite register about Sterling, though. The familiarity of his name and voice kept telling me had I watched or listened to him at some other point in my life.
After about 18 years of being a Yankees fan and preparing for my interview with John Sterling, the chord was finally struck in my long-term memory. Atlanta! John Sterling had broadcast Atlanta Braves baseball during the ’80s before moving over to the Yankees broadcast booth in 1989. There it was, like one of those moments in a movie that flashes through history and emerges out of the eye of the main character. John Sterling broadcast for Dale Murphy and the Atlanta Braves. Suddenly, my questions for Sterling had a twofold focus: Yankees baseball and Atlanta Braves baseball in the ’80s. I had that link back to the team I had loved and followed right before my eyes. I’ve bled pinstripe blue for over half my life, and to speak with the lead voice of the Yankees face to face was a dream come true, yet I couldn’t help trying to summon up those memories of me as a six-year-old boy watching Atlanta Braves baseball on TV.
Baseball does that to a person. It recalls so many of our memories because it’s our link to the past. These memories and their origins all have a setting. As a matter of fact, they have 30 settings, and not one of them is exactly like the other. Not anymore, at least. I’ve always been fascinated with baseball’s stadiums and ballparks. The design. The smell of the freshly cut and watered Bermuda grass mixed with peanut shell dust and a smoky grill. They all come at you full force once you make your way through the gates and into the concourses.
The first stadium I ever visited was Angel Stadium of Anaheim, or “The Big A” as it is better known, and not even that stadium is the same anymore. Dodger Stadium is my second baseball home and was where I took my (then) two-year-old daughter to see her first game: Dodgers versus Yankees, July 30, 2013. Pettitte vs. Greinke. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I hadn’t even been married a year in 2008 when I told my wife, “Honey, Yankee Stadium is closing this year.” The wonderful wife that she is, she merely responded, “Then I guess we’d better go.” She could see in my eyes how much I wanted to see that stadium before it became a thing of the past. She knew that I would regret it the rest of my life if I didn’t attend “the house that Ruth built,” mainly because she understands my love for the game, and after taking a morning tour of Yankee Stadium, she, too, understood the mystique and importance of that cathedral. One of my favorite quotes from my wife is one she uses whenever somebody expresses to me their hatred for the Yankees. She merely replies, “How can you hate the Yankees? That’s like saying you hate apple pie.”
Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, and Angel Stadium aren’t the only parks I’ve had the privilege of visiting over my 30 plus years as a baseball fan. Others are Safeco Field, Petco Park, Chase Field, Tropicana Field, Coors Field, and perhaps my favorite, Globe Life Park in Arlington. Upon visiting these several baseball settings, I realized how much of an identity each park has. There is no uniformity of dimension in baseball. It’s not like basketball, football, or hockey. No ballpark is the same on the field or in the seats. Hoping to visit all 30 ballparks, I thought to myself, “What if I were to write a book on the uniqueness of every stadium in baseball? How do they play differently? What are their quirks? What makes one different from the other 29?” Then I had the thought: “What if I were to get these answers from the broadcasters themselves? They outlast the players, managers, the general managers, team presidents, team owners, and, in the case of Vin Scully, the city itself. Why not get their perspective? After all, they broadcast in that booth 81 times a year for decades on end, so why not ask them?”
The following accounts are from 33 broadcasters whose accumulated experience in the booth is well over eight centuries. They have broadcast in both today’s ballparks and yesterday’s stadiums and have done so alongside those who have passed on, but whose voices still linger years later. Voices like Ernie Harwell, Mel Allen, Red Barber, Bob Murphy, and Jack Buck. The stories go back as far as a young Vin Scully growing up in the bleachers of the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, and as far forward as Rex “Hud” Hudler reflecting upon the Kansas City Royals’ magical 2014 American League pennant-winning season. Made up mostly of what John Sterling himself would call “senior members of the firm,” these storytellers live up to their name for the ballparks, teams, and cities they represent.