The Best Voice in Baseball Goes Deep

EPISODE 102: The OmBoogsman.

The human voice is an instrument.

And while lots of us broadcasters sorta just pluck our banjos, Jon “Boog” Sciambi has a Stradivarius tucked deep inside his diaphragm.

Boog is the voice of the Chicago Cubs, doing play-by-play on their TV broadcasts. And he’s the voice of MLB: The Show, the wildly popular video game. And he also calls college basketball and baseball for ESPN, and was just named the national radio voice of the World Series last year.

But as visible — audible — as his job is, Boog recently got in my ear after listening to one particular conversation we had on this very show about the prospects of a rookie broadcaster named Tom Brady. And Boog argued that while millions of us clearly listen to game broadcasts, the vast majority of people simply do not appreciate the most basic mechanics of what happens in the booth.

And that I might be one of those people.

So I asked Boog to help me find out what he really does. And he had me sit in the booth with him, with a headset on, to hear everything he hears while calling a game, live.

I, in turn, brought him into the PTFO studio to do some of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever asked a person to do.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Ballgame,

Pablo