As I said in an article a while back one of the blogs I read frequently is 38cliches.com. It’s a blog about the current state of the Boston Red Sox radio broadcasts on WRKO AM, mostly concentrating on the poor job that Glenn Geffner has done behind the microphone. As someone with 23 years of experience (1983-2006) behind a microphone, 14 of them with Clear Channel (and it’s many predecessors), I feel that I am kind of empowered to write about broadcasting and possibly offer insights that only someone who has done the job can offer.
When I was a kid growing up I loved sports, especially baseball. I knew all the teams, players and stats and that led to my grandmother suggesting I become a radio announcer. At age 8 I was hooked, it was all I wanted to do. And for 23 years I was able to do it. I can only imagine a similar conversation with Geffner and his grandmother.
Grandma: “Gee Glenn you sure do know a lot about those players”.
Young Glenn: “Yea grandma it’s easy all I have to do is read the information out loud from the newspaper. Maybe someday I could have a job on the radio reading statistics and telling my stories, they’re so much more important that the actual game”.
Grandma: “Well Glenn, not everyone is cut out to do radio announcing but there’s no reason why you couldn’t type the stats up for all the radio, television and newspaper guys. I think that’d be a much better job for you.”
For 13 seasons Red Sox baseball on the radio was called by Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano. While no announce team or singular announcer is ever perfect, these two had a good chemistry and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Sure there were dumb stories, times when they tuned each other out and they made mistakes but everyone does.After his contract expired last fall the Red Sox and Entercom Radio, who own the Red Sox radio broadcast rights, decided not to renew the contract of Trupiano and find another announcer to sit along side Castiglione. It was rumored as far back as last September that “Trupe” was out and that the Red Sox vice president of communications, Geffner was in. While the rumors of his demise piled up in the media and amongst his media friends Trupiano was left out in the cold by Sox management and Entercom.
The biggest complaint anyone seems to have with Trupiano was his missed calls on balls he thought were homeruns and ended up 
being long outs. Many baseball announcer’s make this mistake, although in the last few years Trupiano seemed to do it more and more and his booming “Way Back” calls became a cartoonish character of himself and led to WEEI’s (Entercom Radio) “The Big Show” to use the calls to poke fun of Trupiano.
Many fans, according to the blog posts I have been reading, preferred Castiglione to Trupiano but none really had an intense dislike for the way “Trupe” called a game. In fact as the number two announcer, Castiglione is called the “Voice of the Boston Red Sox”, Trupiano was far more than adequate. As the second voice in the booth, his job was to interact with Castiglione as a color analyst during the innings in which Joe did the play-by-play and then they would switch roles. The way the Sox do games is Joe would call innings 1,2,5,8,9 and Jerry called innings 3,4,6,7. In fact the Sox still handle the assignment the same this season regardless of Castiglione’s booth partner for the night, either Geffner or Dave O’Brien.
Over the last few seasons I have had the opportunity to watch out of market games and listen to out of market games. Many of the announcer’s employed by other teams and broadcast outlets are inferior compared to Sox broadcasts of previous years. Only a handful of baseball announcers can even hold a microphone to the group that did radio in Boston. Some teams have a good lead man and a decent or average second guy. Some teams in smaller markets have the decent or average lead guy and the below average second.
A team of the Red Sox stature should have two quality individuals calling games. The reason for having two well-spoken, highly regarded announcers is a two-fold argument. First, the team can afford to pay the talent. Secondly more people listen to games on the radio and larger segments of games on the radio than watch on TV, particularly on weekends and for day games. These guys are the voices of the franchise, the people the fans associate with. When Joe and Jerry did public appearances they used to get good crowds on their own without the aid of having a player. People related to them.
Sadly, with the change in the booth, this has changed. Some wondered whether “the R(ed) S(ox) experience would (be) forever damaged if Trupe were replaced”? Well I think that after about 110 games we can pretty much answer that question with a resounding yes. As RedSoxAnni put it early in the year in a Royal Rooters post, “it’s going to be a long, frustrating summer for those of us who have to listen to parts of games on the radio”.
Another Royal Rooters poster, Derive, added this about the cohesion in the new booth. “Glenn Geffner, I’m sorry to say, is not on O’Brien’s level, or anywhere near it. Compared to O’Brien and Joe C., he has a very coltish, unpoised, unpolished delivery. Nor does he seem to have a feel for when (during the innings that Joe calls) to back off and leave the mic to Joe. As comfortable as Joe already sounds with O’Brien, I get the sense that he’s equally uncomfortable, at least at this point, working with Geffner”.
While the addition of O’Brien, who comes to us from the Florida Marlins and New York Mets as well as being the voice of Monday Night baseball on ESPN, has been a welcome one the addition of Geffner has not. O’Brien has the Trupiano pipes with out the dumb jokes while Geffner, as one pundant pointed out, “brings nothing to the table”. Geffner, a disciple of Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, brings kind of the “Life is Beautiful style of announcing” to the broadcasts. He rarely, if ever, criticizes the players or heaven forbid the organization in anyway. Whereas Castiglione and O’Brien with much more announcing experience than Geffner have learned how to do it properly while making a point and not pissing anyone off.
Geffner, according to RedSox.com, began his broadcasting career while a student at Northwestern University, calling Wildcats baseball, football and basketball. He was the voice of the Rochester Red Wings and made his Major League debut broadcasting games for the San Diego Padres during a six-year stay in San Diego during which he also served as the club’s Director of Public Relations.
After having come to Boston to work in PR department in 2003, Geffner was made the Red Sox Vice President of Communications in April of 2006. A position he held for less than a year. Or did he? Speculation recently by Lou Clinton at 38 Cliches is that Geffner still may hold this position. He recently found online a listing from 2005 of all the MLB PR guys with Geffner’s email, office extension and cell phone number listed. They all still work as of the other day. While broadcasters are hired by the broadcasting property and approved by the team, it may not seem odd that he would have email and the other stuff. But you’d think if Geffner has it, Castiglione and O’Brien would have it as well. Well they don’t. So does this mean that Geffner still quietly holds that position, one that is no longer listed publicly in the Red Sox front office directory? If it does, as Lou puts it, this means that the Sox have a house whore calling their games in O’Brien’s absence.
Geffner’s game calls are very vanilla. The stats and his stories are more important to him than the actual game. He actually seems to let the play happen, then he recalls it, rather than calling the play as it goes down. What’s the difference you ask? Well if you call the play as it happens, your voice has natural inflections of excitement or dejection and you use more descriptive words because you’re talking about what is happening before you’re eyes. If you wait for the play to happen and then recall it, you loose that as you become a teller of history instead of someone relating an ongoing experience. You also loose detail.
As a radio announcer detail is very important. If you listen to “Obie” on ESPN doing a TV game his way of calling the game is different from his radio call on WRKO. The reason is because you have the picture in front of you he is just there to add to its description. On the radio, the person calling the play is also your eyes. It’s like the country song by Lionel Cartwright where he talks about the games he used to listen to growing up laying in bed, “he saw it all on the radio”.
Castiglione and O’Brien get this, Geffner does not. No one does it any better than Los Angeles Dodgers voice Vin Scully. Scully does something no other major league baseball announcer does. He calls all of his games solo. No second announcer, it’s all Vin, all the time. All nine innings and you know what, it’s glorious. Scully, granted is an old timer, but he does it right. He was taught by Red Barber and Mel Allen in the before television days. He paints a picture, as if he is Michangelo with a microphone instead of a paintbrush. Geffner just doesn’t get it.
At best Geffner is suited to be a minor league announcer. He sounds like a guy you’d find calling A or AA ball while driving through Podunk on a Sunday afternoon while scanning your AM radio dial. As Chad Finn points out in his blog, Touching All The Bases, “I think I’ve finally figured it out. Glenn Geffner sounds like a Connecticut School of Broadcasting newbie who listened to way too much Bob Costas growing up”.
This is also far from Geffner’s first big league rodeo which makes it all the more disturbing. John Maffei of the North County Times wrote this about Geffner’s 2002 radio broadcast experience as the third voice in the San Diego Padres booth when talking about the newest Padre announcer, Tim Flannery. ” There is definitely a mutual respect in the booth, which wasn’t the case in 2002, when Padres media relations director Glenn Geffner was thrown into the mix as a third voice in spring training. Geffner was competent and had several years experience as a minor-league play-by-play man, but he was basically forced on (Ted) Leitner and (Jerry) Coleman and was effectively frozen out of the booth.”
While not a knock on Geffner’s announcing ability it shows how being in Lucchino’s hip pocket can get you into places. Geffner has long been rumored to be one of Lucchino’s boys.
If Maffei couldn’t find fault with Geffner’s ability it sure didn’t stop Red Sox blogger Fragile Freddy from getting into the act. While handing out first half grades to players, management and the radio and television broadcast teams he had this to say:
“Which brings us to the ugly stepchild of the group, Glenn Geffner. The guy has been just brutal this year. His voice is grating but more importantly he lacks an understanding of the pacing of the game of baseball. Everything he says feels rushed and he seems like he just is determined to get through his notes for the game rather than letting the game dictate what he talks about. Obviously you don’t want dead air on radio, but the occasional moment to catch one’s breath is acceptable.”
Denton at AOL Fanhouse adds to the Geffner bashing:
“While O’Brien has grown on me to the point of being tolerable, Geffner has gone the other way. His too-smarmy-for-radio voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard”. Denton also says “When I hear him on a broadcast, I am programmed to reach for the dial – kind of like when that really annoying, chatty guy at work heads for your cube, you quickly grab the phone to avoid listening to him. Don’t get me wrong, I tried. I really tried to warm up to him, but when I began to sense even “Castig” was tuning him out, what was I supposed to do”?
Pragerblog adds this about Geffner which pretty much sums up the feeling of most fans of Red Sox baseball on the radio. “I haven’t heard Geffner be anything but obsequious, not only toward Sox players, but those on the other team, and whomever else arises in the conversation. I don’t wish him ill, but I do hope he’ll go away, soon”.
It’s great advice. Larry please make Glenn go away. The sooner the better.
