I started out with the intention of becoming a Major League Baseball announcer—all because of my exposure to Bob Prince. I spent three years riding the buses in the minor leagues. I talk about my experiences in a chapter called “Life on the Farm”. This is an excerpt from the sub-chapter called “Charleston, W.Va.”, that was the third stop on my minor league journey and, as I later realized, fortunately, my last.

The Charlies played their home games in Watt Powell Park, a beautiful old ballpark with big dimensions and railroad tracks running behind the right field wall.

They could have played their games in the Watt Powell parking lot. The attendance for the 1976 season was slightly over 70,000. Keep in mind that they played 70 home games and that there were two huge promotional nights that each drew over 4,000. That meant that, on most nights, there were about 800 people in the park.

It’s not easy for a baseball announcer to sound good when a home run call is followed by the kind of crowd noise you get at a church league softball game. Actually, there wasn’t really any crowd noise. It was more like intermittent clapping.

Pretty depressing.

And it’s not like the Charlies didn’t have an interesting team.

They had a future 20 game winner in the big leagues, Rick Langford, in the starting rotation and a guy who became a very good reliever in the majors and pitched beyond his 40th birthday, Doug Bair, in the bullpen.

Tony Armas, who became a 40 homerun hitter in the Major Leagues, was in center and Omar Moreno, who became the best base stealer in the National League and helped the Pirates win a World Series in 1979, was in right. Everybody in Pittsburgh knows Moreno as a centerfielder but Armas had a better arm and that made Moreno a right fielder. Miguel Dilone, a switch hitter who never did much in the big leagues, but went back and forth with Moreno for the International League lead in stolen bases and hit over .330, was in left field.

Ken Macha, a future, solid big league utility man and now manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, was at third.

Craig Reynolds, who played almost 1,500 games in the majors was at shortstop.

The second baseman was a kid named Mike Richards who had a short career in the bigs.

Mitchell Page, who came close to winning the AL Rookie of the Year Award the following year, when he hit 21 home runs and batted .307 for the Oakland A‘s, was the first baseman.

Page, along with Langford and Bair were part of the trade that sent Manny Sanguillen to Oakland for the A’s manager, Chuck Tanner.

The catcher was a 20 year-old kid named Steve Nicosia, who would platoon with Ed Ott on the Pirates 1979 World Series winner.

Despite all that talent, the team finished a distant fourth in a six team league.

Maybe that’s why the manager, Tim Murtaugh, never followed in his dad’s footsteps to manage in the Major Leagues.

Not only did I have the absence of human beings in the ball park to deal with during home games, the cheap setup that I had in the radio booth picked up the paging system from the hospital that was down the street.

So, as I was trying to call the game, this is what I would hear in my head set and what I was pretty sure the listeners were hearing, too: “Paging Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard.”

OK, the Three Stooges didn’t work there, but they should have worked in the front office of the Charlies. They would have done a better job of putting people in the park.

When you’re calling a game, you like to think that there are lots of people listening and that’s what I always assumed, but looking back on it, if only 800 people were interested in seeing a team in person, how many would want to listen to their games on the radio?

I’m thinking that, whoever was paging the doctors across the street had a bigger audience than I did.

I used to look forward to away games