Chapter 1
Pregame
Welcome to the Circus of Baseball
It was a cold mid-December Friday morning. I was hurtling southbound on I-85 somewhere between Clemson, South Carolina, and Atlanta and I was panicking. It was that most helpless kind of panic when everything is so silent around you that it only intensifies your dismay. Your brain sounds like a blender in your skull, and you can feel a hot pulse pounding through the side of your neck.
My anxiety was a sign of the times. My times as well as America’s. I was six months out of college and without full-time employment. My parents were well past the point of being happy to have me back in the house. I’d been handed my diploma and pushed out into the middle of a recession recovery. And, okay, if I’m being honest, I was being too picky. I didn’t want any job. I wanted a cool job. Now, with maybe, possibly, hopefully a chance to land said awesome gig—a job in professional baseball—I was in the process of having a mid-interstate panic attack.
Why was I so panicked? Because the skies were pouring an umbrella-useless icy rain, my brand-new Pontiac Grand Am was skating down the highway like a Zamboni, and I was running late. Why was I late? Because that morning I had crashed that brand-new Pontiac Grand Am, bending the right front corner, and now I feared that crumpled sheet metal was rubbing the tire beneath it like a cheese grater as I raced along the interstate. All this while I was also trying to decide: Should I lose even more minutes off the clock by pulling over at the next pay phone to call ahead with my excuse for being late, or should I wait and plead my case in person after I had already been late? Yes, a pay phone. It was 1993.
How had I ended up in this predicament? Because I’d spent the night in Clemson on the sofa of my high school crush, whom I was once again trying to convince to love me, even though I knew it was never going to happen. Just like in high school. I’d overslept on that couch of sadness and in my hurry to get on the road for Atlanta had immediately slammed my new car into the trunk of a much older car that was backing out of a parking space in the apartment complex of the girl who was never going to love me.
It had already been one of the worst days of my young life, and it wasn’t yet eleven a.m.
My destination was the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, host of the 1993 edition of the Baseball Winter Meetings, the annual December gathering of the wheelers and dealers who keep America’s Pastime running. For decades, the Winter Meetings had been the bunkhouse stampede of sports job fairs. There were no rules. Just a horde of baby-faced college graduates like myself, invading baseball’s biggest off-season business convention to hound front-office executives for jobs. A tidal wave of overeager twentysomethings endlessly walking the halls of the host hotel, desperately trying not to look desperate as they stalked those executives, résumés in hand and crazed looks in their eyes.
But this year, for the first time ever, that hunting and gathering process was being organized and corporatized, managed by a brand-new group called Sports Jobs Incorporated. Or maybe it was Jobs in Sports Incorporated or Work in Baseball Inc. Whatever. I forget the exact name now, but I certainly knew it at the time when I’d scribbled it onto the payee line of the $150 check that I’d mailed in with my registration form. The same form that had informed me that I absolutely had to be signed in at the Marriott Marquis by noon on Friday, December 10, no ifs, ands, or buts. But there was no question if I was going to make it by then. I wasn’t.
In the trunk of my just-battered Grand Am was my own box of résumés, a hot-off-the-Kinko’s-press two pages of illustrious life accomplishments (“Part-time high school football correspondent, Monroe Enquirer-Journal”), paired with a cassette tape. On that Memorex was a one-hour compilation of what I had determined to be my best broadcasting moments from the just-finished fall football season. Scratchy recordings made in poorly lit municipal stadiums of my Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent as the play-by-play voice of the Forest Hills High School Yellow Jackets of Marshville, North Carolina (“Welcome to the hometown of Randy Travis, country music’s finest!”) and NCAA Division II’s Wingate University (“Go Bulldogs!”). I had also thrown in a few minutes of my only baseball experience on a microphone, a not-great recording of me doing one game of public-address announcing at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, calling out lineups and official scoring to the dozens in attendance for a midweek daytime game at the Volunteers’ home ballpark, Lindsey Nelson Stadium.
When I listen to that tape now, I hear a kid trying to sound like a man, a youthful Southern-fried voice pushed from way too deep in the back of my throat through the low-def filter of either a college ballpark PA system, a rural AM radio tower (WIXE 1190 AM, “Wixie in Dixie!”), or local cable access Channel 69, my voice used as the background audio for the want ads of the Union County Community Calendar (“Yard sale this Saturday at the Blevins’ house over on Magnolia Street!”).
But when I compiled that tape back then, I was convinced that on it was the sound of the next Red Barber, Mel Allen, or the namesake of my public-address location, Lindsey Nelson. Those Southern-raised gentlemen all managed to “overcome” their accents by charming their way into the ears and hearts of baseball-loving Americans. They had ascended from Columbus, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Pulaski, Tennessee, to work in the press boxes of Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium, and Candlestick Park. If those guys could find their ways from those hometowns to the Baseball Hall of Fame, then certainly I could get to Cooperstown from my own birthplace of Rockingham, North Carolina, right?
I was convinced that my first steps along the path they had trailblazed were to begin now, in an Atlanta ballroom. My plan was to launch my career as a legendary baseball play-by-play man by leveraging whatever resources my $150 fee paid to Baseball Jobs of America Inc. (or whatever it was) to wow the general manager of some Minor League Baseball team with my wit, skill, and can’t-miss broadcasting potential. Who cared which of the 173 MiLB teams it might be? I wasn’t greedy.
Forget that earlier that fall I had already mailed that same résumé and cassette tape to one hundred of those teams, hand-scribbling their addresses and names that I had painstakingly procured from the 1993 Baseball America Directory and likely gaining a bout of glue poisoning from licking the stamps for all those manila envelopes. From those hundred letters, I had received precisely one response. It was from the gregarious Curt Bloom, voice of the Class AA Birmingham Barons, who said he figured (correctly) that I had already faced a ton of rejection and/or apathy, but to keep my chin up and get my butt to the Winter Meetings in December, airchecks in hand, just as he had done a few years earlier to get his big baseball break.
Also forget that I had started that same autumn by totally blowing a shot at my other dream job. The week after college graduation, I’d scored an interview with ESPN for an entry level production assistant (PA) position. PAs answered the phones, ran teleprompter, and cut highlights for the likes of Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter. I’d flown myself to Bristol, Connecticut, and was ushered into the office of Al Jaffe, an original 1979 employee of the Worldwide Leader in Sports and the man who was responsible for hiring everyone. Like, everyone, for real, from production assistants to anchors. To my unprepared surprise, it was less a job interview and more a sports quiz, with questions carefully selected by Jaffe to lean away from any natural regional knowledge. For a Southerner, that meant “Who do you think is the favorite to win this year’s Vezina Trophy?” I didn’t know what that was, so I assumed it was a hockey question. I made a joke that unless he had any questions about the 1980 USA “Miracle on Ice” team, I wasn’t going to be able to answer any hockey questions. I even tried to make a folksy joke about manure. “Hey, the only hockey we see in North Carolina is horse hockey we just stepped in.” I might as well have jumped up onto his desk and started clogging while whistling the theme from The Andy Griffith Show. When he asked me what I ultimately wanted to do for a career, I told him that I dreamed of becoming a play-by-play man. He responded coldly, “You need to know that’s not what this job and this career path in production is about.”
The interview went so poorly that when it mercifully ended and Jaffe pointed toward his door, I asked him how I would know if I’d gotten the job. He explained that he interviewed kids like me all the time and kept us ranked based on how we’d performed in our interviews. When a PA position came open, he’d start at the top of those rankings and make calls offering the job, working his way down the list until someone said yes. He never got past the first couple of names. Then he warned me that the names stayed on his list for only one year. Jaffe looked at his desk calendar and said that if I hadn’t heard from him by one year from that day, by August 19, 1994, I could safely assume ESPN had chosen to go in another direction and so should I. He then demonstratively flipped a couple of pages of paper before what I assumed was finally writing down my name. I wasn’t merely not at the top of any post-interview power rankings. I was barely on the clipboard. That night at the Radisson across the street from ESPN HQ, I slipped into the swimming pool so that no one could see me crying.
That fall, living back home with my parents in Monroe, North Carolina, I covered high school games for the local newspaper, where I’d sit atop the grandstand, far from anyone else, “broadcasting” play-by-play into a cassette recorder, simply for the practice and to have something on tape in case anyone wanted to hear it. That led to the radio gig at WIXE in Dixie. There I worked alongside fabled local sportscaster James “Foxx” Reddish. The Foxx was a subwoofer-voiced man who weighed at least three hundred pounds and would fling himself up onto the roof of the press box by swinging like a pendulum from the fire escape ladder until he built up enough momentum to go full Simone Biles. Foxx was a fantastic storyteller and during timeouts would regale me with tales from his time as the voice of the Monroe Pirates, a Class A Western Carolinas League baseball team who’d played a season at the same aluminum stadium where we now called small college football games. The Foxx also repeated what Curt Bloom had told me, that my best chance at landing a baseball gig was to get to Atlanta that December and, in his words, “sell yourself harder than an Avon Lady of the Night.” I still don’t know exactly what that meant. I just knew I needed to attend the Winter Meetings.
So, that’s how I ended up on a pay phone alongside I-85 in the pouring rain, scrounging up enough quarters from beneath the seats of my wrecked Pontiac to call ahead to Atlanta and let the people at the Get a Baseball Job Inc. sign-in desk know that I was going to be late. I thought that perhaps if I shared the story of my twice-brokenhearted trip (girl and wreck), they would take pity on me and allow me to check in late instead of throwing my nametag into the trash along with my baseball hopes and dreams.
“Hello, Sports Baseball Jobs Incorporated, how may I help you?”
“Yes, my name is Ryan McGee. . . .”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Sorry, I’m on a rest stop pay phone right off the highway and . . .”
“Who is this?!”
“MY NAME IS RYAN MCGEE AND I AM RUNNING LATE BECAUSE I WAS IN A CAR ACCIDENT THIS MORNING AND I AM RUNNING LATE AND I WANTED TO SEE IF I COULD CHECK IN OVER THE PHONE NOW OR LATER TODAY IN PERSON BECAUSE I AM RUNNING LATE! THE REGISTRATION FORM SAID I COULDN’T BE THERE LATER THAN NOON AND I AM RUNNING LATE.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, Ron, that’s fine. Just get here when you can.”
Click.
An hour and a half later, a solid forty-five minutes past the check-in deadline, I sprinted into a side ballroom off the cavernous lobby of the Marriott Marquis, pointed there by a sign on an easel that read “Baseball Job Fair.” As I approached the sign-in table, the shoulders of my navy sport coat and the cuffs of my Dockers khakis were both saturated with cold rainwater. I also wore a very slick semi-silk 1990s necktie, featuring a high-concept design involving a collage of golden baseballs. I was very proud of that necktie. Out of breath, I ran to the table, and there was my nametag and arrival packet, along with at least fifty others’. Apparently, a lot of people were having days just as bad as mine.
I gathered up my lungs, clipped my nametag to my blazer, and stepped into the next room. It was like looking into a hall of mirrors. Dark-haired twentysomething college graduates as far as the eye could see, all wearing navy sport coats, Dockers, and their own funky, slick baseball neckties they were no doubt very proud of. One wall of the ballroom was lined with a dozen rolling bulletin boards, adorned with rows of brown manila envelopes. Each envelope had a number, which represented a job opening, and a sheet of paper containing a list of times and empty rows. Every single one of those envelopes represented a chance.
A sales position with the Arkansas Travelers . . . an assistant grounds crew opening with the El Paso Diablos . . . a concessions manager gig with the Beloit Snappers. Some had a salary posted in the description. Some. The majority had a salary “range” listed, and the diminutive size of those financial figures made all too obvious the importance of the next phrase written: “plus commission.” I was deflated by the fact that there were very few radio jobs posted. The overwhelming majority of listings were for internships, and the going pay rate for those foot-in-the-door gigs was $100 per week. Undeterred, we the Dudes in Dockers began furiously stuffing those envelopes with our résumés, and those of us looking for broadcasting jobs delicately rubber-banded those papers around our cassette tapes.
Then we waited.
“MCGEE!”
Copyright © 2023 by Ryan McGee. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
