The Long Stair
Dan Peterson chased his dream, to be a big-league broadcaster. It's a long stair to the microphone, through a narrow doorway of opportunity that begins at the lowest level of minor league baseball.

Scott Lauer
MLNSportsZone.com

It’s 4:30pm, two and a half hours before the first pitch on a warm Montana summer day in July of 1998 at Kindrick Legion Field, home of the Helena Brewers, a Rookie level affiliate of Milwaukee.  The run-down ballpark, built in 1939, is as quiet as a library.  Dan Peterson, a lanky 23 year-old, sits at his desk in the Brewers trailer-like office, preparing vigorously for the game against the visiting Copper Kings.

Peterson exercises pride in his craft, despite grasping the reality that the parents of players listening on the Internet probably represent the majority of his audience

He goes over pronunciations for the other team, reviews pertinent stats, and explores off-the-field stories involving the players. 

As game-time nears, an anemic crowd of a couple of hundred fans slowly filters through the turnstile.  Peterson navigates his way up to the third-base side press box, climbing a dark, narrow, creaky, wooden stairwell that would make a haunted house proud. 

The press box is open, with no privacy or noise control. The teenage waitress asking for meal orders bleeds onto the airwaves. 

The sun hangs over the right field line at game-time, baking the field and glaring into the eyes of a squinting Peterson, who is paying his dues behind the microphone in the lowest level of professional baseball affiliated with the major leagues. 

His fate will unfold as part personal pluck, part patronage, and a tidbit of terrific timing.

In Rookie and Class A broadcast jobs, you’re a Jack-of-all-trades. At the park in the morning, you answer phones, help pull tarp over the infield when rain is coming, and THEN get into the radio portion of the day. You do it all for about a $1000 per month, for  just the three or four months of the club’s short season.

What separates the great play-by-play guys from those finding “new directions” is really endurance more than natural talent.  A gifted set of pipes will only get you so far.  Like other rare jobs in minor league sports, the mind and the soul have to be ready to stick out the low pay, long bus rides, roach motels, and returned demo tapes.  You have to shine in a world where many general managers can’t figure out what good you are if you don’t sell seats or hot dogs.

You live in a new town for three or four months, dealing with the feeling of being a visitor, praying that you won’t be a long-term resident of this level of baseball.

You worry about the team.  Will they perform well? As much as you would hope that your work shines above a bad season, who catches the play-by-play guy of a losing team?

The anonymity of being on the bottom gives you the time to be bad, to get some games under your belt, and to learn. 

Yet every day you fight the temptation to fall into despair or depression that comes from it all.

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