Victor Rojas has been the television play-by-play voice of the Angels since 2010, but he didn’t exactly take a typical path to that role.
Rojas did a little bit of everything before landing a job as a guy who gets to watch Mike Trout play every night, and that unique journey makes Rojas a perfect person to chat with for this week’s edition of Baseball Voices.
(Editor’s note: The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
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SPORTING NEWS: In your career, you've been a pitcher and a hitter. You've worked for a baseball card company, been a pitching coach, a general manager and radio guy in Newark, radio guy for the Diamondbacks, Rangers color and some play-by-play, an MLB Network host and now Angels TV play-by-play. Am I missing anything in there?
ROJAS: (laughs) I worked in the golf industry, too. I've worked in arena management, worked for the Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami as the marketing and communication guy. I’ve done a little bit in my life.
SN: No kidding. How does all of that help what you do now?
ROJAS: I think that my previous broadcast experience, prior to my broadcast experience, having worked in the so-called real world, especially from a marketing and communications standpoint, I think it's helped me as far as how to relate the game to the viewers, especially when things aren't going well. And I’m not talking about being a Pollyanna, but just kind of explaining things in a way that helps viewers relate to what they're seeing on the field and being truthful about it. It's an interesting background that I have. It's not the traditional background for a broadcaster.
SN: Right.
ROJAS: But I think it's also opened my eyes to the business side of things, especially on the baseball side. How the TV operations work from a corporate structure, having been in it myself, so it kind of gives me a different perspective across the board.
SN: That's cool. How did you decide to make broadcasting your next step in your baseball and life journey? Was there a moment of clarity or was it just something you thought, “I think I want to give this a shot.”
ROJAS: I think there was a moment, and it was me saying, “I think I want to give this a shot.”
SN: Ha. OK.
ROJAS: I left the Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami and it was the holiday season. I was doing some consulting for them. And just to kind of pass the time, I ended up working at Nordstrom in Boca Raton, in customer service. And during that time, I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I wanted to be busy. I had this wild idea that, you know, I wanted try my hand at broadcasting. My dad for years has told me, “You know, you know the game, you should go to a ballpark and record interviews and see if stations want it.” He's always kind of pushed me in that regard. And I finally just said, well, maybe I'll call some friends. Having played independent ball and coached in independent ball, I’ll call some friends. Maybe I could still play, you know, be a part-time player or even coach, and then in my downtime, hang out at the station and kind of learn the business that way.
So I called around but at my age and my stage in my career, not too many people wanted me as a player. And I was fortunate enough that I had a friend of mine who was coaching third base for the Newark Bears. And he said, “Send your stuff up.” Rick Cerrone, the former Yankee catcher, owned the team at the time. And he looked at my resume and called me up and said, “Listen, I don't need you as a player, but I'd like for you to come up here and be our assistant GM. You could put the team together and during the broadcast, you can do the color, go up and do some innings and learn the game, learn the business that way.”
And so I said sure. I talked it over with my wife. They eventually actually hired her as well, as an office manager. And so we both moved up to Newark, New Jersey, and embarked on this journey in 2001, which was crazy. I mean, those first couple of months I signed Jose Canseco, and I'd already signed Jack Armstrong and Jamie Navarro. And then Canseco happened upon us, then Jim Leyritz. It just became a crazy situation up there. Our play-by-play guy quit before the season started, so I became the play-by-play guy without any experience. And then about a month into the season our GM got fired and Rick made me the GM. So I was GM/broadcaster in 2001. Not the career path that's usually taken on the road to becoming a major league baseball broadcaster.
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SN: No kidding. Usually in the minors it’s play-by-play and media relations, not play-by-play and general manager.
ROJAS: I know, right? You're talking about a 22- to 24-man roster in independent ball. When you’re calling a game and one of your guys gets hurt, immediately you kind of forget about calling the game. It's like, all right, who am I getting in here tomorrow or the next day to replace the guy that's going on the DL? So it was really an interesting experience. But things really didn't pick up for me from a broadcast standpoint quickly. I mean, there was a lot of attention because of the whole Canseco thing at the time. But for me personally, I got hooked up with MLB.com and it was that connection, through Jeff Spalding at MLB Productions that kind of opened the door for me. It gave me a chance to join MLB and do a radio show in the mornings with Jonathan Mayo the following year, and that just kind of started to open some doors for me from a broadcasting standpoint.
SN: Was there a low point, where you thought, “Maybe I should try something else?”
ROJAS: Yeah, yeah. At the end of 2002, after having done two seasons. I mean, I shouldn’t say it was a low point, but we were at a point where our home was in Fort Lauderdale and we were living in Newark, so we had a mortgage and we had rent, and you're not making a whole lot of money in the minor leagues. The MLB stuff was great, and it carried over into 2002. I was still doing the radio show and I got a chance to do the All-Star Game in Milwaukee that year. But we went off to Christmas break in ’02 thinking, “You know, we can only really do this for one more year.” I needed to accelerate it, and if it wasn't going to happen, maybe just transition to the front-office side of things and try my hand at that, since I had basically two years of experience. We got to the finals the first year and won it all in year two.
SN: Nice.
ROJAS: So that was our game plan going into ’03, this was going to be it. And lo and behold, we got back to Newark and a couple of weeks after being there in January, I got a phone call from my agent at the time, and he asked me if I'd be interested in interviewing for the radio position for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Rod Allen had just left to go to Detroit, and that’s how I started my big-league broadcasting career.
SN: The big league travel is a little bit different than with the Bears, right?
ROJAS: Slightly. Slightly. I mean, sitting in the loft in downtown Newark, looking out to a boarded up building across the way and listening to my agent on the other line saying, ‘Would you like to come to Phoenix and become a major league broadcaster?” I'm like, yeah, I think I don't think I need to think about this much. I'll say yes now and we’ll negotiate later.
SN: That’s cool. So you've been with the Angels for a while now. When you want to know what's going on with the team, where is your go-to place? Do you talk to the guys on an airplane, at the batting cages? Where do you get your information?
ROJAS: Information nowadays is somewhat guarded, the whole manager-speak and all that stuff. I don't think there's a whole lot out there. So I think whatever relationships you have with individuals, I think that's what you tap in to. Once you get to a point where you feel comfortable, where you can go up to someone and say, “Hey, what are you thinking here? What have you done here?” With the trust knowing that you're not going to divulge anything or throw anybody under the bus. And I think a lot of times teams are so guarded, unfortunately, and especially when it comes to team broadcasters, we're essentially trying to protect everybody. You know, I'm not saying that we're going to lie to the audience, but just case in point, you know, if so-and-so’s not eligible to pitch today out of the bullpen, for whatever reason — he threw too many innings recently or he's just not feeling right, whatever — if we know that information, when the crucial time comes in a ballgame, instead of us speculating, “Why isn't this guy warming up?”, if we have that information in our back pocket, we can kind of dance around and say well, maybe it's because of X, Y and Z and not really bury anybody, you know what I mean? And so I think it's important that you go individually to people and gain their trust and be able to get information so that helps you kind of paint the picture a little bit better for the audience.
SN: Do you have old fashioned cheat-sheet note cards you use? Are you a laptop guy who has everything set up that way? How do you do that?
ROJAS: For some reason I have pretty good recall, so I kind of trust myself. But I'm a laptop guy. Information now is readily available. I usually have my tabs up, whether it’s Baseball-Reference or stats or whatever we're using, plus GameDay and Google and all that stuff. You can easily get stuff fairly quickly. I keep score on my iPad and have the last couple of years where I use my scorecard pdf and I use it in the GoodNotes app so I don't have to carry a book anymore. I've never been a big proponent of writing a bunch of things down, other than certain information that I'd like to talk about.
For the most part, my book is fairly clean other than the standard numbers or if something stands out in general that I want to kind of address. But I tried it one year, man. I was only in Arizona for one year and I got hired by Texas. And so I'm sitting with Eric Nadel, I’m his No. 2 there. And I look at his book and he's got crap everywhere. There's just all these little notes. I don't even know how he can read it, to be perfectly honest with you. So I figured, what did I know? I've only had one year in the big leagues, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. So I tried doing it and, you know, I found myself more focused on trying to get in everything I wrote as opposed to just watching the game. And then from that point forward is where I realized, you know, everyone's different, everyone does things differently, tells stories in a different manner. And so I figured I'd kinda let the game happen and let it come to me a little bit. If something pops into my head and it fits, we'll start a different conversation. But I try not to get too bogged down on a bunch of nuggets that I'm trying to jam into a game.
SN: Is that sometimes hard to let those go and say, “OK, well maybe I'll get to that another day.”
ROJAS: Yeah. Some stuff is timely that you want to get in, but for whatever reason, whether the game dictates or the conversation goes in a different direction and you forget, there's been times after a game where I'll sit there and think, “Oh man, this was perfect and now I can't use it, you know, maybe till next year.” Those are the ones you're kind of bummed out about. But overall, you try to get as much information as possible. Heck, I don't even know if I'm doing it right, to be perfectly honest with you. I'm just more of a conversationalist. I like having the folks at home feel like they're just sitting in on our conversation with Goobie and I, and as opposed to this whole mechanical broadcast of a baseball game.
SN: That leads to my next question. You and Mark Gubicza seem to have great chemistry on air. What's it like working with him on a regular basis?
ROJAS: He's the best, man. We spend a ton of time together. We’ll drive to the ballpark together on the road, drive back, go out for drinks afterwards, dinner or whatever. We spend a lot of time together, and I think that's allowed us to kind of really figure out each other's idiosyncrasies and likes and dislikes, and that makes it easier to have a conversation. But that being said, you know, we had a pretty good relationship before I got the job. I grew up in Kansas City, obviously grew up watching him and he is such an easy-going guy. So it was very easy to transition over from the studio stuff at MLB to working with someone that I already had a comfort zone with and really felt more like an older brother than anything else. And so I hope that comes across on the air because that's a genuine love that I have in working with him because he makes it so easy.
SN: Do you remember the first time you saw Mike Trout on the field? What stood out to you?
ROJAS: You know, it's interesting because Mike was a prospect coming up, but it's not like today where, you know, when Acuña is coming up, it's like “Ronald's coming!” or “Vladdy Jr.’s coming!” It wasn't quite like that. And I don't know why, because everyone thought very highly of Trout. But when he got to the big leagues, you just wanted to see what he was capable of doing. And the one thing that stood out immediately, for us, was how does that big body, how was he able to run that fast? You know what I mean? He was just absolutely ridiculous.
Peter Bourjos was on the team with the Angels and we were trying to figure out, OK, who's faster, Bourjos or Trout? Bourjos is the guy that just looks like he could run fast where Trout, you know, he looks like a linebacker. He’s a big dude. And he’s gotten stronger the older he's gotten, too. He’s filled out. But he’s still able to get down the line incredibly fast. I think that's the one thing that really stood out to me. And then as he settled in as a big leaguer, the power and the shortness of his swing and the contact that he has, everything is just absolutely ridiculous. And it's just amazing how he can pick on one thing that he wants to work on in the spring to try and get better that year and it seems like it works out for him every year. It's amazing that he's been able to sustain this level across the board.
SN: The strikeouts, cutting down on the strikeouts, is the thing that amazes me. You’re not supposed to be able to do that, not that dramatically.
ROJAS: And he keeps getting better. The throwing arm thing was an issue for him early, right? Everyone was dogging his throwing arm. But he’s gotten so much better at that. How does that happen? It’s just constantly working on getting better, and I think that’s what separates him from other guys.
SN: No doubt. OK, same thing for Shohei Ohtani. What were your first thoughts when you saw him in person on a regular basis?
ROJAS: Really the one thing to stand out for me was the amount of pressure that this kid was going to be under, under the microscope coming over from Japan. At an early age he got used to the limelight and what was expected of him, but the way that he was able to just kinda shut that stuff off and concentrate and be able to do both things at such a high level, pitching and hitting, is amazing to me. The dedication that he has to his craft is unbelievable and it's unparalleled, really. No one really knew what to expect, especially with the struggles that he had in spring training last year. And he makes one quick adjustment in the Freeway Series against the Dodgers, gets rid of the leg kick and all of a sudden, I mean, who does that, you know what I'm saying? At the major league level, of all places, you just make this quick adjustment and he's off like gang busters. He’s so tantalizing too with the arm. The game he threw against Oakland, he had a no-hitter into the seventh, that’s just ridiculous. I thought he was going to get it. The legend will continue to grow. He's still kind of going through the spring training phase right now and getting his at-bats. He hasn't looked overly comfortable here of late, but I think that's just bound to happen. Once it gets locked in, watch out.
SN: We learned that lesson last year, right?
ROJAS: Yeah.
SN: So when do you think about having your own signature calls and stuff? Do you develop those? Do you just accidentally say one and think, oh, I like that?
ROJAS: Well, the “Big Fly!” thing I’ve had ever since, gosh, when I was playing. Home runs are called so many different things, especially in the dugout or clubhouse or whatever, so I've always just had that. I was trying things out in Newark when I was broadcasting and that's the one that just kind of stuck. I just liked it. The whole “Drive home safely!” thing, that was a long game and I don’t even know, to be perfectly honest, why it popped into my head or why I even said it. It was most likely me yelling at the team that was on the field and just got beat, get off the field and drive home safely. That’s how I verbalized it, and it just kind of stuck. But I don't plan anything. I think the minute you start scripting stuff and thinking about it, I think it comes off that way. That's just not my nature. You know, I'm a fan. I’m in the moment and I like to be in that moment, especially in those those big moments.
SN: I just got a couple more questions, quicker-type ones. Where is your favorite city to spend an off day, and what are you doing when you're there?
ROJAS: Well, selfishly speaking, Texas is my favorite because I live in the Dallas area, so I get a chance to spend time at home and hang out with family.
SN: OK, fair enough. How about non-home cities?
ROJAS: Kansas City. We usually stay at The Plaza and, having grown up there, I get a chance to see some friends and hang out and play golf and kind of reminisce.
SN: Do you have a favorite barbecue place there? You an Oklahoma Joe’s guy? Well, I guess they’re called Joe’s Kansas City now.
ROJAS: Yeah, Joe’s is good. There's any number of them really. Jack Stack is pretty good.
SN: LC’s is solid. I had the burnt ends at Q39. Best burnt ends I’ve had.
ROJAS: I haven’t had that yet. Haven’t been to Q39 yet. Jack Stack's burnt ends are pretty good, too.
SN: I’ve only had the pulled pork there. OK, back on topic, where’s the best press box dining?
ROJAS: I'm going to have to say Yankee Stadium now. Fenway Park had it for the longest time. They had the best setup. They’ve cut back quite a bit. So I’d have to say Yankee Stadium. And then Arlington is pretty good too. Wanda in Arlington takes care of us pretty well.
SN: So let's say you have a 7 o’clock night game. What is your routine during that day? What are you doing that day?
ROJAS: Home or on the road?
SN: Let's say on the road.
ROJAS: Depending on traffic, because I usually drive, we'll probably leave here about 3ish, because you never know with traffic, to get there by 4 for a 7 o’clock game. I’ll get there, get my book all ready. I’ll go grab a bite to eat. We usually pre-tape stuff about 5:40. On the road, we tape our opens. And then it’s just kind of finishing touches, talk to broadcasters until about 6:30. Then I like to just chill in my seat, man. I like to make sure I'm caught up and ready to roll. Call the family, then it’s go time.
SN: OK, last thing. Were you a better hitter or pitcher as a player?
ROJAS: Well, I was a pretty good hitter in college. I was a switch-hitter, and I had pretty good pop. I was just kind of a guy without a position. I could play first base. I could catch, but really, it was more of a DH/first baseman-type deal. When I signed, Billy Bavasi asked me what I wanted to do because he was happy either way. And I chose to be a closer. I just felt like my mindset was better suited to be coming out of the bullpen and try close out games.
