When Dave O’Brien was stationed behind the radio console at WKNE as a high school student, he was responsible for engineering its broadcasts of Boston Red Sox baseball. As one of the outlets within the team’s radio network, O’Brien had to load in commercials, monitor audio levels and ensure everything went over the air smoothly. The opportunity came to him as a student at Marlborough High School, which partnered with nearby Keene High School to allow students to take the air and discover their voices. Through listening to the games, O’Brien became inspired to pursue a career as a play-by-play announcer. It is something he gradually envisioned himself doing as he listened to the dulcet tones of Jon Miller and Ken Coleman call the action.
“At that time, I had no dream of doing the Red Sox – it was too far away, even in my imagination,” O’Brien said. “To call baseball; to call sports, that’s really when that started to formulate. Sitting there at 11:00 on a Wednesday night performing that menial task that they could get anyone to do – that’s why I was doing it.”
The Jimmy Fund was established in 1948 to raise money for cancer research and care, and it remains a critical part of the Red Sox organization’s community outreach. When Coleman was announcing games for the team, he drove around New England to the team’s affiliate radio stations and appeared on the air. The purpose of his visit was to promote the charitable endeavor, and by journeying to each one, he emphasized his commitment to the mission. O’Brien happened to be the radio host on the air who interviewed Coleman, and he told him afterwards how he wanted to be in his position one day. From there, O’Brien received perhaps the most essential advice from a seasoned professional who had cultivated a bonafide sonic resplendence.
“Remember this,” Coleman said to O’Brien in response. “The key to this is to land softly on the ear. People are going to be in their cars listening sometimes for an hour or two at a time. They’re going to have the radios on beach blankets down on the cape; they’re going to be listening while they’re barbecuing in the backyard on the Fourth of July. Learn to land softly on the ear.”
As a budding media professional, O’Brien knew exactly what Coleman meant in that he needed to avoid disseminating a disconcerting sound over the air. Instead, it would be indispensable that he be a pleasant listen and trustworthy presence. Today, O’Brien hopes people hear congeniality and delectation in his voice, and that he is truly grateful and humbled to be the television voice of his favorite baseball team.
Before he reached that point though, O’Brien diligently studied effective play-by-play announcing and served as his own harshest critic. In listening to Marv Albert and Dick Stockton, he came to understand what resonated with the audience. There was no announcer that impacted him more, however, than Bob Costas. He was a staple of NBC Sports’ coverage and a transcendent personality able to ingeniously blend hard-hitting journalism with lighthearted entertainment.
In his senior year of college at Syracuse, O’Brien interviewed with Costas for a behind-the-scenes job on his nationally-syndicated radio show, Costas Coast-to-Coast. While John Frankel wound up landing the role – and proceeded to become an award-winning correspondent on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel – O’Brien believes being passed over allowed him to stay behind a microphone.
“I was just looking for a bright, young person who would just kind of work on the radio show and take care of some stuff and learn by osmosis by being around the production of the radio show,” Costas said. “….It filled a programming void; it was on some 300 stations and we got a lot of very prominent guests because there wasn’t a show like that.”
After graduating and briefly working in Spartansburg, S.C., O’Brien joined WSB in Atlanta and quickly became frustrated at the lack of play-by-play opportunities he was receiving. As an avid baseball fan, O’Brien wanted to join the Atlanta Braves broadcast team, but there was simply no room at the time. During halftime of an Atlanta Falcons game, O’Brien had interviewed with program director Brad Nessler for a job – and he received it prior to the resumption of play in the third quarter. He was originally elated to work in the marketplace, but was starting to have second thoughts.
“I remember reaching out to Bob after we had developed this relationship,” O’Brien said. “I wrote him a letter and he answered me back within three of four days, which was incredible. What I was trying to find out was what I should do; what was Bob’s advice? Should I leave Atlanta or pursue a play-by-play job somewhere else?”
Costas replied that it would be in O’Brien’s best interest to stay patient, noting the outlet and its personnel would ease in his pursuits. The sagacious words kept him going, and shortly thereafter, he entered the broadcast booth and called the Braves’ run to the 1991 World Series. The retirement of Ernie Johnson Sr. prompted his promotion, and he suddenly found himself working alongside Skip Caray, Pete Van Wieren and Don Sutton from Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
“I was 25 when I started broadcasting the Braves – which even by today’s standards is incredibly young,” O’Brien said. “That’s when I began to think, ‘Maybe one day I could wind up calling games in my ballpark, Fenway, but until it happens, it doesn’t happen.’”
When Major League Baseball awarded an expansion franchise to the city of Miami, there was palpable buzz in the area. O’Brien was tabbed to serve as its first radio play-by-play announcer, and he did not perceive a considerable amount of pressure entering the role. Even so, there was a deluge of historic Florida Marlins’ moments, and he became synonymous with the growth of Major League Baseball in South Florida.
“It’s brand new in many ways – you had spring training of course, [and] that was a big focus in Florida, but they never had their own team before,” O’Brien said. “Part of that responsibility is you want them to fall in love with the game, and they fall in love with the game partly by what they hear on television and radio and [through] the people who bring it to them.”
In 1997, the Marlins won their first World Series championship, and O’Brien was on the microphone to deliver the final call. He has called eight World Series, many of them internationally for Major League Baseball, and the key through it all has been controlling his nerves. No moment was more indicative of that than in 2004 when the Red Sox broke an 86-year championship drought. O’Brien’s description of the jubilance was the last play-by-play audio used in the 2010 update of Ken Burns’ award-winning documentary, Baseball, and is a perdurable part of the team’s history.
“That was probably the single most difficult moment of my broadcasting career when that final out was made, and to be there and to hold it together because my emotions were right there on the surface,” O’Brien said. “….Doing it for your hometown team – in my case doing it for the Red Sox, as I did other championships on radio – was a little bit different because I still felt a responsibility to hang in there until the game was over before I lost it and started celebrating.”
Two years earlier, O’Brien had started working with ESPN calling soccer, basketball and baseball. Making the transition to a national network required a change in his technique, eliminating zealous fandom and calling the game without inherent bias.
“If you’re parachuting in and doing a Yankees and Marlins game on a Wednesday night in July, there’s a lot of the ground you have to cover again for an audience that hasn’t been there step per step in both of those teams’ seasons,” O’Brien said. “I think it is a wholly different approach, and I luckily [worked] with some great people who really did a marvelous job covering national baseball back then.”
Four hundred seventy national contests later, O’Brien does not call many of them these days, but he is usually in the ESPN Radio booth during the postseason. As a television broadcaster, having the ability to seamlessly transition and call a game on the radio by rote demonstrates a level of adept versatility. In fact, remaining prepared and inquisitive allows O’Brien to call basketball games for ACC Network during baseball’s offseason. Developing that quality was a point of emphasis while he was a student at Syracuse University.
“You’re actually a reporter as a play-by-play person,” O’Brien remembers being told in college. “It’s not any different than someone calling you down for a five-alarm fire at 2:00 in the morning, and [having] a camera on you and you’ve got to file a report as a news reporter.”
When fans walk around the concourses of Fenway Park, they feel as if they have been transported a century into the past. Narrow and dark with brick slabs and the proprietary “Fence Green” color adorning the poles, spectators emerge from the incommodious corridor to gaze at the tableau vivant. It is a baseball field with a scalene configuration – the Green Monster in left field; the bleachers in dead center; the triangle in right-center field and Pesky’s Pole straight down the right field line – with an alluring charm and viridescent hue.
Stationed high above the grandstand, the facade of the ballpark’s press box displays the team’s pennants and World Series championships – and behind the window directly in its center, O’Brien narrates the action to millions of fans regionally and worldwide. Upon learning that he had landed the radio play-by-play job in 2007 and would be working with Joe Castiglione, O’Brien was simultaneously incredulous and euphoric.
“This was completely different because I kept looking down into the stands thinking, ‘I should be down there with my dad; I don’t belong up here,’” O’Brien recalled. “It was really surreal in a wonderful way.”
O’Brien only knew about the job opening by listening to WEEI on his way to the airport in Boston. It was announced that Jerry Trupiano would not be returning for the 2007 season. Almost immediately, he called Red Sox chief operating officer Mike Dee, whom someone he knew was friendly with, and ultimately was able to set up an interview. He got the job, but there was still a challenge ahead. He was stepping into an organization that had employed renowned commentators, including Curt Gowdy, Bob Murphy and Jim Britt.
“Real quality; real professionalism is timeless,” Costas said. “Boston is a traditional baseball market – it’s very parochial. Every market favors their own team, and they want someone to project that they’re on board with that, but Boston is more parochial than most.”
One of the defining moments of O’Brien’s broadcasting career came in 2013 when Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz hit a grand slam to tie Game 2 of the American League Championship Series (ALCS) against the Detroit Tigers. The Red Sox went on to win the World Series that year, and Ortiz’s swing of destiny is viewed as an evident turning point in the team’s postseason run.
“I do remember in 2013 the moment before the Red Sox won the World Series at Fenway Park thinking to myself, ‘The theme of this season has been Boston Strong,’ given everything that happened with the [Boston] Marathon bombing and the recovery,” O’Brien said. “…I wanted to find a way to use ‘Boston Strong’ in the final moments in the final call. That was as close as I got to scripting anything.”
The moment contrasts with San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds hitting his record-breaking 756th home run in 2007, a controversial achievement O’Brien punctuated on ESPN. In his broadcasting career, O’Brien has called eight no-hitters, countless walk-off wins and many jaw-dropping feats, and most of the calls are wholly organic; that is, all except for one.
When the San Diego Padres hired Don Orsilllo to succeed Dick Enberg and call games for the team, the Red Sox television play-by-play position was suddenly open. Prior to the 2016 season, NESN announced that O’Brien would step into the position, meaning he would get to pair with Jerry Remy. The former Red Sox infielder for seven seasons, Remy was from New England and considered by many to be one of the best analysts in the sport. He was a beloved Bostonian and a fixture in the NESN Red Sox booth for 33 years. Remy passed away in October 2021 after a battle with lung cancer, a devastating blow for baseball fans and the Boston community.
“Jerry was special because he was one of us,” O’Brien said. “He played for the Red Sox and he wore the uniform, but he sounded like he was from here because he was. He lived and breathed the Red Sox… [and] could be your neighbor. [Jerry] could be the guy down the street, and he felt like a friend every night.”
Throughout the 2023 season, O’Brien has worked with a rotating carousel of analysts, including Dennis Eckersley, Will Middlebrooks and Kevin Youkilis. Each color commentator brings a unique skill set and knowledge base to the broadcast, and it is O’Brien’s job to extrapolate it onto the air.
O’Brien strived for any opportunity he could to get on the air early in his broadcast career, and through endurance and tenacity, he now gets to call “America’s Most Beloved Ballpark” his workplace. From the days he was attending games with his father to now, there was and remains a love for the sport and innate alacrity to deliberately strive towards achieving his goals.
“Many students graduate today with broadcast degrees who’ve spent almost no time on the air,” O’Brien said. “How do you know if you’re any good at it? How do you know what you sound like with a microphone unless you do it? That’s my primary advice to every single one of them – find a way to get on the air; find a way to understand if this is really for you or not – and the only way to do that is to be on the air somewhere.”
Whether it is as a spectator or media member, O’Brien has seen a lot – but he still sees something brand new two to three times per month. Aside from his infatuation with sports, it is that enigmatic aura within the history-laden catacombs of the ballpark that keeps him coming back.
“I may see something tonight I’ve never seen before, and if I’m still broadcasting – and I think I am with that same sense of joy over those moments – then I’ll keep doing it,” O’Brien elucidated. “If that ever leaves me, then it’s time to go, and I’ll be the first one to know it.”
Derek Futterman is an associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
