Summer is very much here. My article this week isn’t going to cast a wide net, but I hope that the people in the very specific situation I am going to write about will appreciate that someone is taking the time to discuss this issue and take it seriously.
There are a lot of sports talk hosts that work in a market with a minor league baseball or hockey team or maybe a G-League basketball team. If you’re lucky, the extent of your on-air relationship with that team is they advertise on your station and you give some tickets away for games. Maybe you show up at the park or the arena once a month to host a station sponsored night at the game.
Sometimes though, those teams want a little more out of your station, particularly if you are the team’s broadcast partner. That can result in the awkward situation of having to have a player or manager from the team on with some regularity.
I had to deal with this when I was a part of the morning show at Buzz Sports Radio in Raleigh, NC. The station was owned by Capitol Broadcasting, the same company that owned the Durham Bulls. Part of being a good corporate citizen was having the team’s manager on once a week.
Look, the Triangle is very loyal to the Bulls. Going to the games is a summer tradition for a lot of families in the 919. On top of that, thanks to a certain romantic comedy from the 1980s, it is probably the most famous minor league team in the country. For all of the popularity though, it was tough to find people that could name more than one player on the roster, let alone find someone that cared what the Bulls’ magic number was to clinch a spot in the International League Playoffs.
Jared Sandberg was the Bulls’ manager at the time. Now he’s an assistant on Scott Servais’s Seattle Mariners staff. Jared is a nice enough guy and we didn’t want to do him a disservice, but my partners and I knew that his weekly call was an invitation for listeners to tune out if all he was going to do was talk Triple-A X’s and O’s.
It was early in the 2016 baseball season, and I don’t remember what happened, but we called Jared to record our interview for the next day. That was a necessity when dealing with a league that stretches from the Atlanta suburbs up to Rhode Island and every team is traveling by bus. I don’t remember what happened the night before, but Mike Maniscalco brought it up before we even started recording. We were just making small talk and Jared was fired up and cussing about a blown call.
A little light bulb went off. If we have to do this, this is how we should be doing it. A couple of weeks went by and we would have Jared comment on what was happening in Major League Baseball and then let him hit a few talking points about the Bulls to close out the interview. It was fine, but Raleigh and Durham aren’t Major League Baseball markets. The interest in a segment built on Major League Baseball talk is minimal.
Then we got a gift from Heaven above. It was the week of the Bulls’ annual Star Wars night. Now, if you read my columns a lot, you probably know that I LOVE Star Wars!
I casually asked Jared who his favorite Star Wars character was. He said he didn’t know. I pressed him. “Come on man. Is it Luke? It’s not lame to say Luke.”
His response was something I was not ready for. Jared Sandberg had never seen any of the Star Wars movies. Not a single frame of a single film. I spent the next four minutes yelling at him about the Jedi and the Rebel Alliance and the forces of good and evil pulling at Anakin Skywalker.
When we hung up the phone Mike and I looked at each other like we had just solved the math equation from Good Will Hunting. This was the segment! If we had to have the manager of a Triple-A baseball team on every week, the way we were going to make listeners care about the segment was by making the segment about us.
So that is a long story about my experience to tell you this. If you are one of the broadcasters that are stuck having to interview a minor league jock or coach every week, figure out what you need to do to make it entertaining to the largest number of people. It isn’t just in the best interest of your show. It is in the best interest of the team too. Listeners will want to support someone that they know as a fun part of the show.
You will have to figure out the best way to utilize the interviewee, of course. We got lucky in that there wasn’t much we could do that Jared Sandberg was not okay with.
These situations are not limited to interactions with folks from the local minor league teams. I hate hearing stations that bring clients into the studio. I didn’t tune into sports talk radio to hear a 10 minute segment on energy efficient windows!
You need to have good content for the sales department to generate revenue. So it’s weird then that sometimes the sales department will saddle you with something that no one in their right mind would think is good content. When that is the case, you need to figure out how to use that sponsored guest in a way that has the least negative effect on the show. Maybe that’s bringing in a minor league hockey player to talk about what is happening in the NHL, maybe it’s talking to an advertiser about what kind of car he would sell a local player that just signed a huge new contract, or maybe it is getting a minor league baseball player on the phone to settle petty arguments amongst the personalities on the show or receive a barrage of insults from a producer because the manager doesn’t know what a tauntaun is.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
