The Press Box - Al Michaels Talks About His Career as a Baseball Announcer

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by sportscaster Al Michaels in preparation for the start of the baseball season. They discuss Michael’s relationships with Curt Gowdy and Sal Bando (6:30), his first broadcasting job for the Hawaii Islanders (16:00), the art of calling baseball (37:40), and much more! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Al Michaels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. This is a special interview episode of the press box to get you ready for the start of baseball season tomorrow. David, when I say the name Al Michaels, what sport do you think of first?

Is this a trick question? Yeah. I mean, no. I think I think of football. I think of football. You think of football. And here's why you think of football. Because Al Michaels is called every big primetime NFL game since 1986.

1986. Wow. That is a run. But until 1986, you could argue that Michaels was primarily known as a baseball announcement. So radio announcer for the Cincinnati Res and the San Francisco Giants. As soon as he got to ABC, he wound up calling so many incredible series that we remember from childhood. The 85 World Series, Royals Cardinals, that went seven games and had a famous blown call. The 1987 World Series, which also went seven, the 86 American League Championship Series,

which contains the most perfect game Al Michaels ever called, period, in any sport. So before opening day, I wanted to talk to Michaels about the, art of calling baseball. David, we got to his early years calling games in Hawaii. The time Bobby Valentine almost got his head taken off, thanks in part to something Al said on the air. And of course, he's one time color analyst Howard CoSell. As the announcers like to say, it's a beautiful day for baseball here in Southern California. Here's Al Michaels. All right, Al, when you were a kid in Brooklyn, was announcing baseball in particular the first thing you wanted to do? Absolutely.

First thing I can remember in life is at the age of six or maybe seven. We lived in Flatbush and we could walk to Abbotsfield. And my father loved baseball. And anybody who lived in Brooklyn loved baseball. So on a Saturday afternoon, we walked over to Abbotsfield. I walked in. It's the first thing I can remember. And I was just enthralled.

Walked in. So the grass was so green. The outfield wall. walls full of colorful advertisements. As Ben Scully would say, year after year, down the line,

the Dodger uniforms, wedding cake, white. And we had seats in the second deck behind the broadcast booth. We could look down

into the broadcast booth and I can see the guys and asking the game. And seriously, Brian, the first thing I can remember in life is thinking, I want to be here every day.

I just want to come here every single day. And that's where it started. And that was the dream and the dream never subsided one iota. I was locked in on wanting to do this for the rest of my life. And part of it was to be able to go to every game and get in for free. Now, which announcer's voices are swimming around your head at this point? Is it Scullies? Is it somebody else's? Red Barber was the lead announcer, of course, the iconic Red Barber. They had another announcer with the name of Connie Desmond, who they picked up from Toledo. He was in the minor leagues with the mud hens. In those years, I think they were called the mudhens. Anyway, it was Toledo. And then Vinny came

along as like a 21 or 22 year old as the number three guy. So when I am six or seven, I'm listening to Vince Scully. And of course, I was able to listen to Vin Scully. And of course, I was able to listen to all the way up until, what, three or four years ago, when he called it a day after 67 years. So without a question, Vinny was a tremendous influence on my life and my career. And he stood out, why? I just loved the way he did the games. Number one, he was the announcer for my team.

I was a Dodger fan. But I was one of those kids. I also liked the Yankees. There were three teams in town. He had the Giants there as well. only 16 teams in the majors, three of them were in New York. And it's not that I dislike the other teams,

but the Dodgers were my team. And Vinny just had a way of broadcasting the games. And then probably as the years went on, and ironically, we moved from New York to Los Angeles the same year that Dodgers did. And that's when Vinny really ascended. And Vinny became a megastar in Los Angeles. And he was the number one guy.

I just, I learned so much baseball from Vinny. Vinny would have been my first mentor because I wanted to sound like him. I wanted to do games like him. And I learned a ton of baseball from him. You moved to L.A., as you say, you go to Arizona State for college. Do you just walk into the radio station, which I believe is or was KAS in and say, I want to call baseball games when you get there? No, what happened was my father knew what I wanted to do.

So we had to pick a school that had a campus radio station. Now, every school has a campus radio station, TV station, now. But years ago, when I was going to college, very few. And very few, even fewer, had a radio station where a student would have an opportunity to broadcast sports. So we go down there and we meet the people at Arizona State. Interesting, the head of the department, a man named Bob Ellis, and I'm going to through the internet the other day. And I saw that Bob Ellis died at the age of 93 within the

past few days. We met with him and he said, if you come to school here, we have a great radio and television program, you know, minor in journalism. And you might have the opportunity at some point to broadcast games. So I go down to school. I show up in September of 1962. I'm registering for classes. I don't know what the future holds in terms of broadcasting, but I have to register for the classes and going to take. And I'm standing in a registration line. And I, it's a long line. And I have a long conversation with a guy standing in front of me. And he is there on a baseball scholarship. And I tell him, you know, wow, I said, hopefully I have a chance to broadcast some of your games, because I want to get into broadcasting. That's what I want to do for a

of it. And we have this conversation and of course, as fate would have it, I wind up doing baseball like as a freshman and do it for four years in football and basketball as well. And he goes on to have a good enough career that he is drafted by the Kansas City Athletics. So fast forward from 1962 to 1972. And I know what we're jumping around here, but in 1972, I'm the announced it for the Cincinnati Reds, 10 years after that meeting in the registration line. We get to the World Series. In those years, if you were the lead announcer for your team, you got to go on NBC television, the home games, radio for the road games, and work with Kurt Gowdy and Tony Kubach. We play the Oakland A's. I walk into the clubhouse the day before

the first game, Friday, when the A's got to town to work out. And I look at this guy and the clubhouse and we look at each other, we go, this is impossible with Sal Bando. So Bando and I had this conversation in the registration line. And 10 years later, we're like two kids going, you have to be crazy. This is impossible. It's a wonderful thing to think back upon. Yeah. Your greatest dream and his greatest dreams have both come true at the same time.

Unreal. And we still, you know, when we're in Arizona doing a football game, Sal's retired. and we've had some wonderful dinners and, you know, just reminiscing about those times. But, you know, at Arizona State, I was able to do baseball. We had 50 games a year. And the manager or the coach was Bobby Winkles who would go on to manage four different teams as well in the major leagues. Rick Monday was there. And then so Sal was in my class.

Monday was a year behind. And then when I was a junior, a young freshman came along. who has played football and baseball, but the name of Reggie Jackson. So I went all the way back to these guys. And I had a chance to probably announce close to 200 baseball games, probably 30 to 40 football games, and somewhere around 60 basketball games,

and track meets and every other thing that moved at Arizona State during those years. These are your reps for announcing. Oh, major, major. And you're learning like, incremental basic things like when the ball goes off the bat that way my voice is going to go hear that kind of stuff at that point in your life um at that point in my life i'm first of all you understand one thing about that radio station just to go back to k a s and sure the the the the signal i think got to the boiler room at the women's storm that was about it if you were

If you were maybe within a two and a half block radius, it was what they called, I think, carrier current. But it didn't matter. It was going somewhere. And all I know is that there was a microphone and football. I had a spotter. They also had a color man. And it was just fantastic. As you say, you get the reps.

And so for the time I got out of college, I mean, I had done a couple of hundred sports events. One more thing about Kurt Gowdy, who you just mentioned. Young announcers do this thing where they give their tapes to establish announcers and get some feedback. You did this in college with Gowdy. Now, if I had given a piece of sports writing to Dan Jenkins when I'm in college or Frank DeFord, I would have fainted. What was it like to sit there and listen to Gowdy, listen to your tape?

Well, it was fantastic. My father had known him a little bit, mentioned something about my sons in Arizona State. you might have you know gave you a call and Kurt said fine and you know I'm nervous as a cat but I called him in the hotel and he's doing the Red Sox in those years and the Red Sox are training in Scottsdale so it's March of 64 I think and I called him oh yeah you know come on by and He had a little office underneath Scottsdale Stadium and I brought my tape recorded with me and I played it for him and it was fantastic and he gave me some some great advice and it was it was thrilling I mean here's the guy he said of all the guys that I

really love I mean he got Scully you had Kurt Gowdy and Jim McKay and then I got to work with all of them you know in particular with McKay and and with Gowdy was Benny I've known her for you know for four decades now we've become you know great friends but with Kurt it was just amazing you know sitting there and just soaking this all in and it's pretty much like that you know like that you know like the Bando story, in the same World Series room, you know,

I'm announcing and Sal's playing. My partner is Kurt Gowdy. I'm doing the games with Gowdy and Tony Kubach. I mean, the whole thing was like so bizarre and so dreamlike. And I look back and I go, man alive, did I wind up in the right place

or the right time all the time? You once told Sports Illustrated, this was back in the 80s, that you had three early goals as a broadcaster. You wanted to be a number one announcer for a major league baseball team by the time you're 25 years old. Number two, call the World Series on television by age 30,

and also by age 30 makes six figures. And this isn't six figures now. This is 1960s, six figures, when it really meant something. What age did you articulate those goals? You know, as a Brooklyn kid, Brooklyn kids are sort of aggressive and dream big and think you can do a whole bunch of stuff.

I don't know that I articulated them outwardly, but I know, that's what I felt. And there was a part of me, you know, when you're young and especially in those years, you begin to think, you know, at 30, you're a dinosaur. It means when you're, you know, when you're 16 or 17 years old, 30 is a long way off, but at that point you're retired. You're finished. Nobody cares about it anymore.

So I kind of set these goals, these dreams. And, you know, Brian, the crazy thing is, and I tell, you know, I know, I, you know, I talked to a lot of kids who want to get into the business and try to, you know, give them as much advice as I can. And I said, look, dream big. Dream big. There's no downside to dreaming big. Why do you just think about all. I only want to get here.

Think about going as far as you possibly can. So it's easy for me to say, and it's easy that it all worked out. But frankly, there's a naivete when you're 17 years old. I mean, I'm naive enough at that age to think, all this stuff can happen. Why not? I'm going to work like crazy. I'm going to get as much experience as I can. Maybe I'll get the breaks, but you need the brakes. And boy, did I get the breaks. So I did the work. I did the preparation. I could see. I had a vision of where I wanted to go. But then I had to wind up in the right place at the right time. And I did. You also told, S.I, I lived in fear of never accomplishing those

things. So put me in your head in your 20s. How did that fear manifest itself? Well, I was afraid, I think once I got rolling in my career and I got the job in Hawaii starting, you know, my professional announcing career with the Islanders in the Pacific Coast. I felt pretty confident that I was going to advance and get there. I think that fear probably came before I got that first job, where I thought, you know, the first job is always the hardest. That's the hardest. And so when I look back at my career, there's a man I have to thank profusely. He's gone now.

He died about two or three years ago. His name was Jack Quinn. And Jack Quinn was the general manager of the Hawaii team, and he hired me. And I always considered him my trampoline. and his daughter, Kay, who I knew as a baby, has been one of the top anchors on a television station in St. Louis for years. Everybody in St. Louis knows Kay Quinn. And I know when her dad died, I called her and we had a good cry because, you know, she loved her dad. And I loved her dad too because he was just such a wonderful man.

And, you know, I talked to Kay from time to time. And she says, I'm so proud of you. I said, Kay, you have to understand. I don't know that any of this happens without your father. I mean, he gave me, he was the springboard, the trampoline, gave me the opportunity. I don't know. Maybe somebody else would have. Maybe not.

And maybe I think that was my fear, Brian, more than anything else that I would not have a Jack Quinn come along and say, go. A lot of young play-by-play announcers wind up in the Appalachian League, the Texas League. You are in Hawaii, the Hawaii Islanders of the PCL. What was it like to call baseball games in Hawaii? Well, I mean, it was great in the sense that it was Hawaii and it wasn't some other place in the Appalachian League. On the other hand, you think, you know, you're so far removed that nobody will hear about you or hear you, but that turned out to be not true at all. It's a lot more people come through Honolulu than came through Billings, Montana in those years. So it was fantastic.

We're living in Hawaii. We somehow wind up getting a really small apartment, but it's on the 11th floor at the foot of Diamond Head, with a 260 degree view. We've got the ocean here in Waikiki and the Diamond Head's over here. I would go downstairs in the morning, and there was a ladder that led into the Pacific and go swimming there or go in the pool.

And we're living the dream. This is like, whoa. This is quite the start. Meanwhile, I'm doing everything. I'm doing minor league baseball, the Islanders. I get over there and Jack Quinn was the man within two weeks. I am now doing University of Hawaii football and basketball, all of the high school football and basketball,

wind up on the ABC affiliate for a couple of years. Eventually, we'd go to the CBS affiliate by last year there. So if it moved, I broadcast it. And then I was on television at least twice a day. So it was a wonderful life. And you know, my wife and I had just gotten married. Her first child was born there. And life was so good in Hawaii.

And we loved it so much that when I got offered the Cincinnati Reds job, I had to hesitate a little bit. Now, here I'm going to the major leagues. I'm going to the big red machine. I'm going to Johnny Bench and Pete Rose. And the day they offered me the job when I'm back in Cincinnati, I'm going, I really want this or do I really want to stay in Hawaii? And my wife and I had a long

conversation on the phone that night. I got to take it. And Jack Quinn was also involved in that decision. Got to take it. But believe me, when, you know, I was in Cincinnati on a day when I'm walking back to the hotel after being offered the job. And it's like 32 degrees. And the only colors in Cincinnati that day were gray and brown. And I'm looking at a poster as I'm waiting to cross the street in the posters of Diamondhead. And I can see my apartment and I'm going, now wait a minute, what's going on here? But off the way. This is my backyard. I can see my apartment is in the, it's in the travel agency window. And I'm going to, and meanwhile, you know, it's like 515 on a November afternoon. It's

sleeting and it's cold and sun's going down. I'm going, oh boy. And then that night's so funny because they were going to announce it the next day. And Joe Nuxel was going to be my partner, as it turned up in 1971. And of course, I couldn't sleep. And I kept getting up in the, you know, up from bed and I'd look outside and it looked like, I don't know what it looked like, but it didn't look like Hawaii. And I thought to myself, you know what, I can't back out of this now. I'll just go through the press conference, get on a plane, and never come back.

But of course, by the time I got to Hawaii, it was time to come back. Two more before we leave the Hawaiian Beach for Cincinnati. you did not always travel to the mainland with the islanders. And sometimes you stayed back and did what in those days were called recreations. For people who don't know what that is, will you tell us how you recreated a baseball game? Well, guys have done it through the years and they were kind of almost doing it in real time. It was like a ticker tape or a teletype. So when they did it like in the 50s and early 60s, that's how they did it.

But we, because of the time difference in Hawaii, wouldn't start the games until around 6.30 in Hawaii. And so that would be normally 8.30 on the mainland on the Pacific Coast anyway. And so we were always an hour and a half to two hours behind the game. And what we had is a fellow who would call the press box, like in Spokane or Portland, wherever the islanders are playing, and he'd get the report. So he would tell us what had happened. And then we would recreate it. Now, one great benefit of that was that if the game was three hours and 20 minutes, we could take it down to, you know, we could take it down to like 240, 230. And sometimes, you know, if there was a big rain delay or whatever, we'd go right through it.

So we could we could condense a game into sometimes we did a three hour game at about an hour and 40. And that's how we, that's how we were able to do those games. but I did most of the road games in that fashion, but two of the three years I was there, we were in the pennant race all the way to the end. So toward the end of the season, I would go on the road. We did games out of Phoenix and Tucson and Spokane and other cities.

In a recreated game, you're two hours behind the game, but you are calling it as if it's happening in real time right in front of it. Correct, a little bit of a crowd noise thing behind us. I know that I heard about guys who would use like pencils I hit like the little pieces of wood. We didn't do any of that stuff. We just had some crowd noise and we called the game. You know, but if it got to the point where the islanders were getting, you know,

blown out 11 to 3 or something, we weren't giving you any 12 pitch at batch. I mean, you know, it was swung on and popped up on pitch number one. So that was the good thing. We were able to truncate any kinds of bad losses. There's a story you've told about Bobby Valentine, later Mets and Rangers manager, then a player, and he almost won the batting title in the Pacific Coast League and you got involved in this as an announcer. What happened with that? He did win the batting title.

What happened was we had a player with the name of Winston Yannis, L-L-E-N-A-S, had a brief Major League career with the Angels. And so Yannis was our best player and Valentine was playing with Spokane, our big rival. So at the end of the 1970 season, Spokane was going to win their division and the islanders were going to win their division. We were going to meet them in the playoffs. So Valentine and Janus went down to the last day of the season pretty much tied for the batting title, for the lead. So we get word. We're doing the recreation of this game.

And we heard that Valentine had had a couple of infield hits. and it sounded like they were very dubious, and it sounded like they should have been errors. So I, of course, make a big deal of this as Valentine edges out Janus for the title by saying, so I mean, local, yokel, official scoring and Spokaneus cost once a genus, I'm making a deal of this, you know, and I'm a brash young kid and I'm 24 years old and what the hell.

So now what happens? We play them in the playoffs. and this is the Spokane team managed by Tommy LaSorda, Bobby Valentine, Bill Buckner, Steve Garby, Bill Russell, Davey Lopes. All these guys are with that team. These are Joe Ferguson. These are the Dodgers of the 70s, as it turns out. So we're playing them, and Hawaii was so excited.

And originally it was going to be a best of five series, but because our attendance was so fantastic, the league decided to make it best. of seven. So the first two games were in Spokane. We wind up televising the games back to Hawaii. The equipment breaks down. We have two cameras by the end of the game. It was just the most amateurish thing ever. And not only that, but the Islanders get killed in both games. Now in game three, we come back to Hawaii, place is excited to sell, but Spokane blows us out again. So now it's three games to nothing. And all of a sudden, the bloom is off the rose. And

And now game four stars and Bobby Valentine leads off. And he was getting, they were blowing the crap out of him in good measure because of what I had done, making it seem as if it was a farcical batting title, but he had won. So our pitcher is a guy named Greg Washburn. And of course, Valentine comes up and there's 20,000 people in the whole state of the whole thing. And he stands in and Washburn throws a fastball into his cheek. And I mean, to this day, I hear the sound. It's like you're hearing bones break in my ear.

And Bobby is now splayed out in the batters box. And all of a sudden it becomes very quiet. And they have to take him out to deepest rock or center field with the clubhouses. And obviously he winds up going to the hospital. And he had a wire his jaw and he had to stay there for 10 days. So it was the one time I had such a pit in my stomach to think, you know what? I don't want to say I created this,

but I helped build a scenario here where I don't know what, you know, I'm not saying a washburn threw at him because of anything that I did, but boy, it was just, it was a bad scene.

And I had embellished it. I didn't have, you know, I didn't see the plays in Spokane where he was granted hits instead of a guy being charged with an error. But I just felt that I was complicitous to a certain degree in this thing.

And that was a really instructive moment for me going make sure you got everything right. Yeah, it's like I almost killed Bobby Valentine. I mean, that's... Yeah, no kidding. And, you know, Bobby and I, when I wrote a book and I had to call Bobby just to get refreshed on this. And I mean, some of the most amazing stories come out of what you didn't know at that time. And so, you know, Bobby and I are recounting this. And Bobby said, you know, the one thing I remember is he said,

Remember they used to have that fantastic soup in Hawaii called Siamen. It was like chicken noodle soup with pork and piqua and beef. And it was fantastic, a Hawaiian delicacy. And they used to sell it in the stadium. And Valentine said he used to love that soup. So Bobby said when he's, he's almost unconscious and he's being taken out off the field. And they go by a concession stand on the way to the clubhouse. And his thought was, I won't be able to have any of this for a few days.

Wow. That's great. The last thing you think, you know, I'm going to have to give up the soup. I know. You mentioned 1970, you get hired by the Cincinnati Reds from Hawaii. You're 25 years old. So check number one on the Al's career goals list there. Now, when people get hired by a team, they fall somewhere on the spectrum from total homer to pretty,

calling the game pretty much down the middle like a network guy. where did you land on that? What was your thinking about that? I wanted to pattern myself after the way Ben Scullough did games. Now, in Cincinnati, the announcers who preceded me clearly wanted the Reds to win

and I wanted the Reds to win. But they were definitely cheerleading for the Reds. A prime example would be, of course, Harry Carrey all of those years. That was expected of him in St. Louis in Chicago and where he did the games. That was Harry Carey.

That's what made him what he was. Vinnie, who I've grown up listening to, was always pretty much down the middle. You know, he was rooting for the Dodgers. Obviously, he was happy when the Dodgers won. But he was giving as much credit to the other team as he was to the Dodgers. And he was when necessary critical of the Dodgers. So that's, I patterned myself after him.

And it worked. I wasn't told to have any sort of a style when I went to Cincinnati, but they pretty much knew what my style was because I got hired on the basis of what they'd heard from the Hawaii tapes and what they heard about people talking about me as the Islanders announcer. And that's the way I did it in Hawaii. And that's the way I did it in Cincinnati. And it was met, I think, favorably. And I didn't really get a lot of feedback on people saying, wow, you need a root harder for the Reds.

No, they knew I wanted the Reds to win. but I was going to give you the game down the middle. You'll call it down the middle, but the Red's winning, it's a lot better for your career. That gets you more attention, gets your more ears, more everything, right? Well, especially you win the playoffs. You beat Pittsburgh in the best of five in 1972, and all that's doing is putting me into the World Series. Oh, yeah. I think I was a little bit more excited than if the Pirates didn't won the game three to two, for sure.

So you mentioned this, too. NBC's idea was that a local announcer paired with Kurt Gowdy and Tony Kuback would just give them some local knowledge that they might not have at the World Series? I think that was part of it. And also it was kind of a reward for, in those years it was so different. And I think they didn't want the local announcer to come in and supplement. So, you know, you could say, well, they're going to bring the guy in and maybe he'll just do a little bit of analysis or color. But you shared the play-by-play with Kurt. So in the opening game in 1972 against Oakland, he does the first four and a half.

And he does the first four and a half and I do the last four and a half. Then I do the first four and a half on the Sunday game. And we went to Oakland and I was on radio. And then Monti Moore was the A's announcer. And he went to television. And we'd go back to six and seven. I'm back on television with courage. So you did half the game.

And Tony Kuback did all of the analysis. We should note you were 27 when you call this World Series. So there's number two on the Michael's career goal. Right. Did you feel ready to call a World Series at age 27? I did because I had seen every World Series up until then. I had missed one minute of a World Series game. I'd seen them. I dreamed about it. I said, boy, if I can never get there.

I had confidence in my style. I knew that I knew the Reds inside out. I knew I could be a greatly beneficial in that regard. And, you know, I was going to obviously do my homework with the A's and follow that team and know what I was talking about to the degree that I would be acceptable on national television. But yes, I was confident, but I was off the charts nervous because when we come on the air, game one, 1972, beautiful Saturday afternoon, Riverfront Stadium, we're coming on the air. and my heart is beating about a thousand beats a minute. And I'm sitting next to Kurt Gowdy, and he opens up and there's a single of him,

and the camera widens out, and here I am. And I swear, Brian, the only thought that came into my mouth or brain was, please God, when I opened my mouth, let air come out. That was the only time I just, you know, and then, you know, I didn't know. But once I got going, then I felt great. You know, I was, I was rolling.

But boy, you know, it was like a horse. You're ready to come out of the gate and you don't want to stumble. You don't want to throw the jockey. You know, you want to get a clean break. And once you get going, you're in the race. They showed this on MLB Network when they did a piece about your announcing the other day. You're both wearing red blazers, which is amazing. Was that an NBC thing at the time?

That was an NBC thing, as I recall. Yeah. Yeah. And they're doing that classic shot out of the booth. so we see the stadium behind you. Right. There's Gowdy looking exactly like Kirk Gowdy, and there's Al Michaels looking incredibly young.

Yep. We were sort of half of an Afro. I think I was getting my hair straight, and I had a natural curls, and I think I had it straight. I can't remember. It was complete nonsense. The whole thing was crazy.

At the 72 World Series, how close are you to being the kind of baseball announcer you wanted to ultimately be? I was, I was happy with the job I did. I knew that it was, I was so nervous going in, and then I was able to do it so that the following year, I know that it's 73, when I was sure I'd be back there

because we won the division and then were upset by the Mets in the playoffs, otherwise I'd do it again. And that was unbelievably disappointing because now I was really ready to go back and do the World Series. Now, you know, wow, you're full of confidence. and knowledge and the rest and I know what it's like. So I always have felt that, you know, I was, I've evolved. I've evolved in every sport.

I think I can't say, you know, I can go back in any of the sports that I've done to go back a number of years ago. Boy, is that the, are you the complete guy at that point? No, I've always, I mean, to this day, I've tried even with football to just get, a little better, maybe look at things a little differently, change the template a little bit, nothing severe. But I mean, there's always ways to get a little bit better. And I'm always trying to do that. 1974, you go from the Reds to the San Francisco Giants. This is the six-figure part of the career goal thing accomplished, right? And it's 76 figures. So this is real money. This is not, you know,

this is good money. That's good, Mike. Are you then getting a little antsy to become a full-time network guy? I'm thinking about it, for sure. When I went to San Francisco, it wasn't with that necessarily in mind except for the fact that the difference was the Giants. I was actually working for the radio station that had the rights. They were going to allow me to take some Sundays off in the fall and do regional NFL football. for NBC. And they were going to allow me to do other things on the side that the Reds

weren't going to allow me to do. So there was a thought of, yeah, you know what, I'm going to be able to do certain things that may lead to a network gig. But at that point, the only network gig I was thinking about would be baseball. And Kurt was, you know, a relatively young man. I wasn't going to move into that role. So it wasn't a matter of going out there and going, okay, I'm going to give this two or three years and away I go. But as it turned out, I was there three years. And the third year is when ABC started Monday Night Baseball and auditioned me and brought me in to do the B game.

So now I am on the network and I am doing the Giants that one year. And I'm traveling around the country like a lunatic. And that led to the full-time offer from ABC in 1977. And if people don't remember, Monday Night Baseball is effectively Rune Arledge who runs ABCC sports, his effort to run. recreate Monday night football as an event as a baseball game with a similar kind of different style of announcing? Yes, there was no question. That was his goal, but it wasn't going to work because football was so much more special than an ordinary baseball game in those years.

And the reason I was able to get my foot in that door was because you had two teams on Monday night baseball and a team and a B team just in case the A game was rained out. They always had to have a backup game. So what they did is they created a template where the A team they hired Bob Prince, who had been the Pittsburgh Pirates announcer. They hired Bob Euker to be the Don Meredith type. What Meredith was on football, Yucca was going to be on baseball. And then Warner Wolf, Warner Wolf, who had been,

Rune Orleans had been told by Ben Bradley, who was the fabled editor of the Washington Post. This guy is the next Howard CoSell. Now, Ben Bradley may have been a great journalist, but in terms of recognizing talent on television, no. Ben was far short of that. But Rune bought into that. He brought Warner in there. Now, if they needed a B game, so the B game was myself and then two very recently retired, players. Norm Cash, who had just retired from Detroit, and Bob Gibson, who had just hung

him up with the St. Louis Cardinals. So we were the B team. Before the season's done, they fire Bob Prince from the A team because Bob wanted to do it his way and not the networks way. And it was a whole mishmosh toward the end of the year. And then the following years, when I signed with them full time, but I'm still on the B game, which was a source of a great consternation for me and they put Keith Jackson on the A game. But I still worked a lot of A games through those years before I went full

time to the A game in 1981 and a lot of that time was spent with one Howard Cochelle. Oh, do I want to ask you about him in just a second? But let me ask you first about a little bit about the art of calling baseball. Is baseball harder or easier to call than football, do you think? Very

different. Football is a different animal in the sense that especially football on television, because there's a first four, five, six seconds of action. And then there's inaction, but the inaction is covered up by replay, which is mainly the province of the analyst. So it's a different dynamic. It's a rhythm in football that's indigenous to that sport. Because every other sport, basketball and hockey are relatively continuous, certainly hockey.

is football is a burst in action covered by refa. Baseball is leisurely. It's, you, and it's best when it's dramatic, it's fantastic. I mean, some of the greatest baseball games that I've ever seen. I mean, I'm just exhilarated. And your brain is in it. You're calling it one way, as opposed to August 5th and Candlestick Park, the Giants against the Padres and each team is 24 games at. You call that a different way. So, and I remember especially when you're calling games that don't have a lot of meaning. I remember Ben Scully telling me one time. And Vinnie had a lot of great years of the Dodgers, but he did some terrible years too. He says, just think of but one game as the season. That's it. Don't go two weeks ago, three months or not. No, no. Just do that game.

stay inside. You can refer to certain things. But I thought that was a great thing. And I always kept that in my mind because you couldn't make it out to be more dramatic than it was. Fans understood that. Both community games are. There's no, the only drama is inside that game. Is the game dramatic?

I think else is dramatic about it. So that's pretty much been my theory about how you go about, you know, doing baseball. Is baseball more of a play-by-play announcer sport or more of a color analyst sport, do you think? Play-by-play announcer. certainly on radio with that question. On television, it's kind of like it's a back and forth,

but it's a different back and forth than footballers. Because, as I say, in football it said first and then replay. Baseball, you know, you can have eight, nine pitch that back, and you're kind of going back and forth. Now, Vinnie,

almost his entire career, work alone. which was astonishing. But he was one of the few people that could pull that off. And he did it brilliant. Nobody's ever done it better than been Scully. But a lot of, you know, combinations these days, the guys work together.

It's more of a conversation than it is. This guy does this, that guy does that. Yeah. You once said, I love this, that when you went from radio to television, the big thing that happened was you removed all the verbs from your call. So as a ground ball and radio, you have to describe it.

Groundball on TV, grounded a short, two outs. Right, right. Is that satisfying for you as an announcer? Was that maddening? What did you feel about it? Well, you just understood what the dynamic was.

You don't want to overstate it. I mean, you don't need the verbiage on television that you do on radio. Nobody can see what you're talking about, right? You've got to describe everything. Television, they can see it. You know, in radio, you describe the arc of a fly ball, what the center fielder is doing on television.

You know, you might just say to center, it makes the catch. You don't have to do much more than that. Now, you can, but you don't want to get too worried about it. You know, I mean, there's a fine line there because people, they want to know you're in the game. They want to know that you feel, that you're part of the game,

that you're providing, I've always said in sports casting, and this is, I think, holds true for just about every sport. The game is the melody, and the announcer provides the lyrics. So you want the lyrics to apply to the melody. You don't want it to be cockapniss. You don't want to talk too much, too little. Find that fine line. Think of the game as music, and you put in words to the music,

and you want it to blend. All right, Al. Here's your batting practice pitch right over the middle. What was it like to call games at ABC with Howard Kosell? it was a little bit, a little bit of everything. We probably did, I guess, maybe 75, 80 games over the years. It could be a lot of fun. And toward the end, when he didn't want to do anything anymore,

it was, I don't want to say miserable, but it was very difficult. And when he went out, he did not go out in a blaze. Lori, he went out because everybody was exhausted working with him, and he was exhausted working with all of us. So at first, tons of fun, very different. He was the kind of guy where you'd go into a game and go, you know what, I should pay a cover charge for this, because I'm going to come out of here with a lot of great stories. There's going to be something that's going to happen either.

on the telecast or around the telecast in the hotel. I mean, there was pretty much never a dull moment. But he could be a lot of fun. The one thing, he always thumbed his nose, looked with disdain upon people who just loved baseball and made it so complicated. He would always say, it's such a simple sport.

And here they are, making it so insanely complicated. but it was you know there were times when I would work with him basically there'd be somebody else like Bob Euktu would be in the booth

and I know one night we were in Houston and Howard would always talk about bunting who was one of those guys that always felt a bun was appropriate even when a bun wasn't appropriate so it's late in the game and Howard's calling for a bun

and Yooker and I are kind of like looking at each other going not really And so Bob is very gently and mildly explaining to Howard. You know, Howard, you might not want to be thinking about it in this situation because then he goes point A, point B. But, you know, softly, kindly going, I know what you're saying, but. So now, Costello's going to fool around with Yucca. He goes, okay, Yuki, I get your point.

You don't have to be so truculent. you do know what truckulent means, don't you? And with that hesitating, Euchar says, Howard, of course. You had a truck and I borrowed it. It would be a truculent. So there were times like that when it was just, it was, it was, it was, rivaled comedy is what we had. It was wonderful.

But there were other times when he would, you know, toward the end of his career and he was drinking a lot in the booth. And that became, that became very difficult, extremely difficult. And that led to his eventual departure from ABC and the end of his, is the end of his broadcasting crew. I thought about that the other day when people made, you know, some people lost their minds when Joe Buck happened to mention, you know, having like a sip of something in the booth when he was with Troy Ackman.

And I thought somewhere the ghost of Howard Kosell and Pat Summerall and Tom Bruckshire going, you call that drinking in the booth? That's exactly right. We'll show you drinking in the booth, buddy. They'll show you drinking. I think I mean, Harry Tyree would probably fall into that category, too. Just amazing. Just amazing that that could happen on national television.

I know. And it was a thing. Howard, Howard did it all the years that I worked with him, but he held it very well until the latter years. And the last couple of years were very tough, very tough. So, you know, that led to the eventual end of Howard's broadcasting for them. A couple of big moments of the 80s. 1985 World Series, Don Dankincher, the umpire famously blows the call in game six. The Royals win the game and eventually win the World Series.

The Cardinals are pissed off. How do you, as an announcer, handle a blown call in real time? I think we called it the way we saw it. We looked at the replay. As I recall that night, we said, you know, he blew the call. There's no replay, as there is right now, obviously, in those years. and you just you move on. What are you supposed to do?

And then, you know, Whitey Herzegh is going crazy. He winds up getting thrown out of the game the next night. But we report what we see. And what more can you say? You know, they should shoot Donne-Denkin. You know, you can't go in that direction. They go, the guy made a bad call. He screwed up.

He knows it all these years later. people want you to, you know, rip a new one and everything. Hey, here's what happened. You saw it. You saw it as well as us. And we'll tell you what we saw. You're seeing the same thing we saw. The 1986 American League Championship Series with Red Sox Angels,

you said that game five of that series was the most perfect game you've ever called. Now, I think a lot of us would watch a bunch of your games and say, boy, that sounds great. Why in your mind was that one more perfect than others? I think that I had a great feeling, you know, as a kid who had been in L.A. When the Angels were born, I knew that team inside out. I followed that team. I understood the history of that team.

And I think what a lot of what that was for me was taking the angels who are now going to go to the World Series for the first time ever in their 26 year of existence. that combined with the drama in that game was off the charts it's one of my you know five favorite events ever to have to have called because we hear the angels in the ninth inning and the leading by three and the place is going crazy and uh and then the red sox mouth this rally where don baleer hits a two run homer to make it five for and then at the very end you got Dave Henderson at the plate. And I think at one point he came up and I said he's a long way from Seattle because he had started the season in Seattle.

I think the Red Sox picked him up sometime at August, either on waivers and the trade. So here he is. It's all in his hands. Can the game stay alive? He got Boneymore on the mound. And he just barely foul tips, a two strike pitch. And the next pitch, somehow the pitch is low and outside. He's able to golf it over the left field wall.

It's like, whoa, how did that happen? So now the Red Sox had the lead. So now the cops have to get off the field and the cops on horseback are back in the bullpen and wait a second. But then the Angels, people forget in the bottom of the ninth, then it tied the game, had the bases loaded. A fly ball would, you know, deep enough would end it. And the Angels would still win the game.

But, you know, you had the Gritchin to sense. They can't get the man home. So now you go to Extranings. In the bottom of the 10th inning, Gary Pettis, switch hitter batting left-handed with no power, you know, a lot of speed singles hitter. The two out, three-two is the count. We got Jerry Naren running at first base for the Angels.

He's one to deep left field over Rice's head, and Rice is able to get back to the wall in time to reach up. He's against the canvas, has to look into his glove to make sure he caught it and go, what? What does he do? in there. And I remember the nighties, I remember thinking on the way home, the one thing I didn't, I forgot to bring up was what was Rice doing so deep? The reason was the night before Peders had

a ball over his head in game four. Anyway, so now the, you know, the Red Sox come up. They get a sacrifice fly from Henderson, the 11th inning, take care of the angels in the bottom of the 11th. I say next plane to Boston. And then off we went in the Red Sox won game six and seven. But that That game was, that one hour, I would say, from the top of the ninth inning for the bottom of the 11th, was as dramatic as intense as baseball can be. You got one team trying to win the pennant for the first time ever, and the other team is trying to stay alive. And the other team hadn't won a pennant since, you know, the head of the World Series since like 1915. It was, that game had everything. So it's a combination of your performance, understanding the stakes because you were an L.A. kid.

and then the natural drama of the game and all that adds up to this perfect moment in time. Perfect moment. And plus you got, you know, you got Reggie Jackson's playing in that game with the Angels. You got superstars all over the place. Tom Seavers on the Red Sox roster at that point. I mean, what are these guys doing it?

Roger Clemmons, of course. And it was such a great, it was, the human interest stories were so great. Gene Locke, who I really admired tremendously and knew him, you know, very well when I was in the National League. He's managing Montreal. But Mark's wife had died a couple of years before.

And he was so distressed and distraught that he retired. And then he was talked into coming back. And I knew Gene very well. In fact, I sat with Gene in his office before. I think it was game three. And we kind of went through the story a little bit. And he knew I could tell the story without making it schmaltzy. and going over the top with it about why he came back.

And we did. I mean, that series had all of these great little sidebars going into it. And then the games were off the charts and game five. Baseball just doesn't get any better than that. You know, I've talked about the 1989 earthquake series before game three in Candlestick Park. You're doing the pregame with Jim Palmer and Tim McCarver when the earthquake hits. Did you really think, because some people in Candlestick thought this day that that stadium was going to come down. or might come down in the middle of that earthquake?

Well, I didn't remember. It happens. Now you don't know what, I know it's an earthquake. And all I was hoping for was that the thing would stop shaking quickly. But I remember having a horizontal feel to it. And we were sitting the cameras in the back of the booth. And our back is to the field. And I remember thinking at one point briefly, you know, we could get pissed.

pitched out. You know, that was the frightening. It was kind of a petrifying situation. I felt that you didn't think about the stadium collapsing until well afterwards. Because it's like, wow, we sort of know what it is. And then it stopped. Now, again, it was 15 seconds, but an earthquake for 15 seconds, it seems like, you know, half an hour. But I really didn't think about what could have happened until well after.

after the fact. And we were fortunate, I guess, to the extent that the epicenter was so far away, had the epicenter, but underneath Campbell's, they're far up. God knows what would have happened. I'll fast forward a few years here, Al. In the 90s, Major League Baseball created something called the Baseball Network. Now, we'd need like another 45 minutes to explain what a travesty of the baseball network was. So we could probably go look it up on Wikipedia, kids. But suffice it to saying the 1995 World Series, Atlanta, Cleveland, you called games one, four, and five, and due to this incredibly unusual arrangement, I believe it was actually after the network had folded, Bob Costas called games two, three, and six on a different network. Now, what was that like

for you as an announcer to call half the World Series? Well, what had happened was when the network was formed and NBC and ABC were partnering. In 94, NBC was going to do the World Series. And in 95, ABC was going to do the World Series. That was the original plan. And 94 is the year of the strike. So there is no World Series. So now in 95, they decide, okay, we'll do a little mishmosh here. It's the last year of the baseball network contract. So we'll split it. So we knew we would each do three of the first six games and we won a coin flip we ABC

to do game seven which of course never happened and I'm sitting there dying because Tom Glevin's pitching a shutout and Dave Justice it's a home run in game six and screws this out of it a carver and palmer

back in the hotel watching that's going crazy so the thing about that was so odd it seems so crazy right now where networks are cross-promoting everything else. In those years, you didn't want to promote anything on another network. So we're doing game one,

Saturday night in Atlanta. And I pops a promo that says, we'll be back with game four in Cleveland on Wednesday night and game five on Thursday night, game seven if necessary for Atlanta. So I'm reading this thing. And I'm going, this is insane. This is ridiculous. So on my own, I simply said, by the way, folks, games two and three will be available. I just can't tell you exactly where they'll be, but here's a hint. Last night, Bob Kostis, Bob Uther,

and Joe Morgan were spotted in underground Atlanta. And then, you know, Bob, Bob was as much of a rascal as I am, And Bob, you know, he did something very funny on the Sunday and Monday games, too. It's crazy. And game six or game five, excuse me, the last World Series game you ever called? Correct. It was effectively the end of your baseball calling career.

I know you came back and done a few small things. A couple of things, yeah, just missing pieces. I'll end it here, but over the last 25 years, as you've done Super Bowls, giant football games, every week, Olympics. When did you think it would be nice to call baseball again? You mean now when do I think it would be nice to go? Yeah, or over the last 25 years anytime. Did it ever pop in your head? I'm going to say I was never more disappointed than when ABC lost the rights after the 89 season.

It went to CBS. They got it for four years, lost a ton of money. And then the baseball network came back. And then after that, Fox and NBC both got in and ABC was out. So it was very distrustful for me on a career level to lose that in 90 through 93. I really, really missed it. Wanted to get it back. In those years, I was doing, you know, plenty of stuff going on Monday night football

and other events with ABC a lot on wide world of sports. Then we got it back and kind of like a half-assed way in the baseball net. network years. It wasn't what it was, but I thought maybe if we could get back into it the way we were into it, that would be great. We didn't. And then as the years slipped by, I began to fall farther and farther away from it. I hate to say it to the point where if it had been like 2001 or two, I probably could have done a pretty good job. I'd followed it closely enough. And then I began to just, it began to just fall away. New guys. came in. We really didn't follow it.

I would watch the All-Star game. You know, 10 years later, I would know most of the guys. I watched the All-Star game 15 years later. I would know less than half of the guys. I watched it a couple of years ago. I knew four or five guys. So it kind of like it's in the background. It's in the past.

I really love the sport, but I just haven't had the chance to follow it. I'm too busy doing other stuff. I think that's what some people don't understand about announcers' careers. It's so strange. It's not like you became a bad baseball announcer in 1989. Your network boss didn't sign a check and somebody else's network boss did. And your career goes that way because of that fact. No question about it.

Again, not too many regrets for me because of all crazy things, I've done the leading primetime game in the NFL for 35 years, which is like astonishing. And would I have loved to have that coincide with baseball all those years? Of course, it would have been fantastic. But it wasn't to be. But, you know, to go back and do baseball, I think an announcer has to have. I mean, I have, in my mind, a tapestry.

And when I did baseball all those years, I could see the tapestry of my life following baseball and take it right up to that moment. Football, I have a tapestry. I can remember, you know, you know, following the NFL closely from the 60s, I didn't miss a beat. It's a funny thing because I know that speaking of the ringer, you know, Bill Simmons used to give me a little grief on basketball when I did the NBA. And I was an unwilling accomplice to that, but then I wound up loving it.

The problem I had when I was doing the NBA is I had, I followed it, you know, very, very closely for years. In fact, I loved Elgin Baylor. I'm one of the few people. I saw Elgin Baylor played 50 times live. So I get that. The great ones that died, of course, and the Jerry West years. And I was living in L.A.

I saw those teams. But I would have this like 20-year void from the NBA of those years up until when I did the NBA in 2003. So I didn't have the confidence. Put me in a baseball game during those years. Put me in a football game now. I don't have to look anything up.

I can remember the confidence. context of it. And in basketball, I had this void. And so that was a case where, you know, I'm getting up to speed. And it couldn't be, you know, Marv Albert or Chick, Earned, because those guys had never missed the beat. So that was a little rough. I was rough around the edges with that thing. But, you know, I think it got better as it went along. As Bill, he could tell you. Al Michaels. I will, and he will tell me. Oh, no kidding. No kidding. L Michaels, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Brian, anytime. We'll do it again.

He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We're off Monday for the long weekend, but back Tuesday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.