Rahimi, Harris & Grote Show - Adam Amin reflects on his wild World Baseball Classic/Bulls trip: 8 games, 7 cities

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Leila Rahimi and Marshall Harris were joined by Fox Sports and Chicago Sports Network play-by-play announcer Adam Amin to discuss his recent hectic schedule that has involved calling the World Baseball Classic and Bulls games.

As we get set here in Pool B for the second game, Adam Amin, a couple of World Series champions in A.J. Prasinski and Adam Wainwright. Ken Rosenthal is with us as well. Judge Swings launches it deep left field. Heading towards the left. The captain sets the tone in Houston. It's 2-0. United States. It feels like most nights, he's got a quiet 20. Bexton.

He does not have a quiet night. That's a 25-point night working on 6 of 8 from downtown. Hit me with it, Stace. We haven't heard it in a long time. I've almost forgot. I haven't said it in a month. Drive home safely. She's got a little beep, beep.

Where to remind me. It's been a while since I've been ever saying. Oh, I feel so good. I'm back on Elizabeth. Oh, Lord. You lost you for a bit there, pal. You lost you for a bit there. I totally forgot about that, man.

My bad. For Stacy, Casey, our great crew, I'm Adam. With Rahimi Harrison Grody on 1043, the score. It is always a great day when we get to talk to Adam Amina on our hotline. He joins us from where? Let's start with that. Adam of being the Bulls announcer, Major League Baseball on Fox,

World Baseball Classic on Fox, NFL as well. Adam, thanks for joining us. Are you on the West Coast? Where are you? We're West Coast in it. We've got Bulls and Warriors tonight. I wasn't sure if you were on the call or not

because let's go through the interactive map that you posed on your Instagram. 10 days, 8 games, 7 cities, 4 time zones, and two sports. Even for you, that's pretty extreme. You know what, though? I've always said it's like,

there's no, I ask for no pity. We're not, we're not like making a deal out of this because it's like, oh, wo is us. We have to travel around the world. It's just fun. It's a fun thing to be able to do. It's a fun thing to go from city to city and cover these cool events and cover things I've never covered before.

I've never done a WBC until this past weekend. And we'll finish. off the rest of this Bulls, West Coast road trip this week. They're playing in San Francisco tonight. They'll play in Los Angeles on Thursday and Friday. I'm taking a red-eye flight on Friday night from L.A. to Miami, so going cross-country. And we're going to see Team Japan play in the quarter of finals against either the Dominican Republic or Venezuela in Miami for a spot in the semifinals. That's going to be an electric atmosphere. In Miami, the two Latin American countries have incredible

fan bases, the Dominicans and the Venezuelans, their fan bases are electric. The Japanese fans, they travel well. I know they were in the Tokyo Dome for the WBC, but there's going to be a lot of Japanese fans there in Miami too next week or at the end of the week. So,

I just think it's such a cool event and to get to bounce around and hop in and call a few of these games. It's really cool. The atmosphere watching in Houston last night, I was sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco watching it. And it was probably

more favored towards Mexico, understandable in Houston, but it was such a great atmosphere to watch on TV and this event is, I knew there was a lot of buzz going into this particular WBC. I was excited to call it. I didn't realize how much of a jolt that

you feel while calling some of these games. Adam, Pop Quiz, one, what day of the week is it? Two, what is your hotel room number? Do you know the answer to these two questions? It's Tuesday, 6, 12. I had to think about it because there have been a bunch of those. There have been a bunch of those this week.

I legitimately had to make sure I didn't screw it up. I've definitely done that. We have all been there. I thought I was staying in the room number for the previous stop. Yeah. Yeah. The day of the week thing just starts to lose sight, but you do have a very specific program that you're on. The other question I wanted to ask is, what is your favorite of the cities that you are visiting in this time away from Chicago?

go. I mean, I always love going to Los Angeles, but that's usually just because there's friends out there. There's a lot of people out there that they usually get to run into. I mean, they're all great. I'm in San Francisco. I know a lot of people probably made their way out here for the Super Bowl, and I didn't realize a lot of people were making the way out here for the very first time. I had never, a lot of folks I talked to that were going out here for the Super Bowl. I never been here before and raved about it afterwards, and I always loved coming out here, but it's always nice to get a trip to Los Angeles. and feel like you get to be

kind of walking around California a little bit proper. I think that'll be fun this weekend. We are talking to Adam Amin, broadcaster for the Bulls for World Baseball Classic on Fox, NFL. Also, of course, NBA with the Bulls tonight on CHSN is where

you can catch that game. And Adam, I did want to ask about the World Baseball Classic. You mentioned of course your work with baseball and Fox and you do a great job there, but I feel like there's no atmosphere quite like it. And when you get to experience it for yourself in person, how do you describe the crowd and what they bring and just the pride that the players have playing

in it as well? I mean, being around Mark DeRosa, the manager this past weekend, talking with Tarek Scouble, which has been one of the interesting, yeah, if you want to call it a controversy, I guess you can. But one of the interesting discussions around Scoobal has taken place over the course of the week and, you know, how much she was impacted by going to the world, World Baseball Classic and standing in line up the first base line in front of the dugout and hearing the National Anthem and, you know, lined up with a bunch of other guys with the same jersey and, you know, kind of the superstar power of Team USA and kind of preparing for these games, it hits you differently. And I'm not, you know, I'm not one to be jingoistic

about this and like, you know, overly patriotic. It's, I find it fascinating. I find it, I appreciate it more than anything else because all these players that take time away from their spring training run up to join this team. I look around at other countries and other players from other countries and seeing, you know, guys who have, you know, British backgrounds and, you know, their parents were born in the UK, like Harry Ford is the catcher for the nationals. to see players in Brazil who are construction workers in their off time and have like regular jobs

and still play for the Brazilian national team, a baseball team that doesn't have a tremendous history. It's only been to the WBC a couple of times, but they have this appreciation for wanting to represent their country. There's a great story about an electrician for Chequio who struck out Shohei Otani, and the Japanese fans gave him a standing ovation. they brought him out to the field at the Tokyo Dome and the Japanese fans gave him a standing ovation. This guy's going to go back to Chekky and go back to his job as an electrician. These are, you know, I know some of these stories can sound like their tongue in cheek, but these are real opportunities for a lot of people around the world,

not just the superstars in Major League Baseball that we've come to know representing their countries. Like, it does mean a lot to them. And I don't like necessarily making this about more than it is. but I do think there is a certain pride that a lot of people take in the identity that comes with playing for your country. I think that's more what it's about. I don't necessarily like connecting it to other peripheral things, but I do think the pride and country and the kind of unification of team to represent a country with an identity, I think is really, really cool.

You get that a lot from the non-American players and their fan bases especially, but it was interesting. I'm sure you've seen or heard Bryce Harper's comments about not having, having the Olympics be a baseball thing in 2028, even though the games are in Los Angeles. Did you take that as more of a dig at the world stage as far as the World Baseball Classic was, or is this just a guy wishing he could win Olympic gold? No, I took it as a guy who wants to – Harper, and I think he knows that the Olympics are still the Olympics. You know, the impact that we felt during those two weeks in Milan for the Winter Olympics,

and you know how much I've always felt that I don't know if you guys do too, but I was thought that the summer games had a little bit more accessibility for a lot of fans around the world, just because they're probably a little bit more familiar with the sports, and they're more comfortable with them. And I think the U.S., you know, you look at the Olympics, and it's not, the competition is greater here in the WBC. You know, it's like the World Cup in soccer relative to playing for the Olympic gold in soccer.

I still feel like the World Cup has greater buzz. it has greater participation. There's different meaning to it. But, you know, there's a lot of reasons for it. And I'm sure you can make arguments for and against one or the other because of, you know, whether it's government involvement or whether it's, you know, country pride, whatever. There's a million different things that you could dissect to try to talk about why one means more than the other. A little bit more in baseball.

There's more countries participating. There's 20, 20 USA to allow major league players to participate like they do with the Olympic hockey. I think that also had a lot of impact on these guys because they saw what happened with both the men and the women winning gold in hockey, and especially the men for the first time in, you know, a half a century. Elements, I think, have a lot to do with why some of these guys and Harper included, Scoobles said the same thing.

They want included with Major League players at the Olympics in a couple of years. And I understood what you were saying. It wasn't a knock on the WBC. It was a, hey, we should also be part of the Olympics, too. We're talking to Adam Amin, broadcasting the world baseball classic, NFL and Major League Baseball and Fox, and also the Bulls. And you are in town for the Warriors games. And I think you and Stacey have done a fantastic job on Bulls basketball all year. And that said, just knowing this iteration of the team, what do you want to see you get accomplished in this last stretch of games before they close out the season?

I mean, it's such a weird dynamic right now, right? because I do see the big picture. The big picture is you probably want to lose games. You probably want to increase your lottery odds as much as possible. I also think the Bulls have a little bit more cushion to win a few here and there because I don't know how much better your odds are going to be. You're not going to catch up to, you know, the worst five or six teams. You're probably not going to catch up to the worst six teams in the NBA in terms of

worst winning percentage to get the best lottery odds. I just don't think it's going to happen. The Bulls kind of committed to this, you know, methodology. And if you want to call it soft-anking, I think that's the first phrase that come to mind. I don't necessarily call it that on the air. I don't know if that's necessarily the right thing to do. It's not respectful to what the players are actually trying to do because the players

are not trying to lose games, and that has been made very apparent by watching these games when Colin Sexton's going off for 58 points in two games, and these guys are playing hard down the stretch against, you know, Phoenix to try to win a game. It's a weird dynamic, and I at the end of it all, you know, would love to be able to say, oh, the Bulls ended up with the best possible lottery odds that they can get. Maybe they have the, you know, seventh worst, eighth worst winning percentage in the NBA.

It improved their opportunity to get one of these superstar, potential superstar players coming out of the NBA draft. And that's all well and good. But it's not fun to sit there for 48 minutes of basketball, two and a half hours a night with all of you, and call it every time that they turn the ball over. Do you really want us to cheer, so to speak, like when they turn the ball over for the 14th time that night?

Like, that's not a fun way to go about this job. Like, when these guys are on the floor and they've made it fairly clear that Billy Donovan's trying to win games and the players on the floor are not trying to lose. because they're, as we've talked about ad nauseum, a lot of them are fighting for jobs. A lot of them are fighting for contracts. A lot of them are fighting to get experience. They're not going to try to lose games purposefully.

So it's an interesting dynamic to sit there. And by the way, it's easier, I would say, as a fan, because if you do want this team to lose games, all you have to do is not watch. You don't have to watch them try to lose or try to win. I've always made the joke, like the difference between the only difference between fans and us, you know, Stacy and I, is that you guys can shut it off if you want to. You guys don't have to watch. You guys can say, all right, well, let's hope they lose this one and turn off the game

and come back in the fourth quarter and look at the score or check on Twitter or check on your box score the next day. You guys can kind of turn it away and look back and hope that the results that you want are there. For us, it's a little bit different. I don't want to sit there and watch. At least I don't want to sit there and call a game as if I'm happy that the Bulls are going to lose a game.

I don't want to call it that way. It's just not fun. It's not in my nature. It's not in my blood to do that. But I think the best thing that we can do is try to contextualize what a loss does mean or what a win does mean. I always talk to our production crew. I mean, you know, we're in constant communication with our crew, and we always say, hey, let's have these graphics ready.

The winning percentage is this. That means the lottery odds are this. So if they do lose the game, which is not a fun thing to necessarily call from the tip to the final buzzer, at least we can contextualize what that means. All right, well, Bulls fall short in this one, but here's where they are in the lottery odds. Here's still what the opportunity is. Here's the silver lining that comes with guys struggling on the floor.

Maybe they lose a game. Here's a silver lining that comes with that. And again, my last thing would be they're going to win some games. You can't lose them all. I think these guys work too hard. The players work too hard. And whether you disagree or agree with that philosophy, I do not have any argument it against you for it. If you agree with it, fine. If you hate it, I can appreciate that.

But I think our job is to at least frame it the way that they want to frame it. If Billy Donovan had come out and said, we are trying to lose every game and they come out and win a game, then we can probably discuss that in a different fashion and say, well, it's not what the goal was here. But the fact is they've talked about wanting to win games. So my framework in calling it is to be excited when good things happen, quote, unquote, for the Bulls, and then we'll put it into context as best as we possibly can. No, Adam, it's a great answer, and I know we're up against a commercial break, but I do want to say this. I think there are times when we have to look at a team and there are times where we have to look at individuals.

And similar to the guys who got opportunities when the NBA went through a bad COVID pandemic and seeing that people actually got caught on to teams and they actually created opportunities for themselves, I think about them at times like this as well. How many people get to make money in opportunities like this or get to provide more of the things? families or get career satisfaction and that often comes to my mind too.