Better Know A Broadcaster: Joey Zanaboni

Baseball America has decided to introduce you to some of the men and women who work as broadcasters in baseball.

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What Is Your Career Highlight?

Calling the Johnson City Cardinals Appalachian League title run in 2019. To me, that team represented a great many things. We had to win the last two of the regular season to get in the playoffs and fell behind 1-0 in both the divisional and championship series. Yet, those kids stormed back each and every time, rising to the occasion and ultimately reaping the reward.

More than perseverance though, they represented youth. Players at that level are 18-22 for the most part. They’re kids. To watch them every night was to experience the sweetest innocence. Their earnestness and their sense of fun were inspiring. When I announce games, my aim is to write poetry the way that only a child can. That season taught me a lot in that regard.

Now, with the future of the Appalachian League in doubt, those Johnson City evenings are even more special to me. I think about what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise: “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

There’s nothing more romantic than baseball. There’s no one more sentimental than play-by-play announcers. Le monde a commencé sans l’homme et il s’achèvera sans lui.

What Unseen Parts Of The Job Do You Feel People Should Know About?

Every sports broadcaster is seeking something illusory, a sense of Zen spirituality that comes from calling games in real time and living the life of a storyteller. Some are looking for something they lost. Some are looking to shed the things they’ve found. It’s a philosophical job that takes you through the whole great existential washing machine: what constitutes reality? Does each moment add up to create a more meaningful pastiche or are we simply witnessing a random sampling of unrelated events? Can we ever be truly objective?

I remember when I was working with the Texas AirHogs in 2018, I used to sleep in the stadium after a lot of home games, just to use the free WiFi if nothing else. Front office execs called Suite 13 “my apartment” because I’d crash there after games. The clubhouse manager Chris Thomas would be the only other guy in the stadium into the wee hours, and we would sit around and talk about life most nights. We shot the breeze a ton but the majority of our conversations boiled down to the same thing: seeking meaningful personal identity in a world that withholds it from far too many.

In the middle of one night, Chris walked into the home clubhouse and there was a homeless man sitting on the couch. When Chris asked who he was, the man replied simply, “I’m the owner’s son.” Of course, he actually wasn’t and, at Chris’s stern insistence, eventually left. The next night Chris told me about the experience, and I listened intently. When he finished and we’d sat in silence for a minute, I looked him in the eyes and asked, “Chris . . . which one of us will prove to be the homeless man?” And for the rest of that night, each time I turned a corner in the suites and the offices in the AirHogs Stadium skybox, I half-expected to find the homeless man there. In my mind, I’d ask him who he was. The man would reply curtly, truthfully: “I’m you.”

I never truly saw the homeless man—at least not in real life. But I wondered about him for a long time that evening. What would it mean to sneak into a suburban baseball stadium for shelter on a hot Texas night? Loss, I supposed. Hardship. Abandon. And I thought he would see himself in me, who had slept soundly there so many nights and thought he’d had hardship because the team lost or the microphone malfunctioned or some other minor inconvenience had occurred. That night, I didn’t get much rest. I tossed uncomfortably on a faux leather couch, and, in the morning, when the sun burst through the high windows of Suite 13, I awoke with the slow eroding feeling that only certainty can bring.

Meeting this man wasn’t a dream, and, yet, none of it had ever happened.

What’s Your Best Story From The Road?

In 2016, the first year I was with the AirHogs, we split our home games between Grand Prairie, Texas and Amarillo, Texas, back when Potter County Memorial Stadium was their home of professional baseball. The American Association is this huge, sprawling bus league that runs from Texas all the way up to Fargo, North Dakota and Winnipeg, Manitoba. We would travel about five hours between home stadiums and then up and down the Midwest for 100 games in about 110 days. We basically lived on this cramped sleeper bus, enduring trips as long as 23 hours. Being the person with the least physically taxing job, I slept in the aisle on a thin foam mat I bought at Walmart.

We finished the season with a 19-game road trip, and our second baseman Brian Bistagne brought along his 3-year-old pitbull named Banks to enjoy life on the great American highway. The dog really had an affinity for my mat. Many times, I would come back from the bathroom to find that canine Kerouac dragging his hindquarters on my little slice of travel heaven. Not knowing how a pitbull would react to being evicted from his preferred sleeping space on a bus full of t35 men, I would gently tap him on the shoulder and say politely, “Excuse me, sir?… Sir?” And God bless him, he would always, eventually, move.

We finished the season with a three-game series in Amarillo vs. the Sioux City Explorers. We drove 10 hours from Laredo and went straight to the stadium so the guys could drop their stuff. I remember stumbling out around 9:30 am, shielding my eyes from the early September Texas sun. It was the final series of an almost indescribably crazy season. We were about 30 games under .500, and life on the road had left us a haggard bunch.

Potter County Memorial Stadium, our nominal second home, was on its last legs. The field’s tarp and drainage systems were truly awful. Out of the 25 games we played there, probably 14 had to be doubleheaders because of poor field conditions. As the long slog of the season wore on, the players and coaches had grown immensely frustrated with the inability to keep the scuffed, pockmarked surface playable, even in seemingly manageable conditions. The night before, a mild rainstorm had created several miniature lakes, moats and reservoirs on the diamond, outfield and bullpen areas. Upon assessing the damage on that bright morning, the team’s sigh was collective. Another rainout coming. What could be done?

Well, as they say, heroes get remembered. Legends never die. And, on that morning, Banks became legendary. As we all stood around laughing at the hopelessness of the situation, here comes Banks, prancing off the bus through our little AirHogs gaggle. Every eye was glued to him as he went right to third base, squatted down and took the most spectacular dump possible.

Everyone burst out in applause.

God, I miss that dog.