Typical Day
"Gooooooooaaaaaaaalllllllllllll! Gooooooooaaaaaaaalllllllllllll!" Pretty much every professional soccer broadcaster during every professional soccer game ever broadcast
Sport Casterson announces just about every game played at the post-high school level in Omaha, Nebraska. That's more than you'd think; for one thing, Omaha is home to the college baseball World Series, so every summer, in addition to other events, Sport calls upwards of twenty ball games in the span of about eleven days.
After that tournament is over, with his throat worn out and wheezing, Sport sometimes wonders if maybe he picked the wrong career.
This isn't how he imagined things twelve years ago when he started down this path. He'd hoped by now to have an NBC or FOX contract to call prime time MLB and NFL games, or maybe NCAA. At this point, just to get out of Nebraska, he'd settle for a slot on ESPN announcing Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest.
Anyway, Sport wakes up at 9:30AM, maybe 10:00AM. You're often out late, being a sportscaster. Some games don't start until 8:00PM. and then there are the post game shows, interviews, checking the police scanner to see which players got arrested for disorderly conduct at after game parties, etc.
So since he usually doesn't get home until well after midnight and since most games don't start until early afternoon at the soonest. He sleeps in pretty regularly. Not too long though, because there is a lot of game prep to do.
The two baseball teams playing tonight, the Wisconsin Wombats and Minneapolis Minions, haven't played each other this season and Sport needs to review their stats. There are a lot of stats to review because baseball somehow generates more numbers than an entire IRS tax season. As soon as he gets to the stadium, roughly four hours before the first pitch, Sport starts his prep work by reviewing both teams' starting pitchers and their recent history.
How do they do against right handed batters and left handed batters, respectively? He reviews their catchers and how often they throw out base runners. How has the infield performed lately? What about the outfield? How are the bullpens? What about the batting lineups, who's hot, who's cold, how do these hitters usually perform against pitchers like these? Are they aware that by the 7th inning roughly half the spectators are asleep, and on and on and on.
Sport needs all this info because, with most ball games lasting around three hours, there's a lot of airtime to fill. Since Sport is being paid, management expects something more intelligent sounding than, "Next up is Tim Winklemier. Wonkelmeter? Wrinkeltimer? Number 8, how's that? The Shortstop, Tim Somethingorother." So information is key.
Not that everything has to be committed to memory. Sport and the other broadcaster each have, in addition to a microphone and a TV monitor showing the game's telecast, a computer with game stats past and present, as well as that repository of all required knowledge, Google. But they don't have time to look up every stat.
Dead air is bad news for broadcasters and, particularly with baseball, there's the potential for a lot of dead air. We once heard from a completely reputable source whose name we've long since forgotten that in an average baseball game there are only five minutes of actual game play. So after reviewing everything on the teams down to shoe size and favorite flavor of toothpaste, Sport had better be ready to keep the banter coming and keep it interesting.
After his prep work, Sport heads to the broadcast booth with the production team and his fellow broadcaster. It's time for the pregame show.
Sport and his Color Commentator, Earvin Johnson, once on the air, introduce themselves and then start talking about the game tonight, the teams, the individual players, the coaches and their histories, their histories against each other, the pitchers and their records, Earvin's fondness for pancakes, whether Sport should have that growth on his forearm looked at, etc.
Finally, just as the listeners are about to lose their will to live, the National Anthem plays, the pitcher throws the first pitch, and the game is on. This means it's time for Sport and Earvin to really go to work, which pretty much means sit there are talk about what everybody else is doing. So they do that; they talk about what everyone else is doing.
They try to keep it informative, clear, relatively concise, and witty, if possible. The good ones (and Sport is a good one) actually make the game experience a little better for the listener or viewer. And in Sport's case, people have noticed. The next day he gets a call from ESPN about backing up the guy who covers Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest.
Neat.