This week, The Post’s Andrew Marchand spoke with ESPN’s Jon Miller. Sunday night, the 51-year-old Miller starts his 30th season in a baseball broadcast booth when the Angels face the Rangers.
Q: When you look at this season, who could surprise?
A: The Cubs have such strong pitching. They have some real power pitchers there.
Q: Who else?
A: I think in that same division the Pittsburgh Pirates could surprise. I don’t see the Pirates being a contender and what not, but I think they are going to be a lot better than people realize. I like their first three pitchers in their rotation, Kip Wells, Josh Fogg and Kris Benson.
Q: What does Opening Day mean to you?
A: It’s the real New Year’s. We have resolutions to do better. We have high hopes to do better. For baseball fans, those things literally exist. Every team literally gets to start with a clean slate. Every fan has the hope that their team is going to win or, at least, be a better team on their way up.
Q: Having done their local games, you’ve been around Barry Bonds with the Giants and Cal Ripken Jr. with the Orioles. How are they different?
A: After we have a few years to look back at Cal’s body of achievement, he will be considered one of the greatest shortstops who has ever played. Barry Bonds is up there on the short list of one of the greatest players he has ever played.
Q: What player have you had the best experience with?
A: The thing I’ll never forget is the first game I ever broadcast at Fenway Park in 1974 with Oakland. I had to go down on the field and grab a player for a postgame interview. The guy I tried to get was Carl Yastrzemski. I was 22-years old, a total raw rookie.
Because of some sort of a union thing with our engineer at Fenway, I could not do the interview in the dugout or the clubhouse. I had to bring Yaz over by the backstop, where they had a microphone dangling.
He had agreed to do it and then he said, ‘Where do we do it?’ I said, ‘Right over here.’ He said, ‘We’re going to do it right here?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ There must have been 500 fans around that backstop hollering and cheering and what not. I was afraid he’d say, ‘I’m not doing it here.’ But he stayed and did seven or eight minutes. I became a huge Yastrzemski fan forevermore.
