Few voices are as associated with Philadelphia Phillies baseball these days as Larry Anderson. The color commentator on the team’s radio call rolled back his schedule to include only home games beginning in 2018. He announced Thursday that he is ready to roll back again.
Anderson will just call the weekend series played at Citizens Bank Park in 2022. He told Marks & Reese that it works out 40 games.
“I’ll put it this way,” he told the WIP afternoon duo. “If anybody’s watched the news the last couple of years, who knows what’s gonna happen in this crazy world? I don’t know how much time I had left.”
Larry Anderson made it clear that he is healthy and that this was not a decision he was pushed into. He is looking for more free time and intends to spend longer stretches in Florida and with family across the country.
He noted that it was not an easy decision. One thing he worried about was the timing of the announcement. He says he told team brass that he didn’t want anything to take away from the optimism in the front office for 2022.
“A lot of heartbreak, a lot of emotion went into this. And so, it’s not anything I took lightly,” he said. “The Phillies have been very understanding and very, I don’t know what the word is, maybe helpful in getting me to this point and being very accomodating in what I wanted to do. The biggest thing is I didn’t want people to think the Phillies forced me out of this and that I didn’t have a choice. That is not the case at all.”
In 1998, Larry Anderson joined the broadcast team in Philadelphia. He spent six of his seventeen Major League seasons on the Phillies’ roster. He started out doing both TV and radio before moving exclusively to the radio broadcast in 2007. He worked two seasons with Hall of Famer Harry Kalas before Scott Franzke took over as the team’s radio voice.
The Phillies announced the addition of four analysts to its radio crew earlier this year. The 142 games that do not feature Larry Anderson will be split between Michael Bourn, Chad Durbin, Erik Kratz and Kevin Stocker.
