ESPN’s Jon Sciambi on his big new role as World Series radio voice: Media Circus

In a TikTok world featuring attention spans as short as a sugar high, baseball on the radio feels like something from an ancient planet. But thankfully it remains, and those listening to the call of the World Series between the Texas Rangers and the Arizona Diamondbacks on ESPN Radio this week have a tremendous voice as a lead guide: Jon Sciambi.
Advertisement
The longtime ESPN television and radio game-caller — and the current television voice of the Chicago Cubs on Marquee Sports Network — made his national radio World Series play-by-play debut last Friday. He follows Jon Miller and Dan Shulman as ESPN’s radio voices for the World Series. The CBS Radio call prior to ESPN taking over the package in 1998 featured two play-by-play voices that might be familiar — Vin Scully (1979-82 and 1990-97) and Jack Buck (1983-89). It is a prestigious broadcasting gig.
Sciambi said when he joined ESPN full-time in 2010 as a play-by-play voice for its MLB coverage, he hoped that he would ultimately land in the top audio chair. That happened when Shulman opted to pull back from his ESPN baseball responsibilities to spend more time with his family in Toronto. Sciambi is calling the World Series with analysts Jessica Mendoza and Eduardo Pérez and insider Buster Olney.
“To me, it’s describing what you see,” Sciambi said when asked how he sees his role for those listening. “People cannot watch the game, so as the saying goes, it’s painting the picture. There’s a craft to it, and it’s something that I take really seriously and something that I love. The two disciplines (calling radio versus television) are pretty different. For radio, there is trying to deliver images in people’s heads. You want to try to as efficiently as possible describe what you’re seeing. You want to use the sounds of the ballpark. When you do it well, you feel like you’re conducting an orchestra. Whereas on television you have different choices that you can make, but the viewer can always see it. So if you want to say, ‘Here’s the 2-1,” you can, but the score bug shows you that it’s the 2-1, and you see the pitcher pitching. On radio, they don’t know that the play is starting until you say, ‘Montgomery kicks and deals.’ The mechanical part of delivering exactly what is happening on the field is to me my first responsibility. On TV, I am probably a little more of a gasbag, a little more trying to pull stuff out of my analyst.
“I gave Jon Miller a tape of my work back in the day,” Sciambi continued. “He listened to it, and the best piece of advice I ever got was from Jon, and it’s mechanical. It’s something that when I critique tapes and share with younger broadcasters, it’s the No. 1 thing that I pass along. The piece of advice was on radio you want to say, ‘Here’s the pitch’ before you think you do. The reason for that is because you want to utilize the sounds in the park. If you try to say here’s the pitch with the pitch, the ball’s too fast for your voice. What you want is ‘Here’s the pitch … swing and a ground ball out to short … Turner to his left, gathers it and throws to first. One down.’ You want that little space because it does two things for you: It allows you to utilize the sound of the ball hitting the bat or the ball hitting the glove, or the umpire calling it after the ball has hit the glove. It gives you the timing so that you are in better position. If my timing is crappy or I feel it’s getting too fast for me, I will just go back to ‘Gallen on the rubber. Standing first-base side. Angled towards the third-base line. Nods yes. Turns, kicks, delivers.’ That’s how we get our timing back — focus on the pitcher.”
Advertisement
I was curious how Sciambi saw working in a three-person booth and how that impacts his role. He said the pitch clock change has reshaped how he thinks about it.
“Up until this year for about eight years, we had gotten to a place where I personally think baseball was consistently better served by a three-person booth,” he said. “The game had gotten so long, and there was so much space. The amount of time the game took to play, the amount of time with the ball not being in play, the amount of time between pitches, it started to get to a place where you almost really had to have three people to do the best version of it. But I think the pitch clock changes things. It makes it harder to execute a three-person booth and certainly harder in radio. It’s just faster. So my focus will be on calling the plays, and while that’s always my focus, you have to edit yourself. For me, it will be, call the plays so that Jess and Eduardo can get in.”
⚾️ @DShulman_ESPN passes the baton – & @ESPNRadio #WorldSeries mic – to longtime friend & colleague Jon Sciambi ‘Boog’ becomes the national radio voice of #MLB’s Fall Classic starting Friday night pic.twitter.com/DzOggBSgZ1 — ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) October 27, 2023
Quick notes: YouTube TV had serious lagging issues on Sunday, which understandably upset Sunday Ticket viewers … ESPN is fortunate Damian Lillard and WBD did not make a bigger deal of this blatant misrepresentation. Here is a good piece from Jack Baer of Yahoo Sports on it under the headline of “Why did ESPN doctor a 3-year-old Damian Lillard interview to make it look like it came from his Bucks debut?”
Episode 344 of the Sports Media Podcast features Amanda Gifford, a vice president of production for ESPN, who oversees the company’s college football event productions (live games) and the XFL. In this podcast, Gifford discusses what her role entails; how ESPN/ABC’s college football game production happens every week; why college football viewership is up this year; where college football should be as a broadcast play five years from now; why there are so few women college football opinionists in 2023; where she sees sports audio going heading forward; what someone in an ESPN talent office does; whether there will be a woman president of ESPN in her lifetime; and more.
You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more.
Some things I read over the last month that were interesting to me (Note: There are a lot of paywalls here):
• Twenty years after St. Joe’s historic hoops run, an absence haunts the team. By Dana O’Neil of The Athletic.
Advertisement
• How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game. By Liza Mundy of The Washington Post.
• An oral history of Michael Jordan’s 13-year run with the Hornets. By Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic.
• Kanye and Adidas: Money, Misconduct and the Price of Appeasement. By Megan Twohey of The New York Times.
• Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era. By Brendan I. Koerner of Wired.
• The Hunt for Crypto’s Most Famous Fugitive. ‘Everyone Is Looking for Me.’ By Alexander Osipovich, Jiyoung Sohn, Weilun Soon and Drew Hinshaw of The Wall Street Journal.
• Rehabilitating Lahaina. By Travis Hartman, Adolfo Arranz, Sudev Kiyada, and Simon Scarr of Reuters.
• ‘That’s what heroes do’: Man saved the lives of children while being shot 7 times. By Julia Bayly of Bangor Daily News.
• Living in the Middle of Halloween Central Is Not Wicked Fun. By Douglas Belkin of The Wall Street Journal.
• Kim Yo Jong Is the World’s Most Dangerous Woman. By Anthony Ruggiero of Foreign Policy.
GO DEEPER This World Series is off to quite a start: Top 10 Weird and Wild tidbits so far
(Photo of Sciambi in 2019: Orlando Ramirez / USA Today)