After several minutes wandering around Excite Ballpark on Friday afternoon, I finally found someone who could point me in the direction of Joe Ritzo. The team’s play-by-play announcer was standing behind the batting cage in the blazing afternoon sun, wearing a Polo dress shirt and khakis and somehow not showing any signs of perspiration. Perhaps that’s because San Jose is the most temperate city represented in the High-A California League and Ritzo travels on the bus with the team to every game in desert outposts like Visalia, Rancho Cucamonga and the Inland Empire.
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Ritzo is in charge of putting together the itineraries for each road trip, connecting with the bus companies and trying to create schedules that aren’t too taxing for the coaches and players — no easy task.
“When we go to Stockton and Modesto, it’s commuter trips. We’re going up 580 at 2 or 3 o’clock on a weekday. We play the game and come right on back,” Ritzo said during batting practice. “Everywhere else, we just stay. We go to Lake Elsinore, that’s a seven-hour bus ride. Nobody but us really, routinely plays day-game getaway days. It’s too hot to be playing at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. So we might play a game in Lake Elsinore at 7 o’clock, get on the bus at 11, roll into San Jose at 6 a.m., go home, sleep a few hours, come right back for a home game that night. It’s pretty nonstop.”
Sleep is hard to come by during the season for Ritzo, even when the Giants are at home. That’s because Ritzo, 35, may not wear a cap when he calls games, but he wears many hats for the team.
(Photo of Hector Borg, left, and Joe Ritzo: Steve Berman/The Athletic)“He helps our kids,” said Giants manager Hector Borg, who replaced Billy Hayes in the middle of the season. Ritzo said that what Borg might have been referring to — beyond his itinerary responsibilities — is how he gives many of the players their first taste of what it’s like to be interviewed by a member of the media.
After all, Ritzo also serves as the only beat writer covering the team.
“Some of my extra responsibilities here are I write all of our game notes and the game recap that goes on our website. So when I finish my postgame show, I go home to eat, maybe see my wife if she’s awake. I sit down and I write the game story and I post that. So that takes about an hour. I usually put a couple radio calls in the story, too,” said Ritzo.
“Then I write the game notes. That usually takes about an hour and a half, maybe two hours every night. So I’m usually working until about 2 or 3 a.m. every night.”
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Conveniently, NBC Sports Bay Area airs replays of the San Francisco Giants games at midnight, and that’s how Ritzo has kept tabs on the big-league club, something that became necessary this year. After calling the team’s spring training games in Arizona for each of the last three seasons, Ritzo got the call all minor-league broadcasters anticipate, when he filled in for Dave Flemming for that wild July doubleheader (19-2 and 2-1 Giants wins) in Colorado.
Justin Allegri is the voice of San Jose State football and men’s basketball and also serves as Ritzo’s partner for half of the San Jose Giants’ home games. He referred to Ritzo’s big league call-up as “The Assignment,” a reference to how the San Francisco Giants full-time broadcasters refer to each other’s absences as being “on assignment.” Ritzo also called some Giants games in Arizona when Duane Kuiper attended services for his late father in Wisconsin last month.
“Now, I’m with the broadcasters all spring,” Ritzo said. “Jon stays there the whole month. Even when he’s not doing games, he’s just hanging out. I’ve gotten a chance to know him really well. Likewise Dave, although obviously he pops in and out more during the spring. But Dave kind of knows what I’m going through, what my day-to-day is like, because he was hired out of the minor leagues by the Giants. (Dave’s brother) Will is doing some Red Sox games now.
“So Dave was actually the one this spring that told me there might be something down the road. ‘Be ready, you know, just in case.’ They’ve all been so positive about my spring training work, the broadcasters. So it’s great to get that from them.”
Unless Ritzo is offered a full-time job by a major-league team, he sees no reason to leave his current post in San Jose, one he has held for 13 seasons. Regardless of how well they perform, broadcasters don’t move up the ranks like players. And Ritzo is quite happy calling games so close to his hometown, where as a junior at Palo Alto High he somehow embedded himself in the Stanford broadcast booth at Sunken Diamond.
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“Job of a lifetime. So I’m 16, 17 years old, watching Stanford go to the College World Series every year,” Ritzo said. “I always knew I wanted to get into broadcasting. So, of course, I got to know the college broadcasters at the campus station. They asked one time, ‘Do you want to come on with us, do a few innings?’ Yeah! Junior in high school, it was incredible. So I actually did that for a couple years, where I traveled to some of the road games. They said, ‘Yeah, if you can pay your own way, we’ll have you on.’”
As a freshman at Santa Clara, Ritzo reached out to the San Jose Giants, who were only broadcasting home games at the time. They had him do five games that season, and that number grew each year he attended school. When he graduated in 2006, the San Jose Giants decided to expand their broadcasts and needed someone to call all 140 games. Ritzo has been in the San Jose broadcast booth ever since.
I shadowed him throughout Friday’s 2-0 loss, a pitchers’ duel that went scoreless until the 11th inning, thanks in part to a rule in place throughout the minor leagues that places a runner on second base when games go to extra innings. Ritzo’s setup is pretty low-tech compared to what one would see at Oracle Park. No surprise there — Ritzo said water sometimes leaks from the ceiling when maintenance workers power-wash the stands above his office in the 77-year-old ballpark. He even uses an iPod to store all audio files including interviews and commercials.
(Photo: Steve Berman/The Athletic)Ritzo calls most games without help, which is common in the minors. Midway through the game, Ports broadcaster Zack Bayrouty, who has also been calling games in the Cal League for 13 years and will make his A’s debut on Tuesday with Vince Cotroneo and Coco Crisp, opened the door to Ritzo’s booth and asked if he’d like to do a game together during the series. Ritzo said he would, as long as he wasn’t potentially calling a game in which the Giants could clinch a wild-card spot (the Giants’ 7-1 victory on Monday put them into best-of-five series against Visalia, with Games 1 and 2 in San Jose on Wednesday and Thursday), as a Modesto Nuts loss that night set the Giants’ magic number at two.
Maybe it’s the Stanford connection (Flemming is a Stanford alum), or the baseball road both broadcasters took to get to their respective positions. But even though their voices don’t sound alike, there’s a similarity in style between Ritzo and Flemming. Ritzo does a nice job during the game of weaving in updates on the San Francisco Giants throughout the broadcast while providing all of the necessary details on the action in front of him.
“He just does a solid call of a ballgame,” said Mike Hohler, a KNBR producer who also serves as the San Jose Giants official scorer during most home games. “His work ethic is first class and it shows in how much he prepares for these games. We’ll exchange a few texts after he calls a spring training game and he’ll already be prepping for games coming up in the next day or two,”
Added Hohler: “I also don’t think he got enough credit for the great job he did when some of our games were televised on Comcast Hometown Network. His TV broadcasts were solid. When that day comes that he gets a full-time gig in the big leagues, he’s fully capable of being able to do great work on the TV side.”
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Once the game was over, I shook hands with Ritzo before heading out to the parking lot where I watched the postgame fireworks show. At 11 p.m., my day was done, but Ritzo’s night still included a postgame show to do and a recap and game notes to write.
While he’s a very important part of the San Jose Giants’ small staff (about 15 employees), he’ll eventually get “The Assignment” as a full-timer for some major-league team, perhaps even the Giants, where he’ll follow someone else’s itinerary, trade bus rides for chartered jets and read recaps written by a stable of beat writers and game notes prepared by a major-league PR staff. But for now, he’ll remain an integral part of the team that has served as part of the pipeline for those Giants teams that won three championships in five years.
— Reported from San Jose
(Photo: Steve Berman/The Athletic)
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