Before he started as the radio voice of the San Francisco Giants in 2004, Dave Flemming, ’98, MA ’98, worked for four years in the minor leagues honing his craft—and doing whatever else was needed. He spent the wee hours of his 24th birthday washing players’ uniforms at the Lake Elsinore Hotel and Casino after his team’s clubhouse man quit during a road trip. And still he made the pregame snacks. But by the standards of baseball broadcasting, Flemming had all but flown to the top. When he joined the Giants, he was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, six or seven years younger than any other play-by-play announcer in the game.
His brother Will, ’02—who now calls games for the Boston Red Sox—would take a more scenic route to the broadcast booth. Having followed his “best friend” to Stanford and then into calling Cardinal sports on KZSU, Will wanted to go his own way after graduation. “I just didn’t want to be a total clone of my brother,” he says. So, he chose the Silicon Valley start-up life.
But his heart wasn’t in tech, and Will soon found himself listening to games, thinking he could—should—be doing that, an inner debate that would finally end with a realization. He was investing time in companies, hoping one would hit big. “Why not invest in yourself and hope you hit big?” he remembers thinking. He sent his KZSU highlights to every team with an opening, getting a bite from the Lancaster JetHawks, a high-A team in the high desert north of Los Angeles. The offer: Spend the season pulling tarps, selling tickets, and putting together media packets for $500 a month and the chance to call three innings at home games. On the cusp of his 30th birthday in 2009, Will loaded a U-Haul and headed south. “Somewhere inside you, you know you’re doing the right thing and that it will pay off,” he says. “And even if it doesn’t, you can feel good about having taken the journey.”
Dave was less sanguine. He had started fresh out of school with plenty of time for plan B. Will was giving up a good career for a delayed start on cracking a league where people hold on to jobs like gold. Last season, just eight people were hired as play-by-play broadcasters in the major leagues. And the older you get, the more it can feed suspicions there must be a reason you haven’t made it yet. “The clock is ticking a lot more loudly when you start later,” Dave says. “I did want to lay out what I thought was a likely outcome, which wasn’t a great outcome.”
So began 10 years of Will working for minor-league teams in Virginia, Indiana, and Rhode Island. Off-season, he picked up college basketball games and whatever else he could cobble together. For two years, while calling games for the Potomac Nationals, he often slept in his childhood bedroom in Alexandria, Va. When schedules aligned, Will would catch one of his brother’s games in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., or New York to get an up-close look at what he was working toward. “I would just go into the booth and be like, ‘Right, this is why you’re riding eight-hour buses to Buffalo and staying in a Comfort Inn in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre,’” he says.
By the time Will joined the Pawtucket Red Sox in 2015, Dave was pretty sure his brother was going to make it. Pawtucket—his own final stop before the Giants—was known as a launching pad, and Will had the chops. “It wasn’t just me,” Dave says. “I heard from enough other people who were listening to him, saying, ‘Hey, your brother, he’s really good.’” Still, Will needed a break. It came July 30, 2018, with a fill-in assignment for a Boston game versus the Phillies. The gravity hit Will as the national anthem played: These were the three most important hours of his professional life. “You’ve done all this stuff, you’ve worked so hard, and here you are,” he says. “You know you’re ready, but let’s prove it. Sure enough, it was great. Everything kind of took off from there.”
The following season, the Sox used him to call 40 games, and then more and more. It was only this year, after Boston legend Joe Castiglione retired after four decades calling games, that Will took the lead radio spot. “That was, what, 16 years after I loaded everything into a U-Haul,” he says. “I can get emotional thinking about it.”
Even with the chartered flights and luxury hotels of big-league life, a 162-game season gets tiring, Will says, especially when you, say, play the Yankees at 7 p.m., leave Newark at 1:30 a.m., and arrive in Cleveland at 4:45 a.m. for a night game. But at first pitch, everything goes away but the game and the audience. “Baseball broadcasting is the absolute purest sports medium because it’s every night,” he says. “You’re part of people’s lives for six months. So, you get to develop this relationship with them.”
Some games come with a little extra. Since 2019, whenever the Red Sox play the Giants, the brothers have left their partners in charge to join the other calling an inning. “Those are my favorite games of the year,” Will says. “They’re just wonderful.” Dave—who has called three World Series, a perfect game, Barry Bonds’s record-tying home run, and much else—agrees. Two brothers calling games for two of the biggest franchises in baseball. “It’s better in a lot of ways than even the biggest moments that I’ve done.”
In a profession full of broadcasting majors, the Flemming brothers fly the flag for liberal arts. Dave famously majored in classics. “He loved Homeric poetry long before he loved calling homers,” the San Francisco Chronicle once wrote. “And he read it in Greek.” Will studied Spanish lit, and his fluency has been invaluable in a sport with such a Latino presence. Over time, his Spanish accent has become increasingly Dominican, he says, due to the number of Dominican players in the league.
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The Flemming brothers are part of the coterie of KZSU alums calling games in the major leagues. Dave Raymond, ’94, does TV play-by-play for the Texas Rangers, and Kris Atteberry, ’96, assumed the lead radio position for the Minnesota Twins last year. “To have four dudes out of a school that doesn’t even really have a program for it is pretty impressive,” Atteberry says.
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The broadcasting brothers are not unprecedented; for years, Dave’s broadcast mate Duane Kuiper, a former second baseman, was working one side of the Bay while his brother, Glen, worked the other for the Oakland Athletics. But they’re rare. “I don’t think there are many brothers anywhere who would be crazy enough to try to do this at the same time,” Will says.
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Dave is tall. Will is really tall. At 6’7”, he used to get mistaken for a player when he worked basketball games. It wasn’t ideal for long bus rides, but in a competitive business, it pays to stand out, Dave says, whether it’s for being the ancient Greek guy or the really tall one.
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Dave calls a range of sports with an aplomb that Atteberry says makes him “the sportscaster of our generation.” “If you need a basketball game, a football game, a golf tournament, whatever you need, he could drop in from a helicopter and do it and make it sound so smooth and professional,” he says. With two small kids, Will emphasizes family once the season ends.
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The brothers’ biggest fan was their dad, Michael, who would start summer nights on the patio listening to one son and end them listening to the other. In one of his last conversations with his dad, who died in October, Will told him he’d gotten the lead position with the Red Sox. “It was really a cool thing to be able to share with him that it was finally done.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
Photography courtesy David Flemming
