It’s a warm day at AT&T Park, or the “yard,” as Dave Flemming calls his workplace. Beyond the left field wall, the specks of orange from East Bay homes will soon light up the hills. Tonight, as on most other spring and summer nights, Flemming’s warm and familiar voice will accompany dusk’s arrival for thousands of Bay Area baseball fans, and it will lull to sleep his 1-year-old twins, Katie and Carter.
In his fourth year as a San Francisco Giants radio announcer, the 30-year-old Flemming, ’98, MA ’98, is still the youngest active broadcaster in the big leagues. His boyish face belies his seasoned insights and that smooth voice.
He sits at a counter in the radio booth on the press level, above and behind home plate, and leans in close to the big black microphone. To his left, a computer monitor displays web pages with updates from other games, and in front of him are arrayed binoculars, several pens and highlighters, a scorebook, and Advil.
The Advil and the collection of tea he carries in his bag are essentials for a man who seldom has a moment to rest his voice. “You can’t get sick,” he says. “I don’t miss any games.” Even on the rare game or two Flemming might get off during a season, he’s been known to try and talk his wife, Jessica, into taking the kids with him to the ballpark.
One of the reasons he loves working in baseball is the chance to broadcast every day. “It makes a connection to the fans,” Flemming says. “I also think it makes you better as a broadcaster.” Throughout the Bay Area and at the stadium, fans greet Flemming like an old friend. “Hey, Flem,” a woman shouted from a few rows beneath the open radio booth at a game in April, “will you sign my autograph book?”
His rapport with listeners seems linked to Flemming’s own genuine love for the game. Fans “want to hear I’m excited,” he says. “To me, there’s always something going on. I see every pitch. I know every side story that’s going on.”
“Flem” is one of a number of unfortunate yet affectionate nicknames occasionally used by Flemming’s fellow broadcasters. There’s also “Flame” (Flemming blushes easily), “Number Four” (you can guess how many other broadcasters he works with) and, for a while, “Et al,” though Flemming can blame that one on his own self-deprecating humor. After a letter to the editor in the New York Times mentioned the Giants’ broadcast team of “Jon Miller, Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, et al,” Flemming brought it up on the air during the post-game wrap.
“It’d be one thing if we had a broadcast crew of fifteen,” he recalls saying in front of his broadcast partners, “but we have a broadcast crew of four and she listed the first three and then said ‘et al.’ There are no ‘et al’; it’s me!”
Miller, Flemming’s radio partner on Giants’ flagship station KNBR, and Kuiper and Krukow—the Giants’ TV guys—ate it up. They know that their young colleague is good, perhaps even on his way to being a national broadcaster, and his willingness to laugh at himself makes working with him that much better.
When his colleagues found out Flemming was a classics major at Stanford, they teased him for being overqualified for the job. When he got a nosebleed in Denver during a game and had to use a wad of tissue to stop the blood, Flemming turned to his right and, through the glass panel that separates the radio booth from the television booth, saw Krukow and Kuiper with tissues hanging from their noses, too. “We knew Dave was going to be a hit the first time we met him,” Kuiper says. “He liked to laugh, he worked his tail off, and he respected his elders—which there are a lot of.”
Flemming, who alternates every two innings with Miller as the play-by-play announcer, says his first priority is to make sure listeners know exactly what’s happening in the game. He has avoided contrived, signature home run calls and catchphrases. Because he doesn’t force a radio persona, his natural charm and humor translates through the airwaves. “You talk to Dave in the hotel lobby and on the plane, and it’s the same as on the air,” Miller says. “And that’s fun.”
That charm and humor have also helped in adverse situations. Last year, when Giants slugger Barry Bonds hit his 715th career home run, surpassing Babe Ruth for the No. 2 spot on the all-time home run list, Flemming was behind the microphone. But just as the pitch was delivered to Bonds, KNBR’s microphones went dead, and Flemming’s call during the historic moment went unheard. Later, when asked about it by reporters from around the country, Flemming responded that perhaps the infamous “Curse of the Bambino” had struck again.
Aside from the occasional on-air teasing, a listener wouldn’t guess that while the other three Giants’ broadcasters were well into their careers in 1994, Flemming was a freshman at Stanford.
Not long after his arrival on campus, he wandered down the steps in the back of Memorial Auditorium into KZSU, Stanford’s student radio station. About 15 people gathered in the back room for an informational meeting of the sports department, including upperclassmen Dave Raymond, ’94, and Kris Atteberry, ’96, who went on to careers in baseball broadcasting with the Houston Astros and Minnesota Twins, respectively. The freshmen were told that if they put in their time as radio engineers for the station, they would be able to cover some Stanford games.
Flemming spent his years at Stanford calling basketball, football and baseball games on KZSU, and by graduation, he figured he would see how far he could go in broadcasting. “I enjoyed it enough that I thought maybe I’d regret it if I didn’t pursue it,” he says. He attended Syracuse University’s one-year graduate program in broadcast journalism, spent a year covering minor league baseball in Visalia, Calif., and then moved to Pawtucket, R.I., to broadcast for the Red Sox’s Triple A affiliate. Each year, Flemming recorded half an inning of one of his games and mailed it to every major league franchise. “There’s no guarantee that you’re going to get one game at the major league level,” he says. “I thought, at least I need to be sending my stuff out there.”
During Flemming’s third year in Pawtucket, the Giants e-mailed to ask if he would fill in for one of their broadcasters during a couple of games in Philadelphia. Then they brought him back to try a series in St. Louis, and again for a few games in San Francisco in September. After that stint, the Giants told Flemming they wanted him full time for the following season. He was 27. Flemming recalls walking back to his hotel stunned. “I still felt like I had just graduated Stanford,” he says. “My sentiment was, ‘What just happened?’ For a big-market franchise to hire me to do full-time work was a real risk.”
But Jon Miller knew all along that Flemming had what it took. “I told them I thought he was going to be a network guy—real smooth and real smart,” says Miller, who leaves his colleagues one day each week to work ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
Miller, Kuiper and Krukow worry that it’s Flemming who will be leaving. With satellite radio now airing all the Giants’ games, they wonder if “some team will hear him and make him their No. 1,” says Krukow. “That will be a bad day for us.”
BRIAN EULE, ’01, a Bay Area writer, is at work on a book about the medical profession.
