The Cape Cod Finishing School for Broadcasters
Every summer in the small vacation enclave, two young Joe Bucks–in-training test their mettle by play-calling under the watchful eye of a broadcasting YodaThe Cape Cod Finishing School for Broadcasters
Every summer in the small vacation enclave, two young Joe Bucks–in-training test their mettle by play-calling under the watchful eye of a broadcasting Yoda
Josh Schaefer is like a lot of summer interns. He arrives at work early and leaves late. He doesn’t make much money. He is excited about his future in the way old people forgot they ever were.
Josh also gets feedback from his boss. One night last month, it came via text message around 9 p.m.—or about the seventh inning. “Don’t say ‘just in the nick of time’ when you can say ‘safe’ or ‘out,’” Josh’s boss wrote. “Too many words. Your listener is thinking, ‘Spit it out.’”
Another text followed: “Add the detail of how close the play was AFTER you make the outcome clear.”
Josh is a play-by-play announcer for the Chatham Anglers, a team in the Cape Cod Baseball League. For most of the Cape’s beach-and-restaurant crowd, the nightly games between teams of college all-stars, at Chatham’s Veterans Field, are a chance to put a capper on a perfectly Rockwellian day.
But climb the stairs of the two-story, wooden press box behind home plate and you will find one of sports media’s great artistic workshops. Chatham is a finishing school for young play-by-play announcers. In the summer, college students come here to call 44 games in 55 days. They have their home run calls tweaked and the passive voice (“Motoring into second is Torkelson …”) scrubbed from their vocabulary. You walk into this press box a precocious game-caller and you might walk out Joe Buck.
On this night, the Anglers were hosting the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. Josh was calling the game with his 19-year-old partner, Cooper Boardman. Cooper and Josh are eerily similar down to their Vans shoes. “We are through and through the exact same human being,” Josh said. A recent poll of the best college announcers—yes, such things exist—ranked them 18th and 19th in the nation.
If you put Cooper and Josh on regional cable for an inning or two, your average baseball fan wouldn’t recognize the switch. They are really good. Moreover, they have the peculiar diction of baseball announcers: sing-songy and clipped at the same time. All they lack is seasoning.
This is what Dan D’Uva, their mentor, wants to give them this summer. D’Uva is the radio play-by-play voice of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights. He was once a Chatham intern. Now he’s Cooper and Josh’s boss, though he prefers they think of him as a coach. D’Uva likes to say of the press box, “This, to me, it’s a giant classroom.”
Tonight, D’Uva is in Las Vegas. But he’s listening to the game and pounding out instant feedback on his phone. He will text Josh: “When you say ‘big game in the east division’ and tell me Harwich is leading Orleans, I expect you to then tell me what place those two teams are in and how many points separate them from each other and from Chatham.”
Sometimes, when D’Uva hears an especially opaque call, he’ll text his announcers, “Tell me what happened.”
D’Uva also sends compliments. Josh scrolled through his messages and found a text from July 13. “Nicely done,” D’Uva wrote. “Just watch out for the phrase ‘good for …’” That line drive that was smacked to right? It wasn’t “good for” a base hit. It was just a base hit, period. These are the lessons you learn in the Cape Cod finishing school for broadcasters.
When Cooper and Josh met, it was like that meme where Spider-Man points at Spider-Man. It wasn’t just the shoes. They had both known they wanted to do play-by-play for years. That’s the thing about sports announcers—they tend to choose their destinies at an early age. It used to be a mandatory part of a play-by-play man’s biography that, as a kid, he turned down the TV so he could call a game himself. Josh did the same thing, but with his Xbox.
Cooper, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, was a broadcasting prodigy. He won the Yankee junior broadcaster contest in 2012. He got to sit in the booth and watch his hero, John Sterling, do a game. Cooper started applying for the Chatham job when he was a junior in high school.
Josh, who’s from Los Angeles, was inspired by the L.A. Kings’ Bob Miller. He wanted to announce games so badly that he created the sports broadcasting program at his high school. As he got older, Josh found he cared more about play-by-play announcers than he did the players. “If I happened to notice Vin Scully in the parking lot,” he said, “I would be a lot more excited than if I saw Matt Kemp.”
In Chatham, Cooper and Josh “spend every waking moment together,” Cooper said. Over the first three weeks of their internship, they left each other’s side only twice. “I went to church one week, and he was sleeping,” Cooper said. “And then one time, we went to the gas station, and he went to the bathroom.”
When they’re on the air, you can see the results of this instant-friendship. Josh raises his finger when he wants to make a point or call a pitch, and Cooper gives a deep nod to cede the floor to him. It’s like watching two mimes act out an incredibly polite political debate.
In the 2001 movie Summer Catch, Freddie Prinze Jr. played a Chatham A’s pitcher who shotgunned beers and lusted after Jessica Biel. This doesn’t happen when you’re the A’s announcer.
“We do have a social life,” Josh said. “Less than I think both of us would like. But this”—he gestured at the wooden press box—“is why we’re here.”
The Cape Cod finishing school was born of that kind of ambition. In 2002, D’Uva and his New Jersey high school classmate Guy Benson came to the Cape and told the Chatham brain trust they wanted to be the team’s announcers. No team in the league had announcers. But D’Uva and Benson had an unusual sense of purpose. “They were like laser beams,” Bob Sherman, the A’s vice president, said.
D’Uva and Benson called games featuring Evan Longoria, Andrew Miller, and Todd Frazier. When D’Uva graduated from college and began his long climb through the minor leagues, he volunteered to run the Chatham internship program. (After taking a U-turn into politics, Benson became a pundit known as the “Millennial Conservative.”) When former Chatham interns started getting jobs at MLB Network and Colbert and with various minor league teams, word got around the broadcasting factories of Syracuse and Arizona State that the Chatham job was the one to score.
“This is the best summer college baseball league for the players,” Cooper said. “It’s the same way for all the media, too.” Each year, D’Uva gets more than 100 applications for two positions.
D’Uva is a gentle but exacting mentor, as if Scully were crossbred with Yoda. When D’Uva is in town, he sits behind the announcers in the press box and coaches them in real time. The effect is like Bob Fosse coaching an ingenue dancer. The morning after a game, D’Uva and his pupils are back in the press box. “Who wants to go first?” D’Uva will ask. One announcer will volunteer, and D’Uva will play an inning of their play-by-play. After giving his notes, D’Uva will listen to an inning from the other announcer.
Sometimes, these sessions are best held in private. As D’Uva told me: “If Josh is late for the pitch all the time, or if he’s late on balls hit to the outfield, he might not want to say in front of Cooper, ‘That’s because Cooper won’t shut up!’”
D’Uva has diagnosed his pupils’ weaknesses so skillfully that they can now diagnose themselves. “I tend to talk very fast, in case you haven’t noticed,” Cooper said. “For him”—he nodded at Josh—“it’s the passive voice. Saying ‘chugging into second with an RBI double is Longoria’ instead of ‘Longoria chugs into second with an RBI double.’ Which sounds simple, but it isn’t.”
From the back of the booth, D’Uva also supplies the kind of announcerly wisdom you only get after a few dozen rainouts and a few million Marriott points. D’Uva has koans. For example: “Boring baseball is bad.” Or: “Don’t empty the clip”—meaning, save some good anecdotes in case your game turns into a 10-0 blowout.
In June, Chatham roared back from a six-run deficit against the Bourne Braves and tied the score. The A’s had runners at second and third. The Braves decided to intentionally walk the batter to load the bases. This is a kind of thing that makes an announcer’s mind drift. But D’Uva told Boardman, “Do not miss a pitch.” Sure enough, the third intentional ball sailed past the catcher, and the go-ahead run scored from third.
The next month, Josh was on the mic during another intentional walk. Cooper, who was doing “color,” silently but insistently pointed at the plate. He had internalized D’Uva’s lesson. Do not miss a pitch.
When you attend the Cape Cod finishing school for broadcasters, you don’t just submit to daily critiques. D’Uva is waging a war against baseball broadcasting cliché. Young play-by-play announcers’ heads are filled with clichés: “free pass,” “the bump,” “knock,” “new slab of lumber,” “campaign,” “Hi again, everybody,” “Farewell from …” They use these words and phrases because they think that’s how announcers are supposed to sound.
After calling the first inning against Yarmouth-Dennis, Cooper swiveled around in his chair. “I said ‘clubbed’ three times in that inning,” he announced to the press box. “I don’t know why. I don’t say that.”
D’Uva told me: “One thing I’ll say is, ‘Don’t be a pretender. You’re not acting the part of a broadcaster. You are a broadcaster.’”
This is a universal artistic challenge for young people: How do you outgrow skillful mimicry? Over the summer, Cooper and Josh have tried to delete certain phrases from their vocabulary. Baseball announcers tend to say “all summer long.” “All summer” means the same thing and it’s shorter. Announcers will bring the audience back from commercial by saying in their most Scullyesque voice, “Inning no. 2 …” The “second inning” is closer to actual human speech.
Young play-by-play announcers love to polish their home run calls. During one game, Cooper said: “Back at the track, he looks up, it’s gone!” D’Uva noted that the outfielder hadn’t actually looked up at the ball as it sailed over the fence. It was a harmless error, but part of banishing cliché is insisting on accuracy. Another D’Uva koan is, “Say what you see.”
Cooper said: “I want to”—he switched to his Sterling imitation—“talk like a broadcaster. The thing from Dan has been just like … don’t. Just talk like a normal person. At the end of the day, people know you’re faking it. I am learning how to talk in my own voice.”
The innings Cooper and Josh call are carefully negotiated. If Cooper calls the first three innings of a game, Josh will call the next four, and then Cooper will return for the final two. If the home team doesn’t bat in the bottom of the ninth, that makes for a fairly even 4.5-to-4.0-inning split.
Chatham games are only available via streaming, so the exact nature of the audience tends to be nebulous. “I don’t know who I’m talkin’ to,” Tom Holliday, the team’s manager, said. Listenership can swell to a few thousand, according to D’Uva, including college coaches who want to make sure their pitchers don’t get overworked. (A college coach reserves that right for himself.) At Veterans Field, the broadcast is piped out in the merchandise store and at the snack shack. It can sometimes be heard at Short ’n‘ Sweet Ice Cream on Main Street.
If young play-by-play announcers are certain what they want to do with their lives, they’re also certain they’ll be great at it. “It reminds me so much of watching players,” Sherman, the team’s vice president, said. “There’s not one of them that doesn’t think they’ll be broadcasting for a professional team at the major league level.”
The next gig for Cooper and Josh is calling play-by-play in low-A or rookie ball. This will probably involve a trade-down in scenery: Niles, Ohio, say, instead of the beaches of Falmouth. They will also lose their mentor, who is probably the last person who will coach them in such a sustained and rigorous way. “They have been diligent in their approach and preparation to calling games, but also in their desire to improve,” D’Uva said. “And that makes teacher happy.”
On this night, the Anglers’ game against Yarmouth-Dennis ended with a called strikeout. Cooper unfurled a cliché-free, say-what-you-see call: “Strike three! Ashford caught looking, and that does it! The Chatham Anglers knock off the Cape League’s best team tonight by a final score of 7 to 3!”
In the press box, Cooper and Josh shared a fist bump. Then Josh tore off his headset and scrambled down to the field for the postgame. He is a summer intern, and the last thing he wanted was to miss a deadline.
