PHNX Arizona Diamondbacks Podcast - D-backs broadcaster Greg Schulte explains his journey to the booth

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

D-backs voice Greg Schulte tells the story of his budding Little League career, how he landed the Diamondbacks play-by-play gig, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back into a special edition of the Rattle Podcast, ladies and gentlemen. Here in this episode, we are honored to be joined by the voice of your Arizona Diamondback since opening day of 1990. He's been here since the beginning. His name is Greg Schulte. Greg was basically my first mentor in the broadcasting industry. We met about 10 years ago now. It's hard to believe I was a Diamondbacks kidcaster. I got the gig. by impersonating Greg Schulte's voice. He was an icon for me growing up. I didn't have cable television, so I would listen to all of the games with Greg Schulte on the radio.

We are honored to be joined by one of my mentors today. Greg, thank you so much for hopping on with us today. We really appreciate it. Glad to be with you, Jesse. Let's go ahead and jump into the bizarre situation that baseball is facing, and really not just baseball, but obviously the state, the country, the entire globe right now with the coronavirus, and everything that is going on. Greg, I know yesterday you would have been in Denver, I believe, calling a Diamondbacks Rockies game.

Maybe a little bit nice to be able to spend Easter with the family. Was that nice for you? Yeah, although I would have enjoyed spending an after call on a ball game. But as you said, it's kind of the world we're in right now. So, yeah, I was a little different. It's been different. It really has. I already had. games postponed and, you know, the count goes on and it's going to go on further, I'm sure, with no idea when this baseball season will or if it will start. Basically, what we know right now, or at least what I know right now, is that Major League Baseball has rolled out a couple different proposals,

at least proposals that have actually been linked to the media. There could be other proposals that were they're considering as well. I'm sure there are. But the two plans that I've heard most prominently, one would have base. baseball continuing here in probably about a month or maybe two months moving into June where basically all 30 MLB teams are sequestered right here in Arizona. There wouldn't be any fans at games, but they would be able to use Chase Field along with all the spring training stadiums around the state, which are very nicely located in

close proximity here in the Phoenix metro area. That's one possibility. I've heard the other one that came out more recently, as I'm sure you've heard, Greg, is the possibility of basically just continuing spring training, but calling them regular season games where you continue the Cactus League, grapefruit league format. Teams would have new divisions.

Kind of the layout of the league would change dramatically, but it would give Major League Baseball the ability to use two indoor stadiums out in Florida, as well as all of the minor league facilities there as well. Greg, I'm curious from your standpoint, does either of these seem more realistic than the other. And just more from a broader perspective,

what's your view on when exactly baseball can be played again? Well, that's a loaded question. I don't think anybody knows. Baseball doesn't know. Yeah. I know the people in charge of trying to get rid of this pandemic globally. They're not sure. So we play a waiting game right now.

I don't know how they're going to figure it out, to be honest with it. They've got the greatest minds of the game of baseball trying to figure this out how they would come back and play some semblance of a season. But right now it's just a roll of a dice and trying to figure out, you know, when, where, if, how, and if go from there. So I'm like you and I'm like all baseball fans. I'm just kind of taking a day by day to see what new proposal there might be on the table for tomorrow

or down the road that we might be able to filter in some way somehow. But, you know, in 2001, Jesse, it was fantastic. The game of baseball player came back and got to heal this country of the wrong that had been done with the attack, both in New York and also in Washington, D.C. And we got some order of semblance back then. But this is completely different. This, as you said, is globally affecting everybody. And, you know, it's a disease that's killing, you know, hundreds. upon thousands globally day by day.

So that's the main order of business right now. And once they get those numbers down and we can, you know, get things going again at least a little bit, then I think baseball will even get a little bit more serious on what they can do and what can't do is the season tries to unfold. I'm curious from your standpoint, Greg, of those two plans, does either of them seem particularly more realistic than the other? Do they both seem far-fetched to you? what do you think about the ideas that you've heard thrown out there so far? Well, I understand about playing them here, but I think there'd be a, you know, you'd have a whole lot more people coming in here to the Valley now,

and, you know, does that cause us more concerned with more people coming in that's talking about sequestering hotels? I don't know. I really have no answer for you, which would sound better than the other, to be honest with you. It does sound more and more like we might be able or might be playing before empty stadiums, wherever that is, spring training facilities or at Chase Field or even

in Tampa or in Miami. But that seems like that might be what we get right now. So like I said, they've got some bright minds going at this every day in New York, and I'm sure they're pulling out their hair. They're trying to get answers. We're all trying to get answers, but until

this thing starts to die some, and I hate using that word, but until it starts to calm down some, and we can get things again somewhat back to the norm then i i think uh we just kind of wait and see yeah yeah absolutely no one i think no one really knows much of anything right now at this point if we're all being honest with ourselves uh gregg i'm curious you've been broadcasting diamondbacks games for 22 years now this would be your 23rd season i believe on the

job you're a veteran at this my guess is that in those 22 seasons you've probably never broadcast at a game with an empty crowd. What would that be like for you? That would be different. You know, I broadcast high school baseball. I broadcast college baseball, semi-pro, minor league baseball, professional baseball, but you always have some semblance of an audience. Yeah.

And I saw, I believe it was some video I saw from South Korea. They were playing before an empty stadium. And, you know, I don't know who the player was, but he had the first home run as their late got underway, and it went into the bleachers and left field. There's nobody out there. He's running around the bases, and they're following him, and you can't see anybody in the stand.

It would be different. I don't know if they're thinking about maybe piping in some crowd noise. I don't know if they would love that or not. It would sure be different. You'd hear everything. I guarantee you that from the outfielder's yelling into the infielders. So it would be strange. They're probably going to hear us broadcast.

the ball games is what they're going to also hear. So having to show up with the very, very different. Greg, I want to jump into your story. I mentioned the 22 years that you've had here as a Diamondbacks broadcaster. Your story in the Valley stretches far even earlier than that. I know you were with KTAR for 14 years. You were with the Sons for 15 years working alongside Al McCoy. First is producer.

Then you moved into a role as his color commentator. You work with the Arizona Cardinals as well as a pre-and-post game show host. At what point in Greg Schulte's life did he first discovery want it to be a broadcaster? I was eight years. I was an old child, and we were big baseball fans. My dad was a big Cardinal fan. And we grew up in Northwest Illinois. And in Illinois, it seems like you're either Cardinal fans or Cup fans,

and then there's a White Sacks fans. but there are a lot of Cardinal fans. Illinois is a different state. Everything out of Chicago is called Downstate, even if you're west of Chicago. It's called Downstate. But fans, obviously, they run the gamut there in Illinois,

on into Iowa, Indiana, even into Wisconsin. And Cardinals fans, for a lot of years, the Cardinals were the furthest steam west. And they had a big following in Texas and Oklahoma. They had the largest radio network. He had all of baseball, I think, was 150, 250, 250 stations throughout the course of the country. I started following Cardinals baseball as a youngster.

Would listen to Harry Carey and Jack Buck call a Hall of Fame, a couple of Hall of Famers that would call Cardinal games on a little Philco radio I had. We go down to the Sportsman's Park at that time, which was the original ballpark in St. Louis. And then they moved to the downtown area, Bush Stadium 1, now Bush Stadium 3. So I've seen three different stadiums. but I would listen religiously every night during the summer, especially when I was out of school, to Harry Carey and Jack Buck Cartaginal baseball. Couldn't get enough of it.

And I discovered very early on that if I couldn't play the game in the major league level, I wanted to be Harry Carrier, Jack Buck, broadcasting Cardinal Baseball. So I go back, that would have been eight years, I would have been 1959 or so, that 1958, 1959, that I decided I wanted to, you know, a Major League Baseball, broadcaster. Your journey to get here, obviously, as it is for any broadcaster is long and difficult. Probably took some unexpected turns at different points in your career. I know you had to

go through other sports in order to get to baseball, and that seems to be kind of the reality that pretty much every broadcaster faces is your dream job is not going to be where you start, and you may start somewhere completely different than where you ultimately wind up, where there are moments throughout your career as you were working toward the job that you have now, where you kind of wondered if that wasn't going to happen or if you'd wind up somewhere else or was it easy to maybe lose heart in some of those moments? No, you know, when I came out here, back to the Quad Cities, I originally was hired back in the early 70s when I was going to college

to join a radio TV combo. I was on the radio side, and we would broadcast high school football and basketball, a little bit of baseball. And eventually, I ended up during the University of Iowa games back when Lou Doleson was coaching at Iowa before he made the trek out to Arizona and became the coach of the Arizona Wildcats. So I had a season of that. I moved out to Phoenix, my wife and I, Nancy, in 1979. And I was hired by KTAR, went to work with Tom Dillon. broadcasting Sunday Sports

and we did basketball. Back then we did all the baseball games, Jesse, which was before the NCAA put a restriction. I think we're broadcasting like 70-some baseball games here. It's almost a half-season of Major League Baseball. And they would go around the country.

They play at Texas. They'd go down to Miami. They had some home and homes with the hurricanes and the long horns. Plus they play a full schedule in the six-packed. So we're getting a lot of baseball experience. Football is really the name of the game in Phoenix, along with sons basketball.

When I came at a time, you had the sons of professional sport. You had ASU with their football, baseball, and basketball. Then you also had the Phoenix Giants at that time. And I didn't hook up with the Phoenix Giants at that time, but I was broadcasting the other sports. I became very good friends with Al McCoy, the longtime voice, the Hall of Famer of the Phoenix Suns. I ended up, as you mentioned earlier.

When we came on the air, was a producer for a number of years, producer engineered. I ended up doing some fill-in play by play, went out and missed, which was very, very seldom. I think you only called about four or five games that now happened to miss, but became the Keller analyst. And then the first year, the Cardinals came in in 88. I broadcast four years of Cardinal football. And then it eventually led to being hired by the Diamondbacks and Jerry Colangelo in 1995. and moved on to become the voice of the Dianbacks in 1998. But, you know, I had a pretty good career going.

I was excited about it. I was doing play-by-play. I was doing color. I was involved with the professional teams, the college teams. And I would have been satisfied if Major League Baseball opportunity would not have come around. But, you know, I got a little bit lucky and had a little bit fortunate to do some other right people. And here I am now, as you said, I'm ready, hopefully. you're in 2020 to enter my 23rd season as a voice of the defects.

From your standpoint, Greg, obviously baseball has seemed to be kind of your first love with the Cardinals and everything there. What's so special about the game of baseball? Well, nobody can meet it's the history of baseball for number one. And I study the game, you know, back into the 50s, I lived a lot of the game, even as a fan back then. You know, 50s baseball, you had the air and, you had the Maze, you had Kofax, Gibson, you moved into the 60s, you moved into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, into the 2000s. So I've lived a lot of the game of baseball, and their history goes well back beyond that, of course,

to the turn of the century and even before we back into the 1800s. But along came a guy back in the late teens in the early 20s by the name of Babe Ruth, who kind of revolutionized the game. and ingredient as far as concerned. He's the one person that I think changed the sport and changed sports more than anybody in the history of sports being played. He became the biggest name.

He became bigger than the sport almost. And baseball's got a lot of history, a lot of a great history, in fact, that I'm able to delve back into and kind of talk about during the broadcast a lot of times. I think one of the many unique things about broadcasting is just that there's really no one way to do it, especially when it comes to play-by-play. Every broadcaster has their own unique style.

I'm curious for you, Greg, what does it look like to prepare for a broadcast on any given day? Well, it's changed a lot because now we have Wi-Fi access and, of course, the Internet. When I first came in, you know, you're relying on notes. I was spending much more time in the clubhouse and the dugouts, getting information, writing a lot of notes. And now I can have pretty much everything on my computer or even jot it down in a notebook, which I still use, before I even get to the ballpark. So then it's just kind of filled in the blanks. Maybe I need to talk to a player or a coach or, you know, Toro Lavello, now the manager of the Diamondbacks. But it's changed a lot, Jesse.

from when I first started doing the games in 1998, we'd get about four or five pages of game notes. And, you know, you would go down, talk to many players, many coaches. Usually the managers are both ball clubs, some of the players on the visiting team, and spend a lot more time down there. But, you know, players are a little bit different now. They want more of their own time. And that's where baseball is also different.

You play 162 games. You're playing basically every day. Football you play once a week, basketball and hockey. You're playing three or four times a week. Baseball, you're playing a lot of times, seven times a week. You know, without an option. A lot of times you go to a couple of weeks without an opt-days. So you've constantly got a reporter or reporters at your cubicle there where you're, you know,

you're trying to get showered and get out of the ballpark and your head on home. So it's changed that. I would say the Internet has helped to everybody, and you can look up anything these days, too. You know, with baseball reference and baseball amannac and all the different websites, you got those handy and at your fingertips, so you can scroll right to those during the course of a ballgame

to help you out. What's your favorite road city to visit? Oh, boy. I still enjoy going to St. Louis, although St. Louis has changed a lot over the years, but I love their new ballpark. Chicago is great, you know, with Wrigley Field. and spent a lot of time in Illinois.

I spent a lot of time going to ball games at Wrigley Field in Kineski Park when I was a kid. Same way with Milwaukee. I lived briefly in Milwaukee out of high school. I went to a broadcast school in Milwaukee. But we had Old County Stadium there. And, you know, it's kind of a smaller big city. Pittsburgh, I enjoy their ballpark immensely. I think it's one of the, it's probably my favorite ballpark to go to, not counting Chase Field.

but just the view you have, the only problem with Pittsburgh, it's so high. But Chicago, you know, I like going to New York for a few days. I enjoy going to Boston. I don't even mind going to Miami, to be honest with you. I enjoy going to their new ballpark now. It's just kind of fun. Every city is kind of unique in its own way,

and I enjoy them. I will say this is Joe, though, Jesse. I think the National League West has got the best travel and the best cities. You go to Los Angeles, you go to San Francisco, San Diego, Colorado, and Phoenix. and he really can't beat to visiting those cities at any time of the baseball season. My last question, Greg, you mentioned it just briefly earlier.

At one point, your goal was to potentially play the game of baseball yourself when eventually you decided maybe that wasn't realistic. You went to the broadcasting side, as many of us do, including myself. But I would love to hear, and I think our audience would love to hear, what was Greg Schulte as a baseball player? What was that like? How far were you able to go? Well, I played through high school and, you know, played Little League.

And I remember I was seven years old. They had Little League, which was minor leagues. You played seven to ten. And then you got to the major leagues, which was 10 to 12. Then you went into Babe Ruth, I think, was Stan Musil. But at seven years old, but I was called up to the major league. So I was playing with, you know, 10, 11 and 12-year-olds as a seven-year-old. It kind of got picked on a little bit.

But I believe I went 0 for 8 that year. next year as an eight-year-old, I was up in what we call the, you know, the major league. He had minor, you had the little league, and then he had the major leagues. So I was in that next age bracket at a very young age playing with kids older than me. And I held my own. I had one game, in fact, when I think it was 10, 10 or 11, where I had a couple home runs of Grand Slam and a three-run homer. Wow.

Played first base, played third base, did a little catch and did a little pitching. But, you know, it's, I think it's what makes us. I'll appreciate the major league athlete. There are only so many jobs available, and you have to be really good. One of the elite players in all of the country to get to the major leagues. Once you get to the major leagues, it's hard to stick. So when you see a Mike Trout player, you know, just in him as an example on the major league level, how good this guy is.

He's a really talented athlete to be able to do what he can do. Greg, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. Jesse, any time you want, I'll be more than happy to stop in. and does shout and does say hi to you.