A few weeks ago, I put a simple question on Twitter: “Who are your favorite local MLB broadcasters, the ones who call the best games and/or tell the best stories?”
I lost count how many Braves fans responded, singing the praises of radio play-by-play man Jim Powell. It was really impressive. Almost as impressive as how Powell personally replied with tweets of thanks to everyone who mentioned him. It’s the little things that often speak to the character of a person.
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Anyway, that little exercise made Powell the perfect first local broadcaster to feature for our new regular segment, Baseball Voices. The goal is to learn a bit more about the men and women who are our eyes and ears when we’re watching — or just listening — to baseball games all summer.
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(Editor’s note: The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
SPORTING NEWS: Have you always known you wanted to be a broadcaster? Would you practice calling games with the TV on mute?
POWELL: Absolutely. I can't tell you how many hours I spent doing that. A good friend of mine, we were both crazy about sports and we would hang out and call games together, sitting on a couch with the volume down. I really think that good broadcasters aren't necessarily born, but you have to really learn how to execute the mechanics of a broadcast. And then you also have to learn how to be yourself without trying to imitate somebody else. That's actually one of the hardest things for a lot of young broadcasters. They tend to want to try and sound exactly like their favorite broadcasters instead of sounding the best they can as a broadcaster. People see through you if you're trying to imitate somebody else. It’s kind of like being a pilot, you know? You have to have a certain amount of airtime before they let you fly planes on your own. In broadcasting, you’ve got to have a certain amount of airtime so you can be yourself, be natural, laid back and not wear people out, etcetera.
SN: Your first professional job as a minor league broadcaster was with the Columbia Mets. I was looking through the rosters for those teams, and there weren't a whole lot of guys who went on to the bigs. Todd Hundley that last year, Pete Schourek and Anthony Young and a couple of other guys. What do you remember now about those first couple of years calling games for that team?
POWELL: What's funny is that I went to Columbia not to do baseball, but to be a television news reporter and anchor for WOLO TV, the ABC affiliate in Colombia. I was offered the job while I was still in school in Athens and I had a bunch of friends who were graduating with their broadcast degrees and then going to work at Macy's and Sears because they couldn't get a broadcasting job. So I got this job for $12,000 a year or something. I worked there for six months or so, and then the Columbia Mets job came open. Mick Mixon, who does a lot of University of North Carolina games, he was the sports director of the flagship station for the Gamecocks, WBOC, and he left to go do Triple-A Maine Guides baseball. And so they suddenly had this Columbia Mets opening. I applied for that to be kind of a side job from my television job, just a part-time thing. It didn't take very long before WBOC made me the sports director and I just quit the television job. I mean, I enjoyed the TV job. It was a fun experience and all that, but I could look at the tapes and see I looked like I was 5 years old. I mean, I was so young. I knew that, realistically, I'm not moving up real fast in the TV world because I looked so young, but in radio they can't tell what you look like.
The Columbia Mets were great. I worked for some really good general managers. like Bill Blackwell and Bill Shanahan. I really enjoyed it. We were doing mostly weekend games, so I would drive to wherever the Columbia Mets were playing, whether it’s Charleston or Savannah or wherever. I did the whole Sally League circuit for a long time. You sit in these rickety press boxes and you engineer the games yourself and you're the the play-by-play man and the color commentator, and if it's a double header you're just on for seven hours and knock yourself out. But it was a very good experience. It goes back to the logging the airtime, you know? It was so painful, Ryan, to sit there and listen to the tapes to try and find a resume tape to look for a higher classification job. You've got to sit there and listen to tapes of yourself and you’re like, “Oh, my God, you suck!” One of the best things about making the major leagues was I felt like I didn't have to listen to tapes of myself and try and find resume-tape material anymore. I could just do my job. But yeah. The South Atlantic League was a very interesting, not always fun, but very necessary part of my career.
SN: I get that. When I got my start as a sports writer, I was at this little paper in suburban St. Louis and I covered an independent Frontier League baseball team. I would go on the road and the radio guys would let me come on to do color. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't listen to myself. And then one day he asked if I wanted to do play-by-play for an inning. I should have said no, but I said yes. It was brutal. Brutal. And I'm not saying like, “Oh, it doesn't meet my high standards.” It was brutal. Horrible. And I remember there was a team message board and somebody wrote a post about it, said something like, “Ryan is a good writer, but he probably shouldn’t do play-by-play.” And I read that and thought, "Yep, I agree."
POWELL: Oh, I’m right there with you.
SN: So when you got to the majors, the travel and the press boxes, was that just eye-opening? Such a big difference from your days in the Sally League?
POWELL: My first major league game was with the Minnesota Twins and I was basically on a one-week tryout. The Twins’ Hall of Fame voice, Herb Carneal, had heart valve replacement surgery in the middle of the season, so they were down a broadcaster. They called up their Triple-A guy for a week, their Double-A guy for a week, and I had a connection with the GM of WCCO in Minneapolis, Jim Ashbury, who had hired me at WSB in Atlanta. I’m sure you’ve heard the old Branch Rickey saying, “Luck is the residue of design,” right?
SN: Yes.
POWELL: Well, Jim Ashbury got a job with WCCO in Minneapolis. So a couple of years later, they've got this sudden opening in the middle of the season. He tried out their Triple-A and Double-A guys, and then he thought of me. So he called me — I actually got the call in the press box at a Columbia Mets game — and he said, “Can you be in Detroit on Monday? We want you to come and do major league games for a week.”
And I was like, OK. I flew to Detroit, checked into this Ritz-Carlton. I'd never been in a Ritz-Carlton before. I was a Howard Johnson's kind of guy. Honestly, when I checked into the room, I was just waiting. I didn't know if I was going to have a roommate or what the deal was. And the towels, they were too nice to touch. I was afraid to take a shower because I wouldn't have a towel to dry off with, because this stuff was just way too nice. It was just shocking. The game was at Tiger Stadium, and Tiger Stadium was, of course, an old relic. It wasn't plush, but it was fantastic. And I'm sitting there doing my preparation before the game, working with John Gordon, who became like a father figure to me over the years. I'm scared to death. Honestly, I was scared to death and nervous until the moment I first started calling play-by-play. And then it was like, this is what I do. I was totally calm. Everything was great from there.
I'm sitting there in the booth before the game and I hear this voice coming from the back of our booth and it says, “I'm looking for Jimmy Powell!” And it’s Ernie Harwell! At the behest of John Gordon, I’m sure, Ernie Harwell had come in to introduce himself to me and welcome me to Tiger Stadium. He told me when I was done with my score book, if I wanted to come down for batting practice, he’d introduce me to the Tigers. And literally, I went down on the field and Ernie introduced me to everybody on the field.
SN: Oh, my gosh. That’s awesome.
POWELL: I mean, I’m a kid on a one-week tryout who was doing an A-ball game 48 hours before. I've never forgotten that about Ernie. He made the whole experience really special and taught me really how you treat other people. ... So that was my first-day-in-the-big-leagues experience.
SN: Wow. That's really cool. That kind of leads to my next question. When you're doing prep and you're trying to get to know the new guys or the vibe of the team, those types of things, where’s your go-to place? Are you a batting cage guy? An airplane guy? Film room? Where do you interact best with the players and coaches?
POWELL: Probably some of all of that. The airplane is great. Everybody's real relaxed there. You probably have better, deeper conversations on an airplane than just about anywhere else. The batting cage is good, but those are short little chats and there are people all around. These players are under the 24/7 microscope. There's always somebody's phone pointing at them and taping what they're doing, pretty much all the time. The hotel lobby, standing in line to board a plane or to get on an elevator or whatever, that's when they're more relaxed and you can get better, deeper conversations.
SN: That makes sense. How do you have to do your pregame prep? Cheat sheets? Note cards?
POWELL: It's funny how it's changed. When I was with the Twins, I filled in for them in ’93 and ’94, in those days I carried a huge duffle bag full of — and you'll love this. This is not made up for just for you. I didn't even think about this until right now, but I had the last few years worth of The Sporting News in a duffel bag. The Sporting News, of course, had the beat reports for every team, right? So if we were going to play the Angels, I could go back through a year's worth of Angel articles and get the beat notes for them. At that point, that was the only way I knew to be able to get up on a team that I'd never seen before. So I carried this duffle bag, which must’ve weighed 50 pounds, and people made fun of me and whatever, but I didn't care because I had to do what I had to do to be ready to broadcast the game.
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SN: That’s awesome! I’ve been with SN almost 14 years now, and back when I started one of my duties was editing those team notes. Loved it. So what do you do now for preparation?
POWELL: Now I have my laptop. I'm on the laptop pretty much all day, reading. As you know, there's no end to what you can read. There are so many available resources. I’ll clip things and put them in a file of stories I might want to talk about on the air. When I’m actually doing a game, I'll probably have anywhere from 10 to 15 different windows open. I’m on FanGraphs, I’m on Baseball-Reference. I’m on MLB.com, obviously. I’m on Baseball Savant. I’m on Twitter. I’m constantly popping around and making sure there’s not some big story that we're missing. It’s not our job to break news, but we also want to be current.
SN: You even read tweets from followers on the air. When did you start doing that? When do you get that idea? Did that just kind of naturally happen?
POWELL: You know, I have a sports-talk background as well. When I was in Colombia, I hosted a two-and-a-half-hour call-in show every night, Monday through Friday. Back in those days I was doing all the Gamecocks stuff. I was doing Columbia Mets. I also would get jobs with the Charlotte Knights and drive up to Charlotte and do their games. And then on the weekends there for awhile, when I finished my show Friday nights, I would get in my car and drive three-and-a-half-hours to Atlanta and work at WSB all weekend, then drive back Sunday night and start all over again. I did all kinds of stuff coming up. My advice to young broadcasters is “do anything.” I would spend weekends in college driving to ABC college football games, doing what they call pull cables, basically you're a runner. You’d sleep on the floor of a hotel room with like 15 other people who were doing the same thing, but you make contacts, meet people and you learn how to navigate the very difficult waters of getting where you want to go, especially in baseball broadcasting. So that was my background, and with the advent of Twitter, I just loved the format and I love the interactivity. I just started, especially when we were on the West Coast when our listenership is thinner because it's real late at night back home and all that. I would say, “Hey, you know, send me a tweet, and we'll entertain some questions.” That became a good way to let the fans make it an interactive broadcast, which seems like an absolute natural in today’s world. I mean, we get their input on Twitter whether we like it or not, right? Might as well use it and have the ability to answer them back. I enjoy doing that.
SN: Do you have a favorite game you’ve called or been a part of?
POWELL: I would say probably Bobby Cox's last game. It was a playoff game with the San Francisco Giants. The Braves had a magical year that year. It was as if there was some divine intervention because it was Bobby's last year, and everything was coming together and the team moved into the playoffs and we really expected to beat the Giants. And we didn’t. We lost the final game on our home field and that was it. The Giants started celebrating and we're all looking around because we can't believe it actually ended. I mean, nobody could believe we didn't have the happy ending that we expected. And then the fans began to realize that’s it for Bobby, so they start to cheer for Bobby. And then the Giants realized what's going on, and they stopped their celebration on the field and they turned, as Bobby's stepped out onto the field, and they applauded. They celebrated Bobby Cox. It brought a tear to all of our eyes. They took it back to the clubhouse before they did anything else to celebrate their playoff series win. I'll just never forget. It was the classiest thing I've ever seen, the San Francisco Giants stopping their celebration to celebrate instead, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, managers in the history of the game, Bobby Cox. It was so emotional, I probably put that game at the very top of my list.
SN: I was going to ask you about the first game that year, Jason Heyward's debut when he hit that home run off Carlos Zambrano. Your call, you can hear your excitement just to be there and see something like that happen.
POWELL: That was definitely one of my favorite calls my entire career. I think I said something like, “This stadium is upside-down!”
SN: Yes. That’s it!
POWELL: I had never said that on the air before, and I’ve never said it on the air since then. That was a standalone. It just came out. Yeah, it was incredible. Heyward had hit all those home runs into the cars that spring at Disney, so the buildup was massive. And then here he is, and Carlos Zambrano is a villain anyway, and, Heyward just jacks it. And the stadium really was upside down. So I thought, “I finally got a call right.”
SN: You had the chance in Milwaukee to work with a guy who we've all listened to and loved for years, Bob Uecker. What was that experience like, getting to work with him on a daily basis?
POWELL: It was vital for me. By being around him, I got to get through a lot of the stupid things that young, inexperienced broadcasters do, much more quickly. Bob was so relaxed. I mean, I think the first thing he told me in spring training was, “I'm not going to tell you what to do. You do whatever you want. I don't care about nothing! We’re just here to have a good time.” And I'm like, well OK. As a young broadcaster, you think you’ve got to prove your worth, like you're getting paid by the word. You’ve got to jam everything in. You've got your stack of note cards, and back in those days I did have note cards. You got your note cards and you're going to get those things in, whether the game deserves it or not.
And instead, you're just yucking it up with a guy who's just having a good time. Now he also taught me that you have to respect the game. You have to respect how hard it is. You have to respect the players. He would make fun of himself. He'd make fun of me. He'd make fun of a lot of people. I mean, the commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, would walk in and he’d bust his chops. If the governor of Wisconsin walked in, he’d busts his chops, on and off the air, and people loved it. I always told Bob, "It's like you made a deal with the devil where the meaner you are to people to their face, the more they laugh." I've never seen anything like it. But when the game was on the line, when the game was close, he was calling that game. He was a true professional. When the game got to be 10 -1, he was Bob Uecker, and he was the best that ever lived in terms of filling the airtime with quality stuff. It was an education and an experience that I would not be the same without it. There's no question about it. That's why I don't take myself too seriously, and I try and relax and have a good time on the year as well and joke around with my partner and try and draw things out of them, because I saw Bob doing it.
SN: So I'm sure people ask you this all the time, but do you have a favorite Bob Uecker story?
POWELL: (laughs) Not that I can tell in a public forum.
SN: Ha. OK, do you have a favorite public-forum Bob Uecker story?
POWELL: I'll tell you a good one. When we were playing the Montreal Expos back in the day. As soon as we would get to Montreal, Bob would start messing around with his French-Canadian accent. We’re on buses and planes, and he’s like “Monsieur!” It’s like he would get into a character every time we go there. So one day when we were in Montreal, I said, “Bob, how about if I — and we won't even air this — but why don't I do an interview with you where you are this French-Canadian sports journalist? I'll do a straight interview with you and we'll just fool around and have fun.” So we do it. I said, “Three, two, one, Jim Powell joined by renowned French Canadian sportscaster and journalists Jean-Jacque Smythe.” And I started asking him questions. We’re sitting in the broadcast booth in the stadium in Montreal, and he's looking around and they've got all these signs with French words and French-related companies. So he's talking in broken English and then every once in a while he'd grab a word off a sign and throw that in there. And it was just absolutely hilarious.
The hardest part for me — and I’ve still got a tape of this, I'll play it for you someday, if you want — is not laughing. We go through this whole interview and then then he starts attacking Bob Uecker. As a sports journalist, he's talking about this Bob Uecker and his big ego and it was just hilarious. And so when it we were done, I thought about it a bit and I said, “What do you think if we just air that as our pregame interview?” We listened back to it and he was laughing and it was really, really funny. So ultimately we decided, and we just aired it. We aired it on the pregame show that day, and people were calling in to the station, to WTMJ, complaining because this guy was ripping Bob Uecker. You don’t rip Bob Uecker. That's our guy! So they're like, “Who is this guy?” And so that became our tradition. Every year we went to Montreal, I would interview Jean-Jacque Smythe on the pregame show and it was great. Just classic Uecker. He could just do anything. He's a comedic genius, like no one I've ever met.
SN: That's awesome. Yeah, I definitely have to hear that. That'd be great. You mentioned earlier about all the driving you did as a younger guy, and it’s pretty clear you have to make a lot of sacrifices as a baseball broadcaster, with such a long season. What are some of those sacrifices that you've had to make family-wise and friends-wise?
POWELL: I worked with the Twins and ’93 and ’94. In ’95, I was back working for Columbia with University of South Carolina and the little side jobs. Then, in ’96, Pat Hughes took the Cubs job, opening the door to the Brewers’ booth. I went to Milwaukee to interview for the job and it was like minus-40 degree windchill. In County Stadium, I’m walking through the concourses as I'm going around and meeting all the people and the wind is whipping through. I mean, I’d never lived north of the Mason-Dixon in my life and that was crazy. When I got the job, we had just had our first baby. My wife, Emmy, and I have been married 31 years. We had just had our first baby, and now I'm telling her she's moving to Milwaukee. She was a news director of the CBS television affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina, one of the first females news directors in the state.
But we had decided that we were going to raise our kids ourselves and not try and farm them out to daycare and that kind of thing. So she quit her job. We moved to Milwaukee, we bought our first house, we had a 6-week-old baby and then five years later we had we had two other baby girls. So we had three girls. We had to move to a bigger house. I stayed in Milwaukee for 13 years. But you know, I'll never forget how hard it was. That was back before cell phones were everywhere and it wasn't that easy to communicate. And then I go out on a 10-day road trip or I'm off to spring training for a month or whatever, and my wife is at home with these three babies. So, yeah, it was really difficult to go on the road in those days. But it was well worth it. All three are out of the house. We're empty-nesters now. The girls are doing great. We feel really good about what we felt was the most important job of our lives, which was to raise our family and try and make the world a better place through our children. And we feel very good about where our daughters are. My wife has got to be one of the great mothers in the United States. She did a fantastic job with them despite getting very little help from me, unfortunately,
SN: Our little girl just turned 8 months old, so we are are right in the middle of that early stage.
POWELL: Oh, man. If I could go back to those days, I would. But if my wife could go back to those days, I don’t think she would. It's a challenge. The first day they would go off to school every year, I would sit there in the driveway and want to cry, and my wife was ready to pour a glass of champagne.
SN: Where's your favorite city on the road to spend an off day?
POWELL: I’ll let my wife speak for me, and I'll just say that every time we play the Miami Marlins and there's an off day, my wife is there. She flies down on her own and she's there. We stay in Key Biscayne and it's beautiful. It's right on the water and it's got a tennis complex there. My wife and I, that’s our No. 1 hobby. We're both big tennis players, so that’s something the two of us can do together, and we do that together often. She’s a really, really good player.
SN: Nice. I was going to ask what you doing on that off day, but you already filled that one in, so that's good. So how about this: Where’s the best press box dining?
POWELL: Hands down in the National League, it’s Philadelphia. The press dining is kind of on the decline across major league baseball, in some ways. It’s sliding. But Philadelphia is unbelievably good. The people there are fantastic. The food is really good. They have lots of options. There are a lot of healthy choices there as well. They always make sure there's something healthy. That’s a real challenge for those of us who do all the traveling all season, trying to eat healthy and not balloon up to 7,000 pounds. It’s a lifestyle commitment you have to make yourself. So when you go to a place like Philadelphia, where I don't have to work hard to get healthy food, that's awesome.
SN: Cool. So when you're in another city for a night game, what are you doing during the day?
POWELL: I sleep as late as I can. You know, at 7:05, that’s when you’ve got to be peaking physically. And if you roll out of bed at 8 o'clock in the morning, you're not going to be peaking at 7 o'clock at night. So I sleep as late as I can, then I get in the workout room. I work out almost every non-travel day, especially if it's a night game on the road because there's no excuse not to. Honestly, over the course of a long season, it doesn't seem like this would be a physically taxing job, but it's mentally and physically challenging. I got great advice from the director of broadcasting for the Milwaukee Brewers a long time ago, Bill Haig, who's no longer with us, unfortunately, but he was great at his job. He implored me to stay in good shape. You need to stay in good shape; it affects your broadcasting. And he’s right. So I’ll go in the workout room and kill an hour or more, and then I'll come back and I'll get back on the laptop and do more reading. And then usually about three hours before the game, we head over to the ballpark and start the onsite preparation.
SN: OK, last thing. What’s one of the most meaningful things you've ever learned from one of your analysts?
POWELL: Hmm. I've learned so much from them because they played and I didn’t. I've learned a lot of pitching from Don Sutton. I feel like if I was 12 years old again, I could probably embark on a pitching career now, with the information that I have. But having Don as a longtime partner and now working with Joe Simpson, who was an outfielder, so I'm getting more than the position player perspective. Uecker was obviously a catcher. I feel like the catchers are fountains of information. But if I was going to go to the salient point, I go back to something I mentioned earlier, which is that I learned from Bob how to keep baseball and the broadcast in its proper perspective and to not take it too seriously, but have a good time. Try and entertain your listeners. They're not listening to hear you complain and moan and despair or anything like that. They're there to be entertained, and they want to hear how their favorite team is doing. To learn at such an early age the proper way, the proper perspective for doing this job, I think was the most important thing that I've learned from anybody with whom I've worked.
