Larry McCormack / The Tennessean-Nashville
Last month a piece titled “Player’s View: Tales From the Minor Leagues” ran here at FanGraphs. Comprising a collection of current and former major leaguers relating stories from their time on the farm, it was equal parts entertaining and informative of life below the big league level. What you’re reading now is a followup, albeit with a notable twist. The storytellers here are all broadcasters: two who picked up a microphone after their playing days were over, and three more who never played professionally. As was the case with the earlier piece, many of the stories will leave you laughing, if not shaking your head.
Jeff Levering, Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster: “There are a lot of great stories. One I’ll always remember is from when I was [broadcasting] with Springfield, in Double-A. We played a night game in Little Rock and needed to get to Tulsa for a game the next day. There was a torrential downpour — the worst rain I’ve seen in my life — and I was in charge of getting the movies for the bus. Our manager at the time was Pop Warner, who is now the third base coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, and he was staunch about no comedies. It was all horror movies, all the time, and the gorier the better — for him. Anyway, most of the guys were asleep in the back, but some of us were watching and it’s getting to be one of the scariest parts of the movie. This was in the middle of a torrential downpour in rural Arkansas.
“Up ahead we see a pair of headlights, but the headlights are sideways in the middle of the road. Our driver doesn’t see it until the last moment and we missed this car, which had spun out in the middle of the road, by a foot — no less than a foot. We ended up going into the left lane and down into the embankment, and right back up. That woke everybody up. From that point on everyone was awake. It was a really bad accident that could have happened but didn’t happen, and it was the middle of the night. Again, we were in the middle of Arkansas. No one would have found us until the next day.
“Another one I’ll always remember is the first minor league game I ever broadcast. It was 2007, Rancho Cucamonga against Lake Elsinore. The starting pitcher was Bartolo Colon on a rehab assignment. To this day it’s the fastest game I’ve ever broadcast, an hour and 52 minutes. Bartolo Colon against Manny Ayala in a 1-0 thriller.
“I had a couple of games in Bakersfield. Not a great place to call games. The temperature inside the booth was 126 degrees. Single-pane windows. The sun sets behind center field. Everybody could hear you, because there was nobody there. One game there were seven people in the stands, and four of them were scouts. Peter Bourjos came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You called a good game.’ He could hear every word I was saying from center field.”
Jim Rosenhaus, Cleveland Guardians broadcaster: “My first job was with the Kingston Indians in 1992. My first year there, the equipment — the mixer board, and how I sent it back to the radio station — literally blew up during a game. I’d smelled something, then it literally caught on fire. It started smoking. Fire was coming out. I couldn’t do the rest of the game.
“Another time — this was also with Kinston — the tower of our radio station was hit by lightning. That knocked us off the air for three days. We were on a road trip, and there was no radio station, so we couldn’t do the games. They actually had me suit up and sit in the dugout one night. They probably weren’t supposed to do that, but it was basically, ‘There’s no radio station, so what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll just watch the game.’ They said, ‘Why don’t you watch it from the dugout?’ So, I put on a generic uniform, sat there, and kind of just stayed out of the way. It was fun, if not maybe a bit ridiculous.”
Andy Freed, Tampa Bay Rays broadcaster: “I’ve told this story many times to friends, because it paints a picture of the minor leagues, how guys tend to have fun. You’re all bunched together on a crowded bus, traveling at odd hours, or you’re all together in a hotel room. It tends to galvanize a group, so if anybody can ever come up with something to make the group laugh, that makes someone a valued member of the group.
“One time we were on some long bus trip, who knows from where to where. The temperature on the bus never seems to be consistent; somebody is hot and somebody is cold. Maybe it’s hot in front of the bus and cold in the back, or the other way around. Well, in the back of the bus one day it was a little bit warm. I remember looking back and there was this one player — he was a prospect at the time — completely naked. He’d taken everything off, head to toe, and I could hear the guys giggling as he walked up to the driver. He deadpanned, ‘Bussy, the guys say it’s a little bit warm in back right now. Can you lower the AC?’
“In 2001, my first year in Triple-A Pawtucket, I was broadcasting a game that became famous, or maybe the word is infamous. There was a beanball battle seemingly about to ensue, and the batter was Izzy Alcantara, who was one of those mercurial players who was a tremendous minor league hitter but never seemed to get his act together to be a regular major league player. I don’t remember who was pitching for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons, but the catcher was Jeremy Salazar. The pitch came in close — it didn’t actually hit [Alcantara] — and instead of charging the mound, Alcantara turned and mule kicked the catcher, knocking him backwards. A brawl ensued.
“The Red Sox [organization] had another player who was a very large man. He was a tremendous power hitter, but he would get overweight as the season went along; he had a hard time staying in shape. The trainer for the team, who was a really small guy, had the job of trying to keep his eating habits under control. We didn’t have a nutritionist back them. One day, the player had had enough of the trainer staying on him about his diet, so he picked him up and stuffed him into a garbage can. I think he might have gotten suspended for that.”
Doug Glanville, ESPN broadcaster and former player: “One of my favorite teammates in the minor leagues was Ben Burlingame, a pitcher from University of Maine. He was kind of our team comedian with Winston-Salem. This was in the Carolina League. Winston-Salem had a marathon that went through the town, with the runners doing the final leg inside the ballpark along the warning track and then ending at home plate, where there was a ribbon to run through. Burlingame, being the clown that he is, decided that it would be fun to wait for them to come into the outfield wall for that final curve, then pounce into the running, wearing a fake number that he’d taped to his back. He hid so [the leaders] couldn’t see him, then when they went by he jumped in. Of course, he had a full tank of energy, so he blows by them all and runs through the tape. Then he falls down and does this James Brown ‘pick him up with the cape.’ Everyone was like, ‘Where did this guy come from?’
“The following year, 1993, our minor league team in A-ball moved from the Carolina League to the Florida State League, in Daytona Beach. We had a kind of rough-and-tumble group there and were getting into brawls. We…
