Baseball broadcasters can be broken into two demographics: Those who take notes during a game and those who don’t. Some like keeping score and scribbling notes. Others just focus on the game on hand.
Greg Brown is a note taker. He loves to be able to go to bring up little details in a game with players or the manager later. What pitch were they looking for on a 2-1 count? Were they choking up on the bat more?
Those conversations and insights add depth and character to those late-night, summer broadcasts that generations of Pirates fans have tuned in for.
He wasn’t able to get a lot of answers to his notes this year. He wasn’t even in the same state the Pirates were playing half the time, due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The Pirates’ media relations team did as good a job as one could hope for under the circumstances this year, setting up somewhere between four to seven Zoom calls a day for reporters, but there was no way to replicate the clubhouse experience virtually. A conversation over a video call with 10 other people watching is different than talking to someone one-on-one at their locker. Brown thrives at the later.
It was just one of the many challenges he had to deal with in his 27th season of broadcasting Pirates games.
“Totally bizarre,” Brown was telling me Monday about this past season. “Difficult. We got it done, but I’m looking forward to normalcy, like everyone else. I certainly don’t want to go through that again.”
Brown was taking part of a Pirates Charities program Monday to provide winter coats for local families in need.
The Pirates’ broadcasters were not alone in their frustrations. Across the league, all team road broadcasts were done remotely, as Major League Baseball tried to limit the number of people who actually went into stadiums. Brown and the rest of the Pirates’ broadcast team did both television and radio play-by-play from the AT&T SportsNet studios, watching a live feed and commenting on it as it was happening.
Brown said a number of people told him they couldn’t tell he wasn’t in the ballpark during road games, but he could.
“There are so many nuances that come into play that is’ really hard to explain to people why we have to be on the road,” Brown said. “Why we have to be in the ballpark. We have to interact with players, personnel. It’s tough. It’s not the same.”
Brown has not yet been told if that broadcast strategy will change for 2021. In all likelihood, it will probably be out of the Pirates’ media partners’ hands and be MLB’s decision again. If the league allows fans back into the stands during the regular season, like they did for the World Series, it will bode well for radio and TV teams.
One thing that should revert back for next year is the original plan for a rotating third color analyst.
Before the shutdown, AT&T SportsNet was going to rotate three former players – Kevin Young, Matt Capps and Michael McKenry – to fill the spot of longtime broadcaster Steve Blass. (Brown joked that his longtime friend and broadcast partner had “impeccable” timing to retire in 2019 rather than this year.)
However, Capps and Young both live out of state, and with Pennsylvania’s COVID-19 restrictions, there were just too many hoops for them to pass through for them to be able to call what would be about a week’s worth of games, so the plan was put on hold.
“That was a bummer,” Brown said. “That’s another reason why I want things to return back to normal, to give them a chance [next year].”
That meant McKenry was the third color guy for most of the year. He had spent the past two years behind the desk for the pre- and postgame shows on AT&T SportsNet, but broadcasting during live games was new for him. Some liked the enthusiasm and insight he brought into his commentary, but others voiced he was raw.
Brown spoke highly of McKenry during the season, saying that it is a tough job to become acclimated to. He added that veteran color analysts Bob Walk and John Wehner had some growing pains early in their careers, too.
“Mike Lange always said you have to invest five years in this job before people will truly accept you, and Michael McKenry did a week’s worth,” Brown said.
Broadcasting a handful of games hardly counts as a normal season for McKenry. Hopefully drastically shortened seasons aren’t the new normal, either.
Brown hates that phrase. “The new normal.” He doesn’t want this to be how things are going forward. This past year was tough enough. Hopefully 2021 will be kinder to us all.
“We all went through it in our own ways. Not just in baseball, but in all walks of life. Each of us has his or her stories to tell. We were no different.”
