Major League Baseball is officially underway for the season. But before that happens, each team gears up for its campaign with a month of training and exhibition games, either in the Phoenix, Arizona area or in Florida: spring training, as it’s known, which recently drew to a close.
Although these games don’t count towards anything meaningful, spring training remains extremely popular with fans who want to get their first glimpse at new players, or their favorite team’s young up-and-coming players.
Fans who can’t make it out to Phoenix to see their team in person have few options to view these games on TV. The Texas Rangers, for example, had 33 spring training games this year, yet were only broadcasting eight of them on television.
But out in Surprise, Arizona, where the Rangers train, a team of people makes sure each year that Rangers fans worldwide can tune into the games daily – on the radio.
“Baseball is paced in a way that you really can paint a picture that allow people to feel like they’re there,” said Jared Sandler, a radio broadcaster for the Texas Rangers.
Sandler’s job is to paint a picture of what happens at Surprise Stadium in Arizona during spring training without the benefit of visual aid.
Fortunately for Sandler, baseball is a sport uniquely suited for an audio medium: the slower pace lends itself to a conversational tone that lets audiences connect with broadcasters, and hear the atmosphere of the game they are calling.
“The pace of baseball allows for so many different styles and elements of creativity,” he said. “I think the ability to weave in stories and information and conversation into the broadcast is unique.”
Baseball radio dreams
Growing up, baseball radio broadcasts were the ultimate form of therapy for Sandler, who is a lifelong Rangers fan. Listening to longtime Rangers broadcaster Eric Nadel was a nightly routine during baseball season.
“When I’d go to sleep I didn’t have a TV in my room, but I had a little radio, and so I’d listen to whatever sporting event was on locally, or if there wasn’t a live game on, then I’d listen to sports talk,” Sandler said. “And that’s how I would fall asleep pretty much every night, for however many years.”
When it came time to pursue a career path, it only made sense for Sandler to try to break into an industry he already loved so much. So he went from listening to Nadel as a kid to filling the homes of Rangers fans with his own voice.
Halfway across the country, in Chicago, Illinois, a Northwestern University student named Adam Beck is pursuing the same broadcasting dream. Adam grew up primarily a basketball fan. But as an up-and-coming broadcaster, he finds himself drawn to baseball for the same reasons that Sandler loves it.
Broadcasting baseball’s future
“Baseball’s weird, because you’ve got to fill so much dead time, and you’ve really got to storytell, but there’s also kind of like this romantic magic about it a little bit,” Beck said. “That’s what kind of gives it its charm, that its a little slower, that it’s more of a conversation.”
Beck did an internship in Los Angeles this past summer, broadcasting for the Arroyo Seco Saints collegiate summer baseball team. The Saints are an opportunity for college players from across the country to continue to get reps in the offseason.
His love for his craft showed up clearly through his skillful calls of the games on warm L.A. summer nights.
Beck will be back as a baseball broadcaster this summer when he interns with the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox of the Cape Cod Baseball League in Massachusetts.
With two summers in a row at the baseball field, it seems within the realm of possibility that maybe one day soon, Beck could spend a spring in Phoenix.
But sports culture is changing, as is technology. Both Beck and Sandler have persisting doubts about the future of radio.
“How much are we going to create an individual lane for radio, rather than just more simulcasting and stuff of that nature and taking away having a dedicated radio broadcast?” Sandler said. " I hope that’s not the case, but I also couldn’t sit here and definitively tell you that it’s not."
Beck sees hope, however, in the uniqueness of baseball broadcasting.
“I feel like it’s still a thing where people get in their car and listen to the game as they drive to wherever they’re going, maybe on their way back from work,” Beck said. “So I don’t think it’ll ever truly die.”
Even in this age of artificial intelligence, “I don’t think AI can ever replicate someone calling a game,” he said. “It’s about what happened, but also why is it important and putting that into context using your voice to indicate why it’s important, and why the moments are important.”
At least for every spring in the foreseeable future, there will be baseball on the radio, coming in from live from Arizona. Because even as the world changes, there’s something about baseball, and its radio broadcasts, that is timeless.