In Richmond, Indiana, a town of about 35,000 people, you’ll find people who remember Morgan Burkhart. From 1995-1998, he took the Richmond Roosters, and the Frontier League by storm. In four seasons of independent baseball, he was a four-time All-Star selection, a triple-crown winner, and a three-time most valuable player. Today, the league’s MVP award is named after him.

“That’s nice that they would do that,” he says. He’s really not enthused when talking about the honor.  That’s not because he doesn’t care, though. That’s just Morgan Burkhart for you—relaxed and ready for anything.

——————–

Despite a professional career that awaited him, although he didn’t know it at the time, immediately after graduation there was no more baseball to be played.

“I didn’t have any offers. I was average,” says Burkhart, who makes his home in O’Fallon, Missouri.

To many, that was likely the shared opinion. During his playing days, Burkhart measured 5’11” and weighed 225 pounds. The ideal size for a construction worker, but not for a corner outfielder who says, without hesitation, “I wasn’t bad. I just couldn’t run.”

So it was construction that Morgan Burkhart, the future Red Sox and Royals player, took up as his first job out of college. “I remember working that construction job and thinking that was it,” Burkhart says, recalling the summer of 1994 when he worked 40-hour weeks in sweltering heat. Fortunately for him, that didn’t last long.

The first job in baseball for Burkhart, who prefers fishing on a quiet lake when he has the chance, came through a connection.

“I came back to coach at Central Missouri,” he says, “and the other assistant coach they had brought in was from Indiana, and he knew a guy starting up an independent team. Back then no one hardly knew about independent ball. They were kind of explaining it to me.”

And that’s how he ended up in Richmond, the star of a team that has since relocated to Traverse City, Michigan, with many of his records intact.

When trying to remember how old he was in the spring of 1999, his first year in the minor leagues playing for the Red Sox farm team in the Class-A Florida State League, Burkhart says, “Too old to be in that league.” He was 27.

He finished the ’99 season with Double-A Trenton of the Eastern League, and got the call to the big leagues in 2000 while playing with the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox, where his manager was current San Diego Padres roving minor league infield instructor Gary Jones. When Boston’s Trot Nixon went on the disabled list, Morgan Burkhart made his major league debut.

On June 27, 2000, six years after thinking he had no future as a pro ballplayer, Burkhart singled in his first-ever Major League at-bat, hitting the Mike Mussina-pitched ball to right field.

Morgan Burkhart as a member of the Boston Red Sox

“I wasn’t too bad,” Burkhart said of his MLB debut. “It just happened so fast. That’s why it was cool (Red Sox Manager) Jimy Williams put me in the lineup that night. I didn’t have much time to think about it.” Had he been provided much time to think, he would’ve had to process that he was hitting fifth, one spot behind Boston baseball legend Nomar Garciaparra.

“The first game up in Boston I’m DH’ing and and we ran out of players on the bench. So (in the 10^th inning) I was on the bases and I come in and Jimy goes, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go to left field.’ And I’m like, ‘What?!’ This is in a tie ballgame in the big leagues. I went out there and they hit a bunch of rockets. They were all either in the gap, down the line or off the wall.”

Burkhart says he wasn’t often recognized in Boston, unless he went out to eat near the park, which seems to be the way he likes it. Low-key. He also played for the Red Sox in 2001, while splitting time with the Triple-A team in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Below, courtesy of the website Diamond Mines, is what scout Leo Labossiere, wrote about Burkhart after watching him play in Triple-A in 2001.

"His best tool is his bat. Has some power, and can hit doeble (sic) digit HR's...Def makes all the routine plays. Nothing fancy."

Burkhart also had a short stint with the Royals in 2003, capping his MLB service time at 42 games.

For a guy who seems most comfortable in a t-shirt and shorts throwing front-toss to hitters at Parkview Field, Burkhart spent a lot of time in uniform, racking up more than 900 games between independent baseball and the minor leagues. He also played in Mexico and Japan.

“If you go to a convenience store, and this sounds crazy,” Burkhart says of the difficulties of living in Japan, “when you go pick up toothpaste, it could be sour cream or toothpaste and you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what the difference is. It sounds like you’ll be able to figure it out, but how? There are no words or letters, it’s all symbols.”

He still longs for the fresh-cooked seafood of the western coast of Mexico, where he spent his winters while the team in Richmond was out of season. He doesn’t miss the soup he once tried in Japan, which featured a live, baby octopus.

“That’s like a really good dish over there. They’ll stick to your mouth and you’re supposed to chew them up and swallow them. I tried it, but didn’t eat much of it.”

Click here to listen to Morgan Burkhart talk about his favorite foods from around the world

Burkhart thought he would have to call it quits as a player after the 2005 season, knowing that with a broken hand that hadn’t fully healed, and his body only getting older, it was time to head back to Missouri.

——————–

The hitting coach for that team in Mexico was Mike Bush who was, at the time, the manager of the independent Calgary Vipers of the Northern League. Bush invited Burkhart to be his hitting coach, a position he accepted and held for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Burkhart became the manager in 2009, and held that through 2011, when the team folded. Last year, Burkhart managed the independent Windy City ThunderBolts of the Frontier League.

Burkhart served as the manager of the independent Windy City ThunderBolts during the 2012 season, before accepting his position with San Diego

After sending out some resumes in the offseason, Burkhart heard back from the Padres and minor league hitting instructor Sean Berry, who invited him down to Peoria, Arizona for an interview.

One of the quirks of baseball, unlike any other sport, is that the coaching staffs don’t wear formal clothes. They wear what the players wear. But this was an interview, after all.

“I did throw on some slacks and a dress shirt,” Burkhart says with a grin, “But it didn’t matter because I walked in and I changed and they gave me all Padres stuff.”

About a month after his late-fall interview, the Padres offered Burkhart, the veteran of octopus soup, of construction in the summer heat, and of navigating left field at Fenway, a chance to get back into affiliated baseball, nearly ten years after his last game in the major leagues.

Morgan Burkhart’s day revolves around The Board. He bought it, hammered it to the wall, and writes in dry-erase marker the schedule for the day on the white rectangle. It’s visible to anyone who comes into the TinCaps’ clubhouse, hanging at eye level on the right-hand side in the entryway.

Morgan Burkart at Parkview Field in Fort Wayne, Indiana

“Early Work, Hitters 2:00,” The Board reads some days. After all, this is developmental baseball. And who better to understand that and teach 18 and 19 year-olds than someone who didn’t think he’d make it, but beat his own prediction, reaching the apex of the game of baseball?

More often than not after a win during the 2013 season, if asked about his success at the plate, a TinCaps hitter will tell you it’s because of the work he’s been doing with Morgan Burkhart. One time, though, a player who was hitting well above .300, in a post-game interview, called him Morgan Burkman. Kangaroo Court does need its fodder, and after all, this is developmental baseball.

Burkhart likes to listen to hard rock, but prefers taking a quiet approach as a hitting coach.

“Ino Guerrero was my first hitting coach in the (Red Sox) organization. I learned a lot from him because he didn’t say a whole lot. You know you’re looking for these guys to get on you all the time, but he’d watch you over and over and then he’d be able to find out when something went a little different.”

The TinCaps take batting practice under Burkhart's supervision in Peoria, Illinois.

Stand around the batting cage long enough, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear Burkhart say something loudly. He changes his vantage point, watching from directly behind the hitter at one moment, and spectating from a side angle the next. His teaching method is a subtle one; he lets the one-on-one conversations carry his points of emphasis.

When Burkhart was back home in the winter of 2006, hunting in the suburbs of St. Louis, he didn’t know what his next move would be. It was time to relax after having played baseball for a living the last 13 years. But there’s always got to be something that’s next.

“Every day I think about that” Burkhart says. “There were times when I was playing where I was like, ‘What else am I gonna do?’ You know, you get down on yourself. When I was coming up all those years in the minor leagues before I played winter ball, I was substitute teaching. I was getting a job every day like a regular teacher. You can go in there and do P.E. one day, math the next. You’re not making anything in the minor leagues. You come home for a month at a time, three weeks of those you’re subbing, trying to make a living.”

Little did he know at the time, as he tried to scrape together day-to-day teaching gigs, that his time as Mr. Burkhart would serve him well. He’s still a teacher, he just doesn’t have to wear slacks and a button-down shirt. It’s a good thing he was an attentive student, too, with his old hitting coaches.

“You remember what things they said and how they went about dealing with the hitters every day. That’s the biggest thing to me is getting the kids to be enthusiastic about hitting.”

“I was trying to help the team win and hoping to survive,” Burkhart says of his time with the Red Sox and Royals.

Now he’s trying to give that survival instinct—hunt or be hunted—to players in Fort Wayne.

*Bzz*

*Bzz*

*Bzz*

After being irritated into a state of consciousness, I reach out of my bed to quiet my cell phone/alarm clock, rattling annoyingly on the wooden nightstand to my right.

“6:00 already?” I think to myself.

We have a noon game today in Comstock Park, Michigan, the home of the West Michigan Whitecaps.  I’m up early to make sure I get downstairs in time to grab some continental breakfast, check my email, shower and write up a blog post before the team’s first bus heads to the ballpark at 8:30. I’ll be on the air for the first time that day about three hours from when the bus leaves the hotel.

——————–

I always tell people the toughest part about being on the road for a week is trying to go grocery shopping when you get back. There’s really no way to explain to someone why you’re walking in to Kroger at 2 a.m., unless you’re wearing scrubs and just got off the night shift at the local hospital. Those are the other people who do their grocery shopping in the middle of the night…and me, the baseball broadcaster.

I’ll walk out with some peanut butter, jelly, yogurt and fruit, because those are the things I know I can leave in my refrigerator and cabinets for a week without them going bad. As a matter of fact, as I write this I know a few heads of romaine lettuce are wilting in the lowest shelf of my fridge. Oops, forgot to toss those before I hit the road. Really, though, that is the toughest part. The rest, although some might call it “work”, is a lot of fun.

Those are the things that I think about during my downtime during the day, which there isn’t a ton of once the bus leaves Parkview Field for one of 15 destinations throughout the Midwest League. Each day brings different responsibilities, both the standard items of business and the unexpected. My routine on the road as the broadcasting and media relations manager for the Fort Wayne TinCaps includes daily: writing and distributing the team’s game notes, writing a daily blog post, recording a pre-game interview and, perhaps most importantly, broadcasting every game on the radio.

Sometimes there might be a media member who needs to interview a player. Last week a writer from Grantland wanted to interview pitching coach Burt Hooton for a piece he was writing on Tommy Lasorda. This week I had to get Max Fried and Jose Valentin on the phone for the local newspaper’s preview article before the home opener. The players and staff are always willing to do the interviews, it’s just a matter of finding a time that fits for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

You see, baseball is all about routine and schedule. At this time, we hit. At this time, we stretch. At this time, we eat. And you do not mess with the schedule. Thus, I work around the schedule.

——————–

For the noon game at West Michigan, I went on the air with my pre-game show at 11:40, meaning I had to have my scorebook filled out and my pre-game interview taped by about 11:30 so that I could run to the bathroom and get a bottle of water before going on the air. Between 10:30 and 11:30, I went down to the Fort Wayne clubhouse three different times looking for my pre-game guest.

First trip: He’s nowhere to be found

Second Trip: Clubhouse Manager A.J. Bridges tells me he’s in the batting cage

Third trip: Success! Pregame interview taped with ten minutes to spare. Whew.

That’s living on baseball time.

I sit in the third row back on the right-hand side. Jose Valentin, Burt Hooton, and then me. One of these things is not like the other…

All of the staff members (coaches, trainer, strength coach, clubhouse manager, radio guy) get their own seat, meaning two adjoining chairs. The players, many of whom have to “double up” and share a seat, are left to fend for the rest of the chairs. On our first bus trip this season, staff took their seats and it became like a college classroom—wherever you sit on that first day is where you’re sitting for the rest of the season. Having been around the block before when it comes to bus rides, I took the seat in front of the overhead TV, making sure that there would be no light projecting onto my eyes during late-night bus rides. Clutch.

The bus pillow is a must for me, too. It’s your standard pillow—mine came from Wal-Mart and cost about $5.00. When we’re at home I just leave it in my trunk, making sure it’s never out of my car lest I were to forget it when leaving the house. On the bus, though, it’s my backrest and pillow for when I want to sleep. Without it, my head would just rattle incessantly against the cold window of the bus. I forgot my pillow last year on our trip to Kane County in Geneva, Illinois, and walked to Wal-Mart the next day to buy a new one. That’s how important the pillow is.

The iPod is always a must-have item. There has not been a bus ride in my time with Fort Wayne where we have not watched a movie. Usually the movies are action or thriller types, and I’m not a big movie guy to begin with. My favorite movie is Office Space, but that hasn’t made its way into the rotation yet. Believe it or not, I only even watched two of the movies that played last year: “Old School” (a favorite of mine from college) and “Project X”. For the rest, I just put my headphones on and try to drown out the sound of gunshots or car chases. John Mayer or Gavin Degraw—something mellow–usually does the trick for me. If you’ve got any music suggestions, please pass them along.

Don’t forget your snacks on the bus, either. The only restaurants we’re stopping at will have a dollar menu or a $5 sub, so if you don’t like fast food, bring your own. I usually stick with granola bars and apples for two reasons: they’re not bad for you and they won’t go bad in a week’s time. Good enough in my book.

Lastly, make sure you dress comfortably. Some of our bus trips are longer than six hours. Sweatpants, although they might signal you’ve given up on life, are a necessity sometimes.

——————–

“Who are you?”

“Can I have your autograph?”

I leave through the same exit that the players do in order to get to the bus as we leave the field each night, and those are some of the questions I usually get on my way out.

The look of disappointment on the faces of grown men and children alike is always a downer for me when I tell them, “No, I’m the radio guy.”

“Oh,” they say, tucking their bursting baseball card binders back into their armpits, eyes fixed on the stadium door waiting for America’s Next Top Prospect to emerge from the clubhouse.

No matter what city we go to, there are always the autograph seekers who wait outside the stadium exit, rain or shine, for a chance to get the autograph of one of the players. Some guys are happy to sign, others think it’s not worth their time. I always wonder about the guys who are disinterested in signing. Don’t they realize, first-round pick or 35^th-round pick, they’re just one injury away from becoming irrelevant?

I have signed an autograph once, though. It was my first season in Minor League Baseball in 2010, and I was working with the Syracuse Chiefs. One night as I left PNC Field, the home of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (now RailRiders), a young fan asked me to autograph his baseball. So I did.

Autographing a baseball is harder than you’d think. Ever try writing on a curved surface? Not easy.

After I handed it back to him, he said to me, “What number are you?”

“I’m a broadcaster,” I proudly told him.

“Oh,” he said, and walked away with his head hung toward the ground.

I don’t sign anything anymore.

It’s 11:39 and I’m about to go on the air with the start of our broadcast:

“This is the Hupe Insurance Services Pregame Show. Now, let’s go to the ballpark. Here’s Mike Couzens…”

Everything that’s happened during the day becomes synthesized into one AM-radio feed for people listening in Fort Wayne, Indiana and anywhere else they might be tuning in. Things I’ve heard, seen, been told and wonder about, all make it onto the air each day. Some items baseball-related, some not. Three hours is a lot of time, and it’s my job each day to make it entertaining.

My take on being on the air each night, is first that it’s a great privilege. The summer after my senior year of high school I worked in the city court in my home town of White Plains, NY. My job each day was to alphabetize and file away each of the traffic tickets that had been given out the day before. White Plains cops were very good at giving out traffic tickets. Even though I worked there for only a summer, I realized I could never work in an true “office” environment that required neckties and listening to the radio at a reasonable volume from 9-11.

Second, no matter if I’ve had a stressful day, people listening at home don’t care. They’re tuning in to me because they want to be entertained and swept away from the tough day they may have had. I have to be informative, entertaining, funny, accurate and fair. I’m being invited into living rooms, bedrooms, cars and backyards each night—the least I could do is be a good guest.

Lastly, I want people  to walk away having gained something from listening. Larry Gifford, a veteran radio programmer writes about what he calls ‘payoff’:

“A strong, genuine reaction from the listener… could be a belly laugh, could be anger, could be bewilderment, could be a piece of information that I now can’t wait to share with someone else (a real-life re-tweet).”

I love the idea of a real-life re-tweet. I also call it social currency. It’s what the listener earns in return for investing time into your show or station.”

If I can accomplish that each day, in addition to describing an exciting game (hopefully won by the TinCaps), I feel like I’ve succeeded that day.

Now the game is over, though, and I’ve got to get to bed because there’s always another game tomorrow. 140 games in 152 days…make sure you’ve got your pillow.

——————–

This piece originally appeared on PadresPublic.com as a two-part blog post.

Part 1: http://padrespublic.com/mike-couzens-life-on-the-road-part-1/

Part 2: http://padrespublic.com/mike-couzens-life-on-the-road-part-2/

——————–

I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Facebook.

Thanks for stopping in,

The Unspoken Word

I was particularly moved to write about this topic because of some experiences that I’ve had within the last few months. The first was with a woman who has been working as my voice coach this winter. I chose to work with her because I thought that I needed my voice to sound different, to sound deeper. I had this vision of what a good broadcaster should sound like, and that he should have a voice of God. I was wrong.

What I’ve discovered with her help is that what makes a good broadcaster is also what makes a good partner in conversation: the ability to be interesting, compelling and relatable. It’s not necessarily how a broadcaster sounds when you say something, but how you say it. A quick span of broadcasting, at least in the play-by-play ranks (we can’t all sound like CBS Radio’s Harley Carnes or Dave Ross) finds a varying array of voices, many of which are alone pleasant-sounding, but not all baritones that would scare a subwoofer into submission.

Part of my learning process involved a rather unique learning tool—YouTube. Specifically, a video called “The Power of Vulnerability”, which is a talk given by a woman named Brene Brown. My voice coach, an actress by trade, suggested I watch this talk. The video is about giving in to our fears, and letting them be a part of our lives.

“Connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about,” Brown says.

As she says this, my ears begin to perk up. She goes on to explain situations in which we’d like to be in control and be able to determine the outcome, but are unable to do so:

“The willingness to say I love you first. The willingness to do something where there are no guarantees. The willingness to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.”

As strange a parallel as this may seem, a part of what I struggled with on the air had to do with my life off the air. For the longest time I didn’t want to experience negative emotions, or talk about my childhood during which I lost my father at age six. I thought that I could ignore those things and that by not talking about them they would just stay locked away—but they’re a part of who I am. I still don’t even like to watch sad movies, because they leave me feeling a little bit blue. But the question arises—How do you know what the height of happiness is if you never have experienced the depths of sadness? That’s what the human experience is all about.

“You cannot selectively numb emotion,” Brown says. “You cannot say: “Here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a beer and a banana nut muffin.”

Although those two do sound good, she’s right.

To practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror when we’re wondering, “Can I love you this much?” “Can I believe in this this passionately?” “Can I be this fierce about this?” Just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing (sic) what might happen, to say, “I’m just so grateful because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.”

Think about the last time that you took a chance on something—asking for a raise, going in for the kiss, moving to a new city—and it worked out. There’s no feeling like that joy that surges through your body. That means you’re alive. There’s also the disappointment that comes with the failure in those situations. But you can’t have the elation without the sorrow.

I needed those feelings and emotions to come through in my broadcasting. And in order to get those on the air, I had to start living them more in my day-to-day life. That meant talking about things that made me uncomfortable and experiencing sadness or grief or anger. Nobody is happy all the time, right? Anybody who is happy all the time is probably hiding something. I learned that it wasn’t bad to cry or to be sad. Jim Valvano said in his speech at the 1993 ESPY Awards:

“When people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it’s the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

That transition for me was not an easy change to make, but it was a necessary one—and it’s still an ongoing process—in order to make sure that I was being fully authentic and engaging every time I put a headset on. We can all spot inauthenticity a mile away, and nobody can relate to that.

The second experience that helped me realize the power of words was an essay I read in The Best American Essays 2002. It’s called “Why Literature?”, and the author, Mario Vargas Llosa, begins with a funny anecdote:

“It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. “It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother,” he explains. “She is a great reader and loves literature.” Immediately I ask: “And what about you? Don’t you like to read?” The answer is almost always the same: “Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person.” I have heard this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important things to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours.”

And, admittedly, when I first read that paragraph, I sided with the autograph seeker. I understood where he was coming from. We can all lead busy lives at times, and in an age that has become increasingly digital, books have found themselves covered in dust and lost in a closet somewhere, only to be unearthed during spring cleaning.

This next passage from Llosa discusses a world entirely without literature, and what he sees as the possible consequences:

“When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books–that is, works of literature–have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority.”

Sounds a little bit like the movie Idiocracy. While Llosa may take the point to an extreme, he makes a particularly great point, one which changes my viewpoint from the autograph seeker to Llosa’s, when referring to what love would become without words:

Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.

(Apologies to All My Children, a show that my mother watched religiously for nearly 20 years.) Not only, in an illiterate world, would love and desire be no different from what satisfies animals, but we wouldn’t be able to enjoy food or drink in the same way. We’d have no Zagat to guide the way at restaurants, no Rotten Tomatoes to tell us which movies to see and no Frommer’s to describe the beauty of an oceanside village in coastal Italy.

Of course, there’d be no play-by-play, no way to describe the smell of a sizzling brat down on the concourse below, or to illuminate the swirling pattern cut by the suntanned groundskeeper that afternoon on the outfield grass. Most importantly, there would be no way to connect with those listening at home, or in the car or on the beach. The most boring of baseball games, to use one sport, is one in which you just get the action on the field without any stories or observations mixed in. Literature, composed of words, grants us the ability to connect with one another as human beings, says Llona.

“Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanity’s multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.”

There is so much to love about that paragraph. Words on a page make us realize that those that came before us, whether decades, centuries or epochs, were not entirely different. Are we not all Don Quixote at some point, looking at life quixotically when we graduate from college and thinking we can change the world? Was Fifty Shades of Grey popular because of the storyline, or because deep down it connected with its mostly female readership by acknowledging so many unspoken things? The written word helped make that connection. The spoken word on the air helps bridge the gap from human to human. Whether it’s on a zany morning radio show talking about dating or on a basketball broadcast discussing how bad I was at high school basketball (with graphics to prove it!), we like to feel connected with at least a handful of the more than eight billion other people with whom we share this planet.

I’ve found reading (particularly outside of my weekly Sports Illustrated) such an important way to grow my vocabulary and knowledge base as a broadcaster. If only, I’d been interested in The Scarlet Letter during high school English class…

I’d only gotten small glimpses at the program growing up, but I recently had an encounter with The Howard Stern Show that made me look more into the man after which the show is named.

Stern was interviewing Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, and the interview was so compelling, the answers and questions so honest that it stood out from any type of terrestrial radio you’ll hear today. I heard this interview while driving through Iowa, and just a few days later I found myself sitting in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, airport with some time to kill (thanks to a three-hour delay) and began researching Stern.

I was well aware that Howard had a history of trouble with the FCC, but I didn’t realize, until my reading, that the indecency standards of the public airwaves were changed directly because of Howard Stern and his show. Seriously, there’s even a separate Wikipedia page for “FCC Fines of The Howard Stern Show”. Granted, Stern talked about some things that would make even the most liberally-minded of us cringe, but he also delved into topics that don’t fly in the workplace: religion, sexuality, race—all things that make up the human experience, like Brene Brown mentioned, but that we don’t always talk about on a daily basis. Stern doesn’t have the voice of God (think of Paul Harvey’s SuperBowl ad), but he says things that are compelling, intriguing and entertaining. Listeners were drawn to him and his show because it was someone talking about things that interested them and that they couldn’t get anywhere else. As the clichéd saying goes, “Content is king.” Or, as my old college professor Rick Wright would say, Stern had, “An act that attracts!” Howard’s now working on a $500 million contract, so he must be doing something right.

The predecessor to Stern is stand-up comedian George Carlin, perhaps most famous for his “Seven Dirty Words” bit, first delivered in 1972. Both Carlin and Stern alike knew that they would offend people. But despite working primarily as entertainers, they both came across as authentic when they got on the microphone. Stern has said that when he went on the air, he unleashed everything he was feeling. Carlin said in a 1997 interview that he never had an affinity for hanging out with like-minded people, which led to his ideas on stage that were astray from mainstream thought. Comedian Louis CK has told of how he saw Carlin tell a joke asking about what dog does on its day off on Saturday Night Live, and at that moment knew he wanted to be like Carlin. CK wanted to make people laugh. He wanted to connect with them.

Carlin’s message, although sometimes dark, resonated with audiences. It cut to the core of our inner thoughts about religion, politics, language, psychology and any number of other topics. George Carlin connected with people because he said out loud what other people authentically believed, but had no avenue to release. What shocks us the most sometimes? When people unexpectedly say the blunt truth. We laugh even if it is inappropriate. Children don’t know any better than to ask a woman if she’s pregnant. Adults do, and still say things like that out loud anyway—and sometimes they happen to be stand up comics.

What Stern and Carlin both showed me was that sharing stories, thoughts and messages that will resonate with other people is a sure way to get people to find your material engaging and to find you entertaining. While I won’t be touching on topics like Carlin did and Stern continues to do, I can still tell jokes and share anecdotes that have a place in the world of sports play-by-play. It’s another way of sharing the experience of being vulnerable and putting yourself out there for the listener, wherever he or she may be. You’re sharing stories from your life and hoping that they reach someone who can identify with them. Broadcasters can all learn something from Stern and Carlin, because we’re all inextricably linked as entertainers. Our goal is to leave people not only glad they listened to us, but wanting more when that night’s game or show comes to an end.

“All my life I have hated being asked to explain what I am doing. I hate the question because I very seldom know the answer.”

-Paul Theroux, Pillars of Hercules

No matter what we do, each day is an improvisation. Unless we’re reading off a script, each word that comes out of our mouth is thought of then and there and that speech comes from deep within. Our viewpoints on life are shaped by our experiences—who we meet, where we travel, our hardships and our high points—and we all have a unique viewpoint on life. Theroux is on to something by seldom knowing the answer to what he’s doing, because each day brings us something new—unless you’re Bill Murray—and along with that comes more opportunity which we might share with one another. As a song lyric reminds me:

“If it’s happening, then it’s happened to more than you.”

I take that to mean that if you’ve experienced something, so has someone else out there and we can connect with one another by sharing our stories.

My last thought on this comes from Steven Portnoy, who is an anchor and reporter for ABC News Radio. He was the keynote speaker at a radio banquet I attended last month, and he delivered an inspiring presentation. He spoke of how radio is not a dying medium, given that 240 million people in the United States listen each year. His call to action for broadcasters was this:

“We can do two things: we must continue to create the most enlightening, uplifting, provocative, can’t miss programming. And we have to make sure that everybody knows we are still the best way to move product, to enhance understanding of an issue, to motivate a political response, to make them aware of danger, to alert them to new cultural trends and to be their friend.”

Most important to me is the last part—being their friend. My goal at the beginning of this offseason was to sound more like what I thought a broadcaster should sound like, but what I really wanted to do was be more friendly, warm and inviting. That’s what it comes down to. People want to be surrounded by those who make them feel comfortable. Words are our tool in broadcasting to do just that.

For me, Nike had it right when they said, “I wanna be like Mike.” Yes, I do want to be myself. And for everyone else, you should want to be you, too.

———-

I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Facebook.

Thanks for stopping in,

Opening Day for the 2013 Minor League Baseball season is about two months away, and with each day that passes I think more and more about baseball. Just a few days ago I received my 2013 Baseball America Prospect Handbook in the mail, and within that tightly-stuffed manila envelope was a shrink-wrapped pack of prospect baseball cards.

Baseball cards. I don’t think I’d opened a pack of those since I was a teenager. My days of baseball card collecting have long since passed, but this simple stack of thinly-sliced cardboard embossed with the images and stats of baseball somebodies brought me back to a hobby that used to take up hours of my time.

I don’t know anything about Dylan Cozens, but his last name says he’ll be a star.

———-

The best, and I mean the best, place for a baseball-obsessed kid like me was a little store in Orleans, Massachusetts. My family vacationed every summer on Cape Cod in the town of Brewster, which sits right on salt-swept shores of Cape Cod Bay. As a part of that two-week stay on the Cape each summer, my mother would always set aside one day for us to ride our bikes the six or seven miles it took to get from Brewster to Orleans. (Keep in mind, this was a big sacrifice for her because it meant we were taking away from time that couldn’t be spent at the beach. Only years later did I realize that I should’ve been more grateful for this.)

At the end of the journey to Orleans was a little store named The Baseball Shop. This was everything that I ever could have dreamed of as a kid. It had jerseys, hats, pennants, stickers, door hangers and the holy grail of a young baseball fan’s life — baseball cards. Hundreds upon hundreds of them in packs, on shelves and even in glass display cases.

“Fifteen dollars?!?”, I thought to myself while rattling the rusted coins and crumpled singles in my pocket. “I’ll have to save up my allowance for the entire year to be able to afford that one.”

I’d tread lightly around the store, making sure not to upset any of the displays in the baseball basilica, stopping to stare at a framed Cal Ripken display on the wall, or flip through the poster display showing off New England baseball heroes of the day like Mo Vaughn, Nomar Garciaparra and Jason Varitek.

I held the Men Behind the Counter at the store in such high regard. They were the classic bifocal-wearing, middle-aged men who wore polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts, with canvas belts and Sperry Top-Siders. If I had a question, I was sure they knew the answer. If I had a question for which they didn’t have an answer, I felt like my hours of scouring the box scores while eating my cereal had finally paid off.

The Baseball Shop was a place where I could add to my collection that already included binders, shoeboxes and cigar boxes full of baseball cards at home. This would be where the highlights of my collection would come from. The shop probably wasn’t much bigger than the inside of a food truck, and so generations of baseball fans would have to shimmy past one another as grandparents and grandkids made their way around the inventory of a Best Buy packed into the size of a beehive.

I’d never come away from the store with much–a San Francisco Giants doorhanger one year, a framed Cal Ripken card another. The doorhanger said something to the effect of, “Don’t bother me. Don’t touch anything. I like my room this way!” I may have been a big baseball fan, but make no mistake that I was still a kid.

It wasn’t so much what I bought from the store that mattered, as much as it was the sentimental value that came along with making that purchase. I’d survived the eternal (four-hour) drive from home in New York to Cape Cod. I’d somehow pedaled myself from Brewster to Orleans and made it to The Baseball Shop for my once-a-year trip to paradise; I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to get something by which to remember my journey. Clinging on to that paper bag that held my fortune as I rode my bike back to Brewster and swerved with excitement, I felt no doubt that I was the luckiest kid on the face of the Earth.

Along with those big-ticket items, I’d get the 99-cent packs of cards that featured the everyday players like Bernard Gilkey or Cliff Floyd. And it was those cards, that held the unknown players within them, that brought me whirling back in time the other night when sitting at my dining room table and, in a way, being a kid again. I was taken back to the enthusiasm, mystery and excitement of baseball and what it holds for us when we’re so young.

Main Street - Orleans, MA

I haven’t been back to The Baseball Shop in years, but I got the same feeling as being there when I opened the pack of baseball cards at home. I don’t need a bike to get there anymore, but just thinking about making that trip gets my mind’s wheels spinning.

———-

I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Facebook.

Thanks for stopping in,

It first happened for me in the summer of 2005 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, high atop the Blue Ridge Mountains. I think there had been hints of it before, like I knew that it was there, but it had never really shown itself. I was a delegate from the state of New York at the YMCA Youth Conference on National Affairs, or CONA, and was presenting a proposal that tried to create a uniform drug policy for all professional sports in the United States. Looking back seven years later and seeing that we’re still dealing with stories ranging from Melky Cabrera to Lance Armstrong, I should’ve known the proposal was doomed to fail.

I had been on vacation with my family on Cape Cod, where my family has traveled every summer for as long as I’ve been alive and well before that. I had just finished with my sophomore year at White Plains High School and while I didn’t quite look like this anymore:

I probably wasn’t far off. Young stud right there, eh?

The reason I was going down to North Carolina was because of my involvement with the YMCA Youth and Government program, a model legislature group that has clubs in almost 40 states. Each state sends about 20 delegates to the national conference each year and I was fortunate to be selected. The New York delegation was leaving from New York, obviously. I was in Massachusetts. Thus, I had to drive to Logan Airport in Boston to fly with the Massachusetts delegation.

Here’s one thing you don’t think about a lot when you’re growing up: There’s a hell of a lot more going on around the world than what’s happening on your GameCube (shouldn’t have bought that) or in the halls of your high school. All you’re wondering about is if you’re going to be able to steal the last Oreo out of the cookie jar without your mom noticing or if you’re going to look like a loser wearing the ultra-short shorts you’re given for your cross country race that afternoon (and oh, will you ever look like a loser). On top of that, you don’t even stop to think that there are tons of other kids your age across the country that are a lot like you. They’ve got the same goals, interests, hobbies and maybe even an interest in news and politics. You couldn’t fathom it because you’ve never met them. It took me until the summer of 2005 to begin to understand that.

I arrived at Logan with a few hours to go before our flight and I was instantly welcomed into a group that was taking on a straggler—that New York kid who was on vacation and wanted to join the crew. Except that there was no negative connotation along with that. I was in. I went from surf and sand to the second amendment, from towels and tans to trade and tariffs. It. Was. Awesome. I was talking about national issues with people my age, where before I’d only read about those issues in the paper and online. Like David after Dentist asked, “Is this real life?”, I secretly wondered.

The conference takes place in an amazingly picturesque setting at the Blue Ridge Assembly, which has been there since 1906. There are some nice historic buildings and a great view, too:

The Blue Ridge Assembly

The week in North Carolina flew by and before I knew it, it was all over and I was headed back to the airport to go back to my normal, teenage life. It was at that point that I started to realize that I’d had an experience like I’d never had before. When you leave somewhere and before you’ve stepped foot out the door, you’re already longing for more, and there’s a certain feeling from deep within that is only summoned by the strongest of events. I first felt that in the summer of 2005. It’s not just with events. It can be from a person, or from a group of people, whose thoughts and views on life are so similar to yours or so inspiring that it makes you want to view life in a different way or live it with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. I first felt that in the summer of 2005. It’s not a negative feeling. There’s longing involved, but you know deep down that you’ve experienced something so good, so true to who you are inside, that you feel amazing. That feeling stuck with me for the bus ride to the airport, for the plane ride back to New York, and for the next few weeks as little things here and there would trigger what I first felt in the summer of 2005.

This is me in 2007 with (L to R) Massachusetts advisors Joel Dusoe, Jo-Ann Berry and Sandy Webb.

On a planet of nearly 7 billion people and in a country of more than 300 million, there are bound to be more people unlike you than there are to be near perfect matches. For that one week I really felt like I was around 500 people who were darn near a match to me. I’ve always taken an interest in what’s going on around me, whether it’s at city hall or the state capitol or in Washington, D.C. News and politics have always interested me, but in my circle of friends in White Plains, N.Y., I felt like I was the only kid who liked those things. Why didn’t anyone else like to read the front page of the paper? But when I found out there were other high schoolers who did that, I was blown away. I wanted more.

I would get to go back to CONA two more times, both in the summers of 2006 and 2007 and I made a lot more friends, many of whom I still keep in touch with today.

On my left is Delaware born and bred Brian Tinsman.

———————

Back then I didn’t think I’d be where I am today. But when I got a few years into college, I started to get a clearer picture of where I was headed…and the feeling returned.

Syracuse University has a longstanding tradition of producing excellent broadcast journalists, and many of them honed their skills at WAER, the campus radio station that is part NPR and part Syracuse sports, among many other things. You start out in your first semester by coming in once a week before the crack of dawn and writing a three-minute sports update that you’d then voice over (then on cassettes…wow) and have critiqued by an upperclassman. Walking through the Central New York snow at 5:30 A.M. to write a sports update that will never make the air tends to build a certain sense of camaraderie. I’d walk from Brewster-Boland hall over to the corner of Ostrom and Euclid with a friend from the Philadelphia suburbs, who’s now a television sports anchor. That was the start of something good.

From there, broadcast students you progress to working behind the scenes on the live broadcasts of football, basketball and lacrosse. Eventually you get to do your sports updates live on the air during the afternoon news, and if you stick with it long enough, you’ll get to call the action of Syracuse athletics on the same station that Bob Costas, Mike Tirico and many others once did. For most, that takes until the second semester of your junior year. It’s over the course of those three, and eventually four, years that a fraternity begins to evolve. A radio fraternity. We’d travel across the country with one another as far as Seattle and spend long nights making charts that included every minute detail about the two teams we were going to watch. We’d spend Sunday nights in the basement of the radio station critiquing (and definitely ridiculing one another) so that the next broadcast would be better than the last. Once again, at Syracuse University, I had that feeling.

It was no longer that I’d found people who were interested in current events, because those people are everywhere on a college campus. Now it was a new group—guys who wanted to make a career out of working in sports play-by-play. I’ve detailed before what sparked my love for radio and live sports, and this group of people helped to take that obsession and turn it into a passion. Now I wasn’t the only one who loved the way Bob Papa called a football game or who agonized over Carlos Beltran taking a called third strike to end the Mets season on October 19, 2006. Not only did I work with these guys, but I lived with them, too, in houses on Ackerman Avenue and Sumner Avenue. Our conversations drifted from the radio station and into our living rooms, where we could argue the best way to make a spotting chart and have it be a perfectly normal conversation.

The WAER crew at Syracuse graduation.

——————–

This feeling, which I don’t know if there’s a word for it, is more than just knowing you’re not the only one. It’s a sense of fellowship. I think it ranges across the human experience and it can be felt no matter what you’re doing. There’s an innate sense of perfection and feeling like you’re in the right place at the right time and with the right people. The sense of joy you get isn’t one that is like eating an ice cream cone and thinking, “This tastes great.” That fades. This feeling is about who you are, what you want to do and what drives you.

Marina Keegan, a Yale graduate who was killed in a car accident this past summer, wrote a fantastic piece just before graduating in June called “The Opposite of Loneliness“, in which she shares her thoughts on this feeling:

“It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt.”

Now that my generation is getting out into the world—getting jobs, bills, engagement rings—things are different. That doesn’t mean that feeling doesn’t still exist and can’t be found. I think I find it more in individual people now more than anywhere else. There’s no one “aha!” moment where it happens, but you walk away from a conversation, and you know that it was different than everything else, but that you had something in common with someone.

Back in 2008, after a Cape Cod Baseball League game, as I was taking the ferry from Martha’s Vineyard back to the mainland, I saw a guy who was wearing a Syracuse shirt. I had about an hour to kill, so I figured I’d start talking to him and find out what his affiliation with the school was. As it turns out, he’s from Canada, is a huge Syracuse basketball fan and we’ve got a lot of friends in common throughout the sporting world. We’ve kept in touch through email over the years, occasionally meeting up at Faegan’s in Syracuse after a basketball game, or even this summer as we caught up for a few drinks after a game in Lansing, Michigan. He’s a retired educator and I’m a play-by-play broadcaster. We’ve got nothing in common other than the love of a team (Syracuse) and a sport (baseball), but that’s helped us stay connected over the years.

There it is again…that sense that it’s something different when you meet someone.

“When the check is paid and you stay at the table.”

——————–

People have told me that as you get older your life gets more routine. You drive to work and you feed your family and you watch your same TV shows each night. Now in a new phase of my life, I truly treasure those moments and those people who bring back that feeling that I first felt in the summer of 2005. It’s a human connection that only comes around so often, but when it does it stays with you. I hope to keep finding that in people for a long time.

There’s a real difference between thinking to yourself that you can do something, and then actually going out and doing it. Ice skating can look easy, but you’ve never felt less sure about moving on two feet since you were learning to walk. Cooking shows make gourmet meals look like a breeze, but let’s face it—Banquet frozen dinners are only two steps, not two hundred.

I’m now halfway through my first season as the lead broadcaster for a professional baseball team, and although I’ve two full seasons under my belt as a broadcasting assistant, the view from my current perch is a different one.

A thought that has resonated with me a lot this season has been one that came from a high school graduation speech, delivered with a powerful message to the 2012 graduates of Wellesley (MA) High School.

“I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance.”

It’s a recurring theme over the course of a 140 game season.

In the first half of this season, my team traveled 4,587 miles by bus. That’s like driving from New York to Los Angeles, turning around to drive back and running out of gas in St. Louis. The point is you’re going to spend a lot of time traveling.

So when I hear something like, ““I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance,” I realized I’ve made the right decision. I don’t like what I do, I love what I do. You’ve got to if you’re going to get into this, because of the amount of time you spend on a bus, a plane or a ferry (yes, I’ve done that a few times). If you don’t love it, it will wear on you.

I wear Nike basketball pants (the soft, smooth material) when I’m on the bus and I bring slippers, too. It’s so much more comfortable that way. A pillow is also a necessary item. I forgot mine on a road trip to Geneva, Illinois, this year and walked to the nearest Wal-Mart to get a new one. There is no understating the value of a good bus pillow. I can’t say I’ve tuned in for any of the movies the team has watched this year, although I did catch a few episodes of Modern Family, which were pretty funny.

I’ve learned to travel better. I bought an iPod over the winter during basketball season (Yes, I really didn’t have one until this year) and started to fill it with my favorite music and podcasts. Here’s some of what I’ll carry with me on the road:

Listening to those podcasts is a way to a) be entertained and b) keep my mind fresh. Thinking about all baseball all the time can be consuming, and you’ve got to have somewhere else for your thoughts to go, or in this case, somewhere else for them to be taken. I listened to the one called “Unraveling Bolero” earlier today. Here’s the description:

“In this podcast, a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music.”

If that doesn’t draw you in, I don’t know what will.

The gentleman who delivered that high school graduation speech, David McCullough, Jr., made another salient point in his talk:

“Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read. Read all the time.”

It’s so easy to get sucked into the day-to-day routine of calling baseball games. There’s one after the next after the next, and if you get into a bad habit it can be hard to snap out of it. That’s the glass half empty view. But because there are so many games, it’s easy to put yourself into an ever-changing routine in which you’re always trying to better than you did the previous day. The question, “How can I better myself?” must constantly be asked. I like to look at things with that glass half full viewpoint.

And reading…oh, I wish I could read more. Here’s one book I just finished and another that I’m about halfway through:

I started The Bullpen Gospels at the Windsor, CT, Marriott in March during the America East basketball tournament and just recently finished it here in June. So much for expediency. With a few days to sit by the pool recently, I’ve cruised through R.A. Dickey’s fascinating life story. I usually work on game notes on the bus, or read one page and then get drowsy, so the All-Star break has been great for reading…and for working on my non-existent tan.

As a broadcaster, I’ve learned I’ve got to take care of my body. There is no weekend to recover. After a 12 or 13-hour day, the body needs a good night’s sleep. While other people celebrate a Friday or Saturday night, that usually means a shorter turnaround for the broadcaster, with most weekend games player earlier than the ones scheduled for weeknights. A long night can equal a hoarse voice, which in turn creates for a tough broadcast for both the broadcasters and the listener. Driving home from the ballpark around midnight makes it easy to memorize the traffic light patterns on your route.

I’ve become much better with learning names this year, too. From meeting front office members, coaches, managers, players, staff members and sponsors, not just at one park, but at all of them—you’ve got to have a cerebral rolodex. People who knew my dad have always told me that he could always remember someone’s name and their background, and I’m trying to do the same.

Mr. McCullough reminds me ever so closely of one of my high school English teachers, Mr. Donohue. I had him both my freshman and senior years, and talking to him after class was always such a tremendous experience. He had wisdom for any problem, and his words always seemed to be perfectly chosen. I peppered him with far more questions about life than I should have, but he always put up with me. I saw him a few years ago on Thanksgiving at my high school’s annual “Turkey Bowl” football game, and he told me he was going to be retiring. I think that was his perfect answer after too many years spent dealing with too many kids like me.

In McCullough’s speech, I could see one of the answers having come from Donohue, too. McCullough takes on the oft-used phrase “YOLO”, which stands for “You only live once”. He counters with:

“You can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than ‘you only live once’, it should be ‘you live only once’. But because ‘YLOO’ doesn’t have the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn’t matter.”

It certainly does. I’m finding that in a new role, it’s a matter of making time for what’s important and following through with those commitments not only to work, but to yourself. The passion to do what you love, and not just what has the best hours or perks, is fulfilling. Thanks for the message, Mr. McCullough. I hope you don’t retire any time soon.

Here’s the full graduation speech:

——————–

I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Faceobook.

Thanks for stopping in,

I think it was 2008 when I joined Twitter and sent my first tweet. I was a sophomore at Syracuse University and was enrolled in an elective class entitled “Web Journalism and Innovation.” I had no idea what Twitter was.

It was also in that class that I edited video for the first time. I had no idea how to edit video.

After having only edited audio before, having to deal with not just a waveform, but also a pictorial component was absolutely baffling. Sure, there was a learning curve and a few bad mistakes made on my end, but I got the hang of it eventually. I had to get over my fear of the unknown (video editing) before I could get to a great result (well produced content).

I look at Twitter the same way. At first, I had no idea what an @ reply was, or what the etiquette was for following other people. “Is it like Facebook?” I wondered. “Do I have to follow someone if they follow you?”

No, you don’t.

Following-back isn’t an obligation or courtesy, it’s a choice. Be interesting and engaging, not demanding.

— Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) May 2, 2012

“If someone retweets me, do I have to thank them?” I would ask my professors.

Any relationship starts by someone making the first move. In this case, Twitter is not going to be making the first move; the onus rests upon your shoulders. If you’re not there already—join.

Whenever I wake up, I almost always check Twitter first before I even get out of bed. As of this writing, I follow 756 people. I can use one app to complete a process that used to involve checking multiple websites.

Here are some of my favorite follows:

Sports

@richarddeitsch – Richard Deitsch  – Media Critic at Sports Illustrated

Sample tweet:

Read a piece on aggregation in @cjr that has me pondering: What is a fair and just word count to pull from someone else’s reporting?

— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) May 4, 2012

@WSJSports – The sports section of The Wall Street Journal Sample tweet:

Warren Buffett’s Olympic Discovery: We talk to Buffett about his friendship with a US ping pong prodigy on.wsj.com/JQNtZF @WSJ — WSJ Sports (@WSJSports) May 2, 2012

  @ESPNStatsInfo – The ESPN Stats and Information department Sample tweet:

Earlier this afternoon, Erik Bedard became the 1st Pirates pitcher to strike out 7 consecutive batters (thanks, #Elias!) — ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) May 3, 2012

News

@RoomForDebate – Room For Debate, a section of The New York Times where experts give their opinions on matters of the day. Sample tweet:

In Europe, Now What? nyti.ms/I6xCqe

— Room for Debate (@roomfordebate) April 23, 2012

@AntDeRosa – Anthony De Rosa, a former contributor to MetsBlog (great site if you’re a Mets fan) and now the social media editor for Reuters. He seemingly never sleeps and is always the first on my timeline to tweet breaking news.

Sample tweet:

Facebook IPO roadshow scheduled for May 7: source reut.rs/K5VriD

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) May 2, 2012

@BrianStelter  – Brian Stelter, the TV and media reporter for The New York Times. He’s always got an interesting story up his sleeve. Sample tweet:

“Today’s Goliaths, before they even dreamed of being Davids.”@jimmaiella dug up cable channel ads from 30 years ago: tmblr.co/Zew50yKrui52 — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 4, 2012

 FREE AGENTS  @MySecondEmpire – Chris Jones, a writer for Esquire, who’s always got something funny to say, or a good story he’s written to share with everyone. Sample tweet:

Soon speaking at Syracuse inside something called The Herg. Sounds like a mythical beast, I imagine with wings. — Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) April 24, 2012

(It’s just an auditorium, but a great, big one at my alma mater.)

@Mediaite – Mediaite.com, which tracks happenings with TV shows and uploads lots of video clips of important interviews or funny segments from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Sample tweet:

Mick Jagger To Host Saturday Night Live Season Finale mediaite.com/a/kqbvj

— Mediaite (@mediaite) May 3, 2012

@Longreads – Longreads.com, which shares the best longform stories there are on the web. If you travel frequently and need things to read, this is your go-to for a mixture of lots of topics.

Sample tweet:

“Six Degrees of Aggregation.” @shapiromichael, @CJR, on the evolution of the Pulitzer-winning HuffPost lgrd.co/HIyVFL v @amzam

— Longreads (@longreads) April 17, 2012

Those are just a few of the accounts I enjoy seeing updates from, but it’s the personalized mixture of my timeline that allows me to never feel like I’m behind on what’s going on in the world.

“It never ceases to surprise me at the infinite capacity of the human mind to resist the introduction of useful knowledge.” – Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury

Isn’t it just a part of the human condition for adolescents not to listen to their parents when advice is given? The child knows too much already, in his or her mind, and doesn’t need any advice from mom or dad.

That’s what I think of when I hear that people don’t want to get on to Twitter. I understand that not everyone is interested in getting updates on sports, news, entertainment, gossip, etc., but that’s the beauty of it; you can customize your feed to be whatever you want it to be, and you don’t always have to have something to say.

If you just want to follow your friends, then you can do that. If you just want to follow players on the Yankees, then by all means go for it. And if you just want to follow Perez Hilton, well, he’s got a website, but you’re more than welcome to do that, too.

So when people say “I don’t get Twitter”, it’s a little baffling to me. It is what you want it to be, and I think that the relationship analogy is a great one.

Reminder to take at least 5 minutes to reply/retweet others. Nothing about you. Engage, interact, give.

— Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) April 30, 2012

Relationship: The more you try to make a relationship work and the more effort you put in, usually the better the outcome you’ll have.

Twitter: The more people you follow and the more you custom-tune your feed, the more you’ll gain from checking your tweets during the day.

Relationship: The more you communicate with the other half of your relationship, the better you’ll get along and the better you’ll understand one another.

Twitter: If you communicate with people, and as in real life, make it genuine and thoughtful, you’ll usually see that reciprocated on your timeline.

That’s how I use Twitter every day, and although it often leads my phone battery looking like this:

Frantically searching for an outlet...

It’s well worth it because I feel like I’ve always got an idea of what’s going on around me.

I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Faceobook.

Thanks for stopping in,

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never tasted victory or defeat.”

-Teddy Roosevelt

March also means that it’s time for basketball conference tournaments, and then ultimately the NCAA tournament. It’s a fantastic celebration of basketball and some days it feels like any time you flip on the TV, there will be a competitive, down to the wire basketball game waiting for you to yell and scream at it as your bracket turns to mush. I thoroughly enjoy it. Baseball makes its return to the television and radio airwaves, too.

March is also the one time of the year where you can hear so many different broadcasters calling games. Networks have their crews spread out to cover the different conference tournament games on both television and radio. You just never know who you’ll get as the broadcast crew. Here’s why I like that: When I listen to or watch a sporting event, I am not really watching it anymore as a fan of Team X or Team Y…for the most part. Even though I’m watching the game, getting caught up in the action and following the storylines, my true focus is on what’s being said. For most people the play-by-play and commentary is in the background, but for me it’s in the foreground.

It’s what I call The Insider Effect.

I’m analyzing every word of what the broadcasters say when I listen to a game. If there’s a good nugget about a player or coach, I’m wondering to myself “How did he get that?” For instance, on Friday night Cincinnati beat Syracuse in the Big East Tournament. In Cincinnati play-by-play announcer Dan Hoard’s post-game wrap up video, he gave an anecdote from his first sit-down interview with Head Coach Mick Cronin. At that time, Cronin told Hoard that an ideal day would be waking up on the Saturday of the Big East Tournament in New York with a chance to play for the title. I thought to myself, “Wow, that is a) great recollection by Dan, and b) just an awesome tidbit that really adds value to the viewing experience.” I don’t know if everyone sees it that way, but it’s how I’ve come to watch and listen to sports.

When a game is coming down to the wire, I’m listening to hear what information the play-by-play guy is giving, or if he’s letting his color guy fill something in, or whether the action becomes the show and the play-by-play voice might sit back momentarily.

Baseball spring training broadcasts have just come back on the air, and I got to listen to both the Mets with Josh Lewin and Ed Coleman on Saturday.  While I was driving I caught some of the Cubs pre-game show, too. I thought about how much studying and preparation Lewin had done coming into his first year as a Mets broadcaster, and what type of questions were being asked of Cubs Manager Dale Sveum. Some people might say this takes away from the viewing or listening experience, but I see it as a chance to glean a new word, phrase or way of asking a question. There’s always something to be learned.

This happens at whatever job you do, even if it’s only to a small degree. I think it’s just human nature that once we’re used to doing something “our way”, that we then observe things differently once we’re on the outside. A few friends of mine work in the advertising business on the creative design side, and they’ve told me that they can’t even read a newspaper or magazine without thinking about how it’s laid out and what fonts are used. In creative circles, I’m told, using Times New Roman is like wearing an acid-washed denim outfit to the White House Correspondents Dinner—you could probably get away with it, but are the awkward glances really worth it?

We’re all subject to The Insider Effect, subconsciously or not. Having once worked as a banquet server at weddings when I was in high school, I am always in awe of waiters and waitresses who can carry huge drink trays without spilling or take orders from a table without writing anything down. I once worked in a call center (that’s a whole separate story) and the one phrase that people used that always got to me was “today”.

“How can I help you today?”

“Would like you like to place an order today?”

Well, I suppose I’ll have a grilled cheese, tomato soup and an iced tea today, but I’ll take the check tomorrow.

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Take a minute to think about when your awareness is heightened because you’ve been in someone else’s shoes before. You’ll probably start to notice things more and more now.

I believe The Insider Effect can be a good way for us to challenge ourselves every day.

In what ways is this person doing something better than me? How can I emulate this person’s success to make myself better? What’s a mistake that I need to make sure I don’t make in the future?

There’s always something to be learned.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it – Yogi Berra

For business or pleasure?

Well, I suppose in my case it’s a bit of both because the journeys that I go on are almost all for work. This past weekend I traveled with the Vermont women’s basketball team down to Baltimore as they took on UMBC. The journey involved a three-hour bus ride to the airport in Manchester, NH and then a quick flight down to Maryland.

Within this basketball season, I’ve gone with the team to Texas, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and most recently Maryland. Nine states aren’t bad, especially when I’d never been to three of them before.

I envision myself as George Clooney from "Up in the Air" when I travel. Suave, sophisticated, and wearing slip on shoes to avoid holding up the security line. I usually only accomplish the last on that list.

One of my favorite game note nuggets from this year, courtesy of UVM’s Sports Information Director Lisa Champagne, is this:

“The Catamounts spent December on an eight-game road swing. During the road trip, the team traveled to six states and logged over 3,900 miles.”

For reference, Google Maps lists a trip from New York to Los Angeles at 2,777 miles.

That month meant a lot of time on buses, planes and sitting in airports. It also meant a lot of time trying to figure out a way to access a Boingo hotspot for free. Success rate: 0%.

And I’m tall, 6’4”, so I don’t fit well on most planes and buses. Does it get uncomfortable sometimes? Certainly. If I had a nickel for every time someone pointed out that I have to duck to stand up in an airplane, I would have $4.25. (Seriously, I’ve been keeping track. Let me tell you about the app I have for that…)

That said, I’ve also found that sleeping across two rows of seats on a coach bus is surprisingly comfortable. Just pop on the old iPod and nap away. I also learned that my snoring sometimes keeps the team’s athletic trainer awake. (Sorry, Allison!)

The bottom line is that travel can sometimes be a hassle, uncomfortable and inconvenient, but there’s no way that sportscasters should ever complain about it.

I wanted to write about this because over the course of the winter I’ve seen either Tweets or Facebook statuses from folks along the lines of “Ugh, early morning wakeup call”, or “Not looking forward to this long bus ride”. And at first, I was inclined to agree with the authors of those statements. But on second thought, you’ve got to realize why you’re doing all of that travel.

Here’s something that Dave O’Brien, Red Sox and ESPN broadcaster, said not all too long ago in the New Hampshire Business Review:

“I just added up my 2011 schedule, and I called 212 games for the Red Sox and ESPN. The travel and time spent in hotels and airport terminals is extraordinary. It’s pretty solemn sometimes, because that means I am away from my family and home in Rye (N.H.) so much. But then I realize how lucky I am. I try to tell my children to do what you love to do and find someone who’s willing to pay you to do it. My office is Fenway Park, Allen Field House (Kansas), or any remarkable place I go for the broadcasts. I never forget that I get to talk sports and do it for a living.”

When I read that, I just shook my head and a big grin came across my face. Sometimes all it takes is the right person to get a message across. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t remind myself that I could be sitting at a desk, or standing at a counter, or doing any number of other things that are not truly my passion. This served as an excellent reminder this weekend.

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1.    An exit row trumps all other seats on a plane. Do not be deceived by the appearance of extra leg room in the first row.

2.    Free hotel wireless. I’ve found the more expensive the hotel, the less likely the internet is to be gratis.

3.    Gigantic hotel beds. After sleeping on a twin bed until my junior year of college (see aforementioned height), this is still wonderful. I will never understand why one person needs nine pillows, though.

4.    Delicious hotel buffets. I am a sucker for good food. Omelette station? I’m sold.

5.    On that same note, plentiful food options around a hotel are always welcome.

6.    Hotel irons. I’ve got my own iron at home, but the ones at hotels always seem so much better. Perhaps, steamier. I’m also always afraid I’m going to hit myself with the ones that have a cord recoil button. How I developed this fear, I do not know. (As a side note: Gus Johnson uses the tried and true method of steaming your shirts in the hotel bathroom. I highly recommend this.)

7.    An iHome in a hotel room. I rarely watch TV (“Swamp People” is a show, so I know I’m not missing much), so being able to use my iPod with nice speakers is an appreciated touch.

8.    Silent plane neighbors. The more you resemble Charlie Chaplin, give or take the mustache, the better. We’ve all had the chatty person sit next to us, and it’s been scientifically proven that time goes only half as fast as it normally does during those flights.

9.    Southwest Airlines. I just flew on my first Southwest Flight for the first time, and being able to check two bags for free was jaw-dropping. I also got pretzels on the plane. Pretzels! I will not throw a challenge flag for that snack.

10. Catching up with old friends on the road. There have been a few trips this year where I’ve gotten to see people that I hadn’t seen with in a while, in some cases a few years, and that makes the journey all the more worthwhile.

To top it all off, I was with the team earlier this year when someone spotted AC Slater, um, I mean Mario Lopez, in the airport. If you grew up watching “Saved By The Bell”, this could only be topped by a Belding sighting. For the older crowd, I guess a “Dancing With the Stars” reference will suffice. (Go Bayside!)

You just never know what’ll happen when you’re on the road.

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“Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’

Barely getting by, it’s all talkin’”

-Dolly Parton, “9 to 5”

Well, she did have one part spot on: it is all talkin’. That said, there’s nothing else 9 to 5 about being a sports broadcaster. Every day is different, and that’s what makes the job so fun. A new city, a new interviewee, a new venue – those things are all part of what makes the profession exciting. Like any job, there’s the behind the scenes work that goes into putting the show together and making it run smoothly. For broadcasters everywhere, it starts with game preparation. Whether you call them charts, boards, or whatever other term you might use, everybody in the industry knows what you mean.

The finished product

That’s one of my finished charts for a recent game at the University of Vermont. Although I choose to do mine by hand, the majority of folks do them on the computer using programs like Microsoft’s Excel or Publisher, which give you a variety of options for customization. (I did try doing my charts on the computer for a short while a few years ago, but just never really liked working that way. I think I’m able to remember more facts by writing them down. I also lost the power cord to my printer after my freshman year of college, but that’s another story.)

When I start my preparation, I have two pieces of legal-size paper (11” x 17”), a pack of Sharpie markers, a ruler, a pen and a good, solid surface to write on. The first thing I’ll do is mark off the allocated space for both the team information and the player boxes. I turn the paper horizontally, and mark two inches down from the top of the sheet. Then, 1 ¼” away from that dash, I make another mark. I continue to go in 1 ¼ inch intervals until I reach the bottom of the sheet. After that, I draw lines horizontally across the page where I made those small marks. Then, I turn the paper vertical, and on the top line, I make a mark three inches from the left edge, and draw a line straight down. So this is what it looks like that that point:

Still lots of work to be done

Eventually, all of those blank spaces will be filled with either colored sharpie or markings from my pen. After that, I start to fill in the names of the players. In this instance, the Binghamton Bearcats:

I put the players in the order of points per game, highest to lowest.

I try to use colors as close to the school’s actual colors as I can. Vermont’s pretty easy with dark green, although Columbia (UVM’s first opponent this year) with the baby blue was more of a challenge. It’s pretty amazing how many colors of Sharpie marker there are. (Hint: Best Buy carries almost any color you can think of.)

Eventually, each player will have a name, height, class, position and hometown listed in that space below where I’ve written “FOULS”. The “FOULS” are used to mark off the five fouls a player is allowed before being disqualified from the game.

Beyond the vertical line to the right, I’ll give the field goal percentage, free throw percentage and three-point field goal percentage for each player. Underneath that, I’ll list each player’s season averages in points, rebounds/assists (based on relevancy) and minutes played per game. Up top in the larger, right-hand partition, I’ll put what each player did in the previous game. All the way on the right, I’ll list the player’s season high and career high for reference during the game. Any space I’ve got left over after that is used for the most pertinent notes I can come up with for each player.

I slept through the whole "learning how to print legibly" part of first grade.

Up top is where I put general team information like the all-time series notes, and any other trends or pieces of other information that would make for good storylines throughout the broadcast. I also include the team averages for field goal percentage, free throw percentage and three-point field goal percentage.

When I’m done with both charts, I staple them to a legal-sized folder, and I’m just about ready to go.

That’s just the written preparation for a game. Then there’s the Googling of player names and hometowns, conversations with coaches and players, observations from practices, etc. that all go into a broadcast. When I get to a gym, here’s what my typical setup looks like:

Stony Brook University's Pritchard Gymnasium

I’ve got the mixer on the left, which controls my audio and connects me to the radio station. On top of that is my digital recorder, which I use to tape pre-game interviews and record each game broadcast. In the middle is my chart, which has a notepad on top of it. I write down the last name of each player on that notepad and keep a tally of how many points they’ve scored, so I can refer to it instantly after a basket. On the right is my laptop, which I use to email my interviews back to the station for playback on the air, and for live stats during the game.

So, that’s the way I prepare my charts for a basketball game. For baseball, there are a number of scorebooks available, and football is pretty wide open as far as charts go, too. I’m sure every broadcaster has a unique way that he or she likes to get ready.

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I wanted to write this entry because broadcasters, not just me, frequently get asked things along the lines of “How do you remember so many things during a game?” Well, while my mind does retain a lot of stuff, there are still a lot of things that I can’t remember, and that’s what a broadcaster is referring to constantly throughout each game. It’s the art of making it all sound seamless that’s the challenge. Think of a chart as the cheat sheet your friends would make for before taking the SAT exam (surely, you wouldn’t have done such a thing), except broadcasters are allowed to make a much bigger one and keep it right in from of them. (And hopefully, we all get graded like Ralphie in A Christmas Story did. “An A plus! Plus! Plus!”)

If you’re ever at a coffee shop and see someone with a laptop, a bag of markers and some legal paper – that’ll be me getting ready for a game!

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I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me via the contact page, Twitter, or Facebook.

Thanks for stopping in,

Mike