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Play Ball!
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
By: Brad Herzog, Cornell Alumni Magazine
High above home plate, in the visitors' radio booth at San Diego's Petco Park,
Colorado Rockies announcer Jack Corrigan '74 is surrounded by the tools of his
trade: binoculars, a laptop for electronic scorekeeping, a tiny television monitor,
Padres and Rockies media guides and stat sheets, and a booklet of sponsor ads
to be woven into the evening's narrative. Corrigan's announcing partner of six
seasons, Jeff Kingery, sits to his right. The engineer/producer mans a soundboard
atop a platform behind them.
It's all one needs to do the announcer's job--that, and an endless supply
of baseball stories. There was that time in Detroit when a foul ball knocked
Corrigan's sound engineer unconscious. And that run at the end of the 2007 season,
when Colorado won twenty-one of twenty-two games to reach the World Series -- "the
most unbelievable time I've been through in sports," says Corrigan, who
wears a National League championship ring on his right hand and a worn Cornell
cap on his head.
At the moment, doing a pre-game interview with a Denver radio station, Corrigan
is telling a tale about Mickey Mantle shuffling up to the plate with a hangover
and hitting a pinch-hit home run against Corrigan's beloved Cleveland Indians
in the early Sixties. Back then, Cleveland's futility represented an opportunity
for young Jack Corrigan. He and a neighbor would lug a tape recorder to cavernous
Municipal Stadium, sit in an empty section of the upper deck, and practice their
play-by-play. "I've wanted to do this since I was ten," he says in
a strong, radio-perfect voice. "I was the kid who would turn down the sound
on the TV and pretend I was the announcer, until my brothers and sisters would
throw pillows at me and tell me to shut up." Some two decades later, in
1985, Corrigan was back in Municipal Stadium, only then he was beginning a seventeen-year
stint as the Indians' television announcer.
A wide receiver on the Big Red football team, Corrigan tried out for a couple
of professional squads before pursuing a graduate degree at Kent State, where
he focused on broadcasting. He wrote his master's thesis on NFL Films, the production
company that changed the way people watch pro football, showing how a game can
become a drama through the use of narrative. Corrigan began his broadcasting
career in Youngstown, Ohio, and then moved on to Richmond, Virginia, before
making his way back to Cleveland. Over the years, he broadcast everything from
college basketball and minor league baseball to pro soccer and even table tennis.
"As you develop, you start to get a style," he says. "That's
what I tell aspiring broadcasters --you have to find your voice."
Corrigan's seventeen seasons in Cleveland represented the longest tenure of
any broadcaster in Indians history, but when the team moved to a new network
in 2002 he found himself looking for a job. He took a year off and began writing
his first novel, Warning Track, a self-published tale of a star outfielder's
foray into the use of illegal supplements. Corrigan, who was a history major
on the Hill, is currently finishing his second book, a fictional account of
the sinking of the S.S. Leopoldville on Christmas Eve in 1944. (His father was
among the rescuers; at least 750 American soldiers perished.)
When Corrigan was hired by the Rockies in 2003, he moved from TV to radio -- where
the ability to "inform, entertain, and support" (as he puts it) is
fueled by the descriptive abilities of the announcer. "On the radio,"
he says, "you are the analyst, the producer-director, and the play-by-play
guy." Corrigan, who has only about eighteen days off during the six-month
regular season, tries to have fun in the booth. He'll throw in pop culture
references, shout his signature home run call ("It's touch-'em-all time!"),
and fill gaps when necessary, as in mid-April, when the Padres and Rockies
played a twenty-two-inning marathon that lasted six hours and sixteen minutes.
"You have to like the person you're sitting next to," says Corrigan,
nodding to Kingery, "just due to the sheer amount of time you're spending
together."
But Corrigan is well aware that he is the storyteller, not the story. He remembers
a piece of advice he got from legendary Detroit Tigers baseball announcer Ernie
Harwell during his first year on the air. "He told me, 'You know you're
doing a good job if at least a half-dozen times in the course of a game, the
fans can hear the hotdog vendor.' Every once in a while, it's okay to shut up."
Click here
to listen to a clip of Corrigan talking about his book Warning Track, as found
on the Colorado Rockies team site.
