By Charles Fountain
Photography by Mary Beth Montgomery

It is a typically wretched May evening at Fenway Park. The temperature hovers in the mid-forties. The wind blows in hard from centerfield.

In the television broadcast booth, the window is closed tight against the chill, keeping the crowd sounds out and the smoke from Jerry Remy's cigarette in. The room is stuffy, spartan, cluttered, and not overly clean. But the view from this particular office is among the sweetest in all creation. And the work? Well, let's be honest here. The guys sitting in this booth have the job a lot of people would run down their mothers for.

Who among us, really — investment banker, cop, pediatrician, cab driver, lawyer, chef, construction worker, tenured professor — wouldn't give up all the approbation, the security, the financial success, and the power for a chance to be the Red Sox play-by-play guy?

Playing for the Sox is dream one, of course. But reality sets in early there, so we transition easily into seeing ourselves call the action. Hell, we've done that all along, haven't we? The heroics of childhood fantasies come with a soundtrack: "THAT BALL IS GOING. GOING. GONE! HIS FIFTH HOME RUN OF THE GAME! A NEW MAJOR LEAGUE RECORD!"

Growing up on a farm off a dirt road in Madison, New Hampshire, Don Orsillo, AS'91, used to broadcast imaginary games for his younger sister's edification. In the days before satellite television, when Red Sox baseball reached the far corners of New England only through radio, the voice that fired Orsillo's boyhood imagination was Ken Coleman's. It was the twilight of Carl Yastrzemski. The heyday of Dennis Eckersley, Dwight Evans, Jim Rice, and a homegrown second baseman named Jerry Remy.

Orsillo's parents tell him he had made his career goals clear by age twelve. He remembers no epiphany. He just remembers always wanting to be the Red Sox voice and, moreover, always believing he would make it happen. Through his young years in New Hampshire, through high school in Los Angeles and college at Northeastern, through ten years of broadcasting in the minors, he never lost his focus or his determination.

And today, it's Orsillo's voice that fires the imaginations of young dreamers. For 130 games a season, the New England Sports Network — NESN, for short — carries his Red Sox telecasts into millions of homes across New England and, via various satellite sports packages, into untold others throughout the nation.

Game's on: Orsillo and Jerry Remy kick off another telecast.

FENWAY'S TIMELESS SPELL

At thirty-four, Orsillo still has the boy-it's-a-thrill-to-be-here wonder of a kid from New Hampshire. "Driving into work, I come past Northeastern and come into Fenway from the back," he says. "And it's always jarring to see the park and to think I'm coming to work here.

"There's always such an electricity to the place, even five hours before game time," he says. "It's a little like the first time I ever came here as a kid. I don't think many people get excited about seeing the place where they work. It happens to me every day."

At the same time, as he completes his fourth season with Boston, Orsillo's boyish enthusiasm has blended with a polish, a maturity, and an easy familiarity that suggest he's going to be part of Red Sox summers for a long time to come. "There's no question he's growing into this job," says Bill Griffith, radio and TV sports columnist at the Boston Globe.

"The keys [to broadcast success and acceptance] are time and ability," Griffith says. "It's how the public perceives and embraces you. I'd say the clearest proof of Orsillo's success is the lack of any negative response. If the public doesn't like somebody, they speak out pretty quickly. I get no complaints about Don Orsillo."

Up in the booth as a telecast approaches, Orsillo and partner Remy, who banter so easily on the air, say little to each another. It's not a frostiness, exactly. It's more like the subtle tension in a locker room before a game. Each is busy with his own game prep, highlighting statistics and game notes likely to be worthy of mention between pitches. They tape the telecast's open some thirty minutes before game time and finally take their seats just before the Red Sox take the field.

For the next three hours, Remy sits hunched forward, resting on his elbows. His eyes leave the monitor hanging just outside the window only to check the notes and stats taped to the wall on his right, or to quickly review a defensive alignment on the playing field.

Orsillo sits erect, his palms flat on the table in front of him, his eyes alternating between the monitor and the field — monitor when the bases are empty, field when runners are on. "You can't see a runner break from first on the monitor," he explains. "You have to be looking at the field. But there's no question the centerfield camera gives you the best look at a pitch."

Broadcasting a baseball game requires the concentration of a surgeon. A mistake's consequences may not be as dire, but they are every bit as evident. There are upwards of 250 pitches in a game, one every thirty seconds or so. The game could turn on any one of them.

And when the big moment comes, you had better not be staring at a stat sheet, or looking at your scorecard, or glancing at the promo you've just been handed to read after the next batter, or distracted by the producer's voice in your headset giving you the night's attendance or Curt Schilling's pitch count. The big moment is Judgment Day.

"It's everything," says Orsillo. "You can be perfect for three and a half hours, but if the play of the year takes place and you screw it up, the whole day is lost. Because that's the one highlight that's going to be played all over New England on the eleven o'clock news."

Still the new kid: "Check back with me in thirty years."

"YOU'RE KINDA GETTING RIPPED HERE"

An entire broadcasting career can be defined by how you handle a big moment. Russ Hodges had "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" Al Michaels, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"

Improbably, Orsillo's first big moment came in his very first Boston game — Hideo Nomo's no-hitter against Baltimore, April 2001. And the next day, the rookie awoke to find himself sizzling under the white-hot light that is New England's obsession with all things Red Sox.

John Dennis and Gerry Callahan — the morning hosts on WEEI, the Boston sports-radio station that serves as the flagship for Red Sox broadcasts — were mocking Orsillo's understated call of the final pitch. They were suggesting it was not at all equal to the moment. That, by extension, the new broadcaster up from Pawtucket was not equal to the job.

Any listener of testosterone-fueled WEEI knows it's schoolyard-bully radio. And the talk-show barbs were countered by kinder assessments from Orsillo's bosses and colleagues, and from Bill Griffith and Jim Baker in their TV columns for the Globe and the Boston Herald. Still, the barbs stung, creating a

jangle of emotions that come with simultaneously realizing a lifelong dream, witnessing history on your first day in the job, and taking a verbal shovel upside the head.

"I was surprised," Orsillo says, "because I'd had calls after the game from NESN people and from some producers at ESPN congratulating me on the game. So I had gone to bed feeling pretty good, especially since all I could think during the ninth inning was ‘Don't screw it up.'

"Then in the morning," he says, "I got a call in the hotel from a WEEI producer, and he tells me, ‘You're kinda getting ripped here. Would you like to come on?' I declined. It was just too much right then."

"It's hard for a guy when he first comes to the big leagues," says Jerry Remy. "You're afraid to let yourself go. It's just like playing. When you come to the big leagues, you're trying to prove yourself."

Orsillo has apparently since proven himself to Dennis and Callahan. For the past two seasons, he's had a regular weekly gig on their show. But what reassures him more is the perspective a couple years of experience has given him. "You know, I've seen that broadcast on ESPN Classic," he says. "And the call I made: ‘Hideo Nomo has no-hit the Baltimore Orioles!' I would call it exactly the same way today."

The same call made today would likely earn Orsillo praise — certainly no jeers — even in the most cynical corners of talk radio. That's because the true measure of a baseball announcer's stature with fans is not the big call, or wit and glibness during a slow game in August, or dexterity with details, but the entire package. What Red Sox radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione calls "wearability."

"The whole thing is letting people get to know you," says Remy, echoing Castiglione's and Griffith's sentiments. It's a process that takes some time, easily a decade or more, rather like the languid pace of the game itself.

Orsillo is still the new kid on the Red Sox broadcasting block. Remy has been doing it for seventeen seasons. Sean McDonough, who does the Friday night telecasts on UPN 38, has been with the Sox since 1988. In the radio booth next door, Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano have been behind their microphones for twenty-two and thirteen years, respectively.

Broadcasting baseball games is a job people tend to hang on to. Curt Gowdy was the Sox announcer for fifteen years, Ken Coleman for nearly twenty, Ned Martin for more than thirty — making them as much a part of team history as Yastrzemski, Ted Williams, and Carlton Fisk. Across the game, it is the same story: Ernie Harwell with the Tigers, Jack Brickhouse with the Cubs, Mel Allen with the Yankees, Vin Scully with the Dodgers — each built a glittering reputation over a span of generations. (By contrast, Dick Stockton, Jon Miller, and Bob Starr — though fine announcers all — stayed in the Fenway booth too brief a time to leave historical footprints in Boston.)

"Check back with me in thirty years," says Orsillo, when asked where he might fit into the pantheon. "I am aware every day that I do the same job as those guys. I'm reminded of it when I walk by the pictures of Ned Martin and Ken Coleman that are just outside the broadcast booths. But I would never presume to put myself in their class."

Yet he dreams that someday he may be. It's a goal you'd expect of a kid who always set his sights high, who took advantage of every career break that came his way.

CLIMBING INTO THE BOOTH

Orsillo's first big break came at Northeastern, when he took the popular sports broadcasting class Joe Castiglione teaches. Realizing the sophomore was bright, ambitious, and attentive to detail, Castiglione picked him as his broadcast intern. Orsillo soon found himself sitting in the Red Sox radio booth between Castiglione and Ken Coleman, his boyhood idol.

Coleman retired after that season, so when Orsillo came back for his second year as intern, he sat next to yet another idol — Bob Starr, whose California Angels broadcasts he'd listened to in high school.

As much as anyone can predict outcomes in a chancy business like broadcasting, Castiglione felt Orsillo had a shot at making it. "Well," Castiglione says today, "he had the pipes," radiospeak for a broadcast-quality voice. "And he was very smart, and very good at networking."

But the odds of going from the top of the class to the top of the profession — even at the minor-league level — are not good. Tougher, even, than becoming a player. Colleges graduate more broadcasting majors than baseball players. Yet each year, close to a thousand college players are offered the chance to play minor-league ball. No more than a couple dozen broadcasting jobs open up among the 180 minor-league teams.

Orsillo knew all this as he finished up his senior year. Still, he sent out 120 resumés and tapes, to teams and stations across the nation. The call he never doubted would come was practically a local one. The Pittsfield Mets offered him $1,500 to be the second announcer on their road-game radio broadcasts, three innings per game, and to serve as the public-address announcer for home games.

Not $1,500 a week, or a month. He'd get $1,500 for the entire season. At seventy games, that broke down to a little more than $21 per game. He'd made $25 a game as Castiglione's intern. Even so, Orsillo didn't hesitate. He graduated from Northeastern on June 16. Two days later, he was in the booth in Watertown, New York, calling his first game.

Pittsfield rents are not Boston rents, and the worldly obligations of a single guy just out of college are not great. Still, $1,500 doesn't go far. "I was very lucky to have parents who were able to help me and willing to help me with my rent and other expenses," says Orsillo. He spent two years with Pittsfield, augmenting his income and resumé with a winter broadcasting job for the American Hockey League's Springfield Indians. That job paid $5,000 per season, bringing his annual broadcast earnings up to $6,500, or $125 a week.

In 1993, thanks to Mike Ryan, director of broadcast operations for the New York Mets, Orsillo got a radio job with the Mets' Double A Eastern League affiliate in Binghamton. Ryan was encouraging, and Orsillo began thinking he might one day make it to the Shea Stadium booth.

"Every year, there was a rumor Bob Murphy was going to retire," Orsillo says of the legendary announcer who, with Casey Stengel, was around at the Mets' inception back in 1962. "But of course it never happened." (Murphy left the Mets only last fall, and died last month at the age of seventy-nine.)

The young broadcaster quickly matured under the keen ear of Binghamton general manager R. C. Reuteman. "I'd say, ‘The pitch was fouled away,'" Orsillo remembers, "and he'd say, ‘Be more precise. Fouled where? First base? Third? Ground foul? Pop?'

"If I missed something," Orsillo continues, "he was on the phone right after the game: ‘Bottom of the third, two out, play at second. You missed it.' I learned pretty quickly I'd better not miss anything."

READY FOR THE CALL

Orsillo regularly sent tapes of his broadcasts to Castiglione, partly to stay in touch, partly to seek advice. He says he took something from all the announcers he interned with — Castiglione, Coleman, Starr. Anyone who's heard him do a Red Sox game has also noticed he sounds something like Sean McDonough; Orsillo believes that's because the echo of Ned Martin can be heard in both his and McDonough's voices.

But the voice he claims influenced him most belongs to Yankees radio announcer John Sterling, best known for his articulation of a New York victory. "Yankees win!" Sterling says. "Thhhhhhhhhhhheeeeee Yyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaannnnnnnkees win!"

"I'm not crazy about his singing at the end of the game," says Orsillo with a smile (he knows how Sterling's signature grates on Red Sox fans' nerves). "But I really like his pacing, the way he delivers the information, his voice articulation and depth, how he can raise his voice without screaming."

Orsillo's broadcasting maturation was the least of his good fortune in Binghamton. He also met wife Lisa there during his second season. They were married in 1997, the year after he left Binghamton to take a job with the Pawtucket Red Sox.

Pawtucket gave Orsillo his first annual salary with benefits. He did the radio broadcasts and served as the club's community relations director. He and Lisa began making a life for themselves in Providence. But they didn't buy a house — they just extended their apartment lease six months at a time — because Orsillo wanted to be ready when the call came.

Being ready for the call from the majors is what Triple A is all about. It dominates all thoughts, enters all conversations. "I used to iron his shirts," says former Pawtucket manager and current Oakland Athletics manager Ken Macha. "He would come into the clubhouse when we were leaving for a road trip, and his shirt would be all rumpled. I told him, ‘If you're going to make the big leagues, you've got to look like a big leaguer.' And I'd make him take his shirt off right there."

In so many ways, Triple A is the cruelest of all the minors. Triple A travels by plane instead of bus. The cities are bigger and more interesting. The salaries are near-livable. But the big leagues are at once achingly close and frustratingly far away.

During the ten years Orsillo spent broadcasting in the minors, only four announcers graduated to the big leagues. When he looked up the road to Fenway, the view was especially discouraging. Castiglione, Trupiano, McDonough, and NESN play-by-play guy Bob Kurtz were all well-ensconced and popular voices. None was likely within twenty years of retirement.

But in fall 2000, Orsillo's disappointment at missing daughter Sydney's birth — she had arrived while he was in Toledo on a road trip — was offset by a stroke of luck. McDonough was calling some college football telecasts on ABC and had to miss a pair of Red Sox games on Fox 25. Orsillo was asked to fill in, his unfamiliarity with television more than balanced by his knowledge of the game and the team, and his readiness for the opportunity.

Not long thereafter, Kurtz, who'd succeeded Ned Martin eight years before, announced he was taking a job with the National Hockey League's Minnesota Wild.

Orsillo was no shoo-in to replace Kurtz. He seemed, in fact, quite a long shot. NESN already had Bob Rodgers in house, or it could have had its pick of national talent. But, with the blessing of

the Red Sox front office, NESN president Bob Whitelaw offered Orsillo the job.

RED SOX NATION TUNES IN

The radio guy had arrived at the threshold of his life's ambition. Problem was, he didn't know a damn thing about television.

"Joe Castiglione gave me the best advice," Orsillo says. "He told me that television [broadcasting] wasn't telling the story. It was providing captions for the pictures."

Orsillo's role carried another responsibility: "The job of the play-by-play guy is to set up the analyst," Castiglione says.

Luckily, Orsillo took his major-league seat alongside the most accomplished and popular analyst in Red Sox history. "I learned about the big leagues and I learned about television from Jerry Remy," he says.

The gracious Remy asserts he's learned from his young partner as well. "The guys I've worked with have all been responsible for bringing something out in me," he says. "I think Don's brought out a little more levity, got me to try to make the game more entertaining."

In the seventh inning on this night in May, with the Red Sox ahead 11-2, Orsillo asks Remy about Wally. Remy adopted the Wally character as the Red Sox mascot a couple of seasons ago, imbuing him with a whole personality, history, and jet-set lifestyle.

A six-inch beanbag Wally generally sits in a tiny Adirondack chair on the desk between Remy and Orsillo. But tonight he sits astride a miniature mechanical bull made by a New Hampshire viewer. With Orsillo's prompting, Remy is off on an inning-long, between-pitch riff of nonsense about Wally's skills on the bull.

"A lot of the time, the game's just not that interesting," says Orsillo. "Those times, people are looking to be entertained. But there's a fine line you've got to be careful you never cross."

"It's always about the baseball," says Remy. "Our job is to entertain, but we've got to remember, it's always about the baseball."

When the baseball is good, the broadcasting is good, and since Orsillo's arrival at Fenway the baseball has been very good indeed. New England is consumed with the Red Sox, and he is riding the wave.

At the beginning of his first season with the team, NESN was a pay cable channel, available in just 220,000 New England homes. But by June 2001, NESN was part of the basic package for most cable systems. Suddenly, Orsillo's audience was 3.5 million homes. In 2003, when NESN stopped sharing telecasts with Fox 25, he moved from a package of 80-odd games to more than 130.

Orsillo still makes his home in Rhode Island, with Lisa and daughters Sydney, four, and Madison, one. But as his professional demands have increased, so, too, have his visibility and celebrity. NESN is promoting him in a new TV spot with Tim Wakefield. He's been an attraction on two wintertime Caribbean cruises featuring Red Sox players. Last December, Keith Lockhart invited him to narrate "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" at the Boston Pops holiday concerts.

Like Pedro, Varitek, and Lowe, Orsillo is in a contract year; his NESN agreement is up at the end of 2004. After negotiating his first three NESN contracts himself, he's hired an agent to handle matters this time.

Though his current contract prevents him from doing telecasts for other networks, he has a natural interest in outside opportunities. But, he says plainly, "I wouldn't want to do anything that would mean I had to miss a Red Sox game."

Orsillo intends to be around for his listeners for many years. "I would like to think that I could become a family member over the course of time," he says. "That they would be able to familiarize a time in their life with the sound of my voice. If I could have done that by the end of my career . . ."

He lets his voice trail off, fully aware of what a profound legacy that would be.

Charles Fountain is an associate professor in the School of Journalism.

Star search: Castiglione stands behind young up-and-comer Berenguer.

An Ear for Talent

In the booth next to Don Orsillo's at Fenway Park sits a man who has called some 3,500 Red Sox games. And launched seemingly as many broadcast careers.

Joe Castiglione, who's done play-by-play in the Sox radio booth since 1983, has also been an adjunct Northeastern communication studies professor since 1985. The sports broadcasting class he teaches every fall is perhaps the most fully subscribed course on campus.

Why wouldn't it be, with guest visits from members of the Red Sox and other Boston pro teams, a slender reading list, and what Castiglione freely calls a generous grading policy. "I am probably responsible for some of the grade inflation at Northeastern in recent years," he admits.

Yet the laidback instructor is also committed to getting his best students an opportunity to show their stuff at the professional level.

"He's the guy who really believed in me first," says Orsillo. "He told me, ‘If you want to do this professionally, there's a job for you.' What a confidence booster that was."

Castiglione has lost track of exactly how many former students work in broadcasting or in some front-office capacity. He rattles off the names of eight to ten ex-students broadcasting in the minors or working in major-league public relations. He then thumbs through the front-office section of the Red Sox media guide and points to another half-dozen young faces whose entrée to the Sox came through his class.

But, in one notable instance, the usual sequence was reversed: He helped someone with baseball connections get into Northeastern. In 1994, Castiglione, a longtime Jimmy Fund supporter, met Uri Berenguer, a twelve-year-old cancer patient at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Castiglione asked the youngster if he was related to Juan Berenguer, the former major leaguer who'd pitched for the Tigers, the Twins, and the Braves.

"That's my uncle," Berenguer told him. "That's my father's little brother."

From this exchange blossomed a solid friendship. When Berenguer was in high school, Castiglione brought him into the radio booth as a substitute statistician. After the young man's cancer went into remission, Castiglione put him to work telling his story at Jimmy Fund fundraisers.

As a high school senior, Berenguer applied to Northeastern, largely because of Castiglione's connection to the school. But paying for Northeastern was going to be a problem. Though he'd moved to the United States from his native Panama when he was four, he was not yet an American citizen and was thus ineligible for federal financial aid.

"Joe, together with Roger Giese [director of Northeastern's Environmental Cancer Research Program] and John Harrington [then Red Sox president] got me a tuition waiver," says Berenguer. "That was just huge."

Castiglione wasn't finished. He also helped Berenguer secure a position with the Red Sox Spanish Network, doing technical production and some pregame on-air work.

Berenguer came to Northeastern in fall 2001. In February of his freshman year, he got a call from Bill Kulik, head of the Red Sox Spanish Network, offering him a job doing play-by-play. He was nineteen years old.

He's twenty-two now and in his third year in the Spanish booth. Full-time work has taken a toll on his progress toward graduation. He's promised both his mother and Castiglione he will eventually graduate, but right now a degree is just one of two life goals.

"I'm very proud to know I'm the youngest play-by-play announcer in the major leagues," Berenguer says, "and the first-ever Panamanian announcer in the major leagues.

"I'd love to become the first ever to make the crossover to English-language broadcaster. I'd love to be Joe Castiglione's partner one day."

— Charles Fountain