Memories converge for Jon Miller in his 50th season, as Giants visit Baltimore

BALTIMORE — It was 90 minutes before the first pitch and Jon Miller wanted crabcakes.

He sauntered past the press box dining room, followed an usher’s instructions to the club level at Camden Yards, and found the right concession stand just as it was opening for business. The young cashier asked Miller if he worked at the ballpark. The customer next to him in line spoke up: Yes, he’s a broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, but for many years before that, he was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles.

“I’ve been working on a new one, want to hear it?” Miller said to the cashier, before switching his voice into its radio resonance. “Here’s the pitch … fouuuulll.”

Miller’s longtime broadcast partner, Dave Flemming, laughed when that story was relayed to him. Flemming can’t guess at how many times he’s been out in public when gushing fans flock to Miller to introduce themselves, to pose for selfies with him, or just to tell him that his voice has been a soundtrack to so many of their summers. There are no cough buttons to press when flocking fans expect a performance. And Miller is like any consummate performer: he never wants to disappoint. So he uses an icebreaking, one-line act that has endless riffs.

“I’m hoping I’ll be able to use this one on the broadcast tonight,” Miller told a crowd in an elevator on Tuesday. “Ready? Ball one, lowww.”

Miller has pressed nearly every variation of the one-liner into service this week. The Giants are playing their first series in Baltimore since 2019. It’s a black-and-orange merger for Miller, who has spent the past 28 seasons in the Giants broadcast booth for KNBR, NBC Bay Area and NBC Sports Bay Area, and prior to that, was a broadcasting institution in Baltimore while voicing the Orioles for 14 seasons from 1983-96. It’s only fitting that the Giants visit Camden Yards this season, which marks the 50th anniversary of Miller’s beginnings in the broadcast booth. The Hayward, Calif., native was 22 when the Oakland A’s hired him in 1974.

He still loves the game. He still loves the job. If he’s ready to say Adios, it’s only because Mike Yastrzemski is sending another baseball in the direction of Eutaw Street.

“I truly get a kick out of how much people love him here,” said Flemming, who joined Miller, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow on the Giants’ broadcast team in 2004 and still ranks fourth in seniority. “Thank God for us that he came to San Francisco and we’ve had him for all these years. But they’ve never, ever gotten over the fact that he’s not here in Baltimore anymore. To this day, when I go into town and have lunch, somebody says, ‘Oh, you’re with the Giants. How’s Jon doing?’ It’s amazing how much they still love him.”

Miller and his wife, Janine, rented two suites for Tuesday night’s game to host nearly three dozen friends and acquaintances from their time in Charm City. This was worrisome for longtime radio engineer Darren Chan, who knows that Miller doesn’t need a microphone to spin stories as time flies by. Chan also knew that Miller couldn’t possibly make it from the party suite to the press box without getting stopped a dozen times. So Chan took precautions. He had the television audio cued up and fed into his sound mixer just in case.

“He had so many people here, and he’s so popular,” Flemming said. “And he was working (in the radio booth) alone. So we had to have somebody here if he got trapped.”

Miller made it to his chair on time for the first pitch Tuesday night. And on the second pitch, Yastrzemski homered. A night later, Yastrzemski did it again. The Giants right fielder, a former Orioles farmhand who spent six years in Baltimore’s system but never played a home game at Camden Yards, crushed the first pitch of Wednesday night’s game for a home run. It marked just the fourth time in all-time Giants history that a batter led off consecutive games with a home run. Dan Gladden had been the last to accomplish the feat in 1985. Bobby Bonds had done it 12 years earlier.

It just goes to prove a point that Miller made Wednesday afternoon, after he’d settled affairs with the first of his two crabcakes, finished recording his open and the lineups, and looked out on the silky afternoon light bathing the B&O warehouse beyond the right field fence in the ballpark that he helped welcome into existence more than three decades ago.

“The game is always fresh, it’s always new, it always engages your mind,” Miller said. “You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. You never know if it’s going to be a great game, maybe it’ll be a bad game, maybe it’ll be a historic game. Maybe you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. That’s what keeps it fresh and what keeps it fun.

“You can say the same thing about any sport, but in baseball, there’s a game every day. If you didn’t like the broadcast today, you go home and you have another one tomorrow. The things that you didn’t like about the game tonight, you can resolve it. It’s ‘I’m going to make sure I get that right tomorrow.’”

Flemming’s mind keeps flashing back to his yesterdays. He grew up in the Washington, D.C., area before the Nationals moved from Montreal. Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and Memorial Stadium before it, were his family’s source whenever there was a baseball itch to scratch. And Jon Miller was the voice that came through the static in the parking lot.

“I can close my eyes now and remember being in the back seat of a station wagon — remember the old station wagons with the back seat that faced backwards? — and we’d pile some friends in the car and come up to an Orioles game, we’d stay till the end of the game and go get in the car,” he said. “And I can remember listening to Jon do the postgame highlights and the out-of-town scores. I mean, I was 8 years old!  Jon was a huge part of my childhood and so much of it is associated here. So it is amazing to think: here we are and how many thousands of games we’ve done together.”

A quarter-century ago, Miller assumed he would’ve done those thousands of games for the Orioles. He treasured the notion of a broadcaster as a civic institution like Ernie Harwell in Detroit or Jack Buck in St. Louis or Vin Scully before and after the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. Miller spent two seasons announcing for the Texas Rangers in 1978-79 and three for the Boston Red Sox in 1980-82 but it wasn’t until he arrived in Baltimore, just in time for the Orioles’ World Series championship in 1983, that he felt he landed in a place where he could become part of the fabric of the franchise. And he was.

Until his contract was up after the 1996 season and former owner Peter Angelos decided he didn’t want to pay a broadcaster whose availability was hampered by another growing institution, ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” and most importantly, who didn’t wave rhetorical pompons in the booth.

Miller, in Angelos’ infamous and oft-quoted words, “didn’t bleed black and orange.” So Miller left for the team of his boyhood. One that also wore black and orange.

And even now, when Miller interacts with Orioles fans, they continue to express two things: gratitude for his years with the club and lamentations that it came to such a short-sighted end.

“Of all the things that the old ownership did here, I think the thing that broke people was when they ran Jon out of town,” Flemming said. “You can screw up contracts and sign players that don’t work out or whatever. But don’t mess with Jon.

“This is where he came and felt he was meant to be. I think it came across back then in his broadcasts. I hope it comes across for the four of us now, that we feel that way about San Francisco. Back then, it was obvious to everybody here how much Jon loved being here and that was a big part of the appeal.”

“I’m really blown away that people still recall it,” Miller said. “You have to be of a certain age. I wanted to stay here and ownership had a different opinion about it. I wasn’t happy, but I had somewhere to land because Hank Greenwald had retired (in San Francisco). I look back now on it and I feel a little embarrassed. It’s not that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to San Francisco, but you aspire to be that guy for generations of fans. I thought maybe Baltimore would be my place. And then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Now I look back on it and think, ‘This was the best thing that happened to me, going to San Francisco.’ It’s funny how I didn’t even realize that at the time.”

Miller’s time in Baltimore included making an immediate impression on a 24-year-old Orioles beat writer who was learning the ins and outs of a major-league clubhouse. Ken Rosenthal, now The Athletic’s senior baseball reporter and Fox Sports television correspondent, cannot forget the time he walked into the dugout and encountered Miller in conversation with a stern-voiced Reggie Jackson. Rosenthal’s ears started to burn when he heard Jackson say, “The problem with writers today is they don’t love the game like you do, Jon.”

“I’m thinking, ‘Holy s—,’ if you want to be respected, you’d better love this game,” Rosenthal said. “Jon knew Reggie. They’d been together in Oakland. But that respect he showed made an impression on me. I’ve never forgotten that. The Orioles PR guy at the time, Rick Vaughn, used to say that Jon Miller sells more tickets than anyone else in the organization. I don’t think Peter Angelos understood what this guy meant to the city. He loved the game, had a curiosity for the game, had a curiosity for life. And he was so good. Angelos just didn’t get how good he was.”

The best ever, in Flemming’s opinion.

“His radio broadcasting is unmatched, ever,” Flemming said. “I just think that’s true, no offense to all the other greats who have ever done it.”

What makes Miller stand out in a multigenerational field of iconic voices?

“I’ll give you a few,” Flemming said. “For one, he’s the best on the big calls. The thing about being a baseball broadcaster is slow, slow, slow, quiet, quiet, big. That’s hard. In football, the big moments are way easier. You’re pumped up the whole game. Every play feels like such a big deal so it’s easier to call a big play successfully. In baseball, you’ve got to be able to flip that switch and not sound like an idiot. You want your voice to sound great and full and robust, but not out of control, like you lost your mind. And Jon does that better than anyone. It’s a hidden skill for being a good baseball broadcaster that he nails.

“He knows the history of the game. He knows the rules, he knows the nuances of the game. He puts you in the middle of the strategy of the game. Jon and Vin, maybe those two are the greatest. But they are totally different in how they do a game. With Jon, you’re not going to hear all the stories, where a guy went to college and how he rescued a rabbit from a rattlesnake and whatever. That’s not Jon and that’s OK. Both those guys are great and they do it different ways.

“I just think Jon puts you inside the game more than anybody ever. He makes you think along with both managers, along with the players on the field. He’s got a true gift for grasping how the game unfolds, and it’s awesome to watch.

“And he is a student of the craft. He’s a student of language. He doesn’t make grammatical mistakes because he cares about getting that right. Jon’s voice is an instrument and he uses it like one. It’s the booming voice but it’s also the intonation and the way he enunciates and his command of the language.”

A week or two ago, Miller was in the dining room at Oracle Park in San Francisco. Another major-league game was on television. The broadcaster pronounced “error” as a one-syllable word.

It’s the smallest of details. But in every Jon Miller broadcast over the years, error is a two-syllable word.

That’s not to suggest that Miller is incapable of making his own two-syllable errors on the air. He laughed as he recalled his first spring training broadcast with the Giants in 1997 at Peoria, Ariz. The Giants were wearing their road grays with black and orange piping, just as the Orioles would wear. The third batter of the game stepped in the on-deck circle. Miller saw Cal Ripken’s No. 8 on his back. His familiar impulses kicked in.

“Fortunately I didn’t say this on the air,” Miller said. “But I thought, ‘God, Cal, it looks like he put on some weight in the offseason. Is this one of those things where he’s gonna use the spring to get back in shape like Brooksie (Robinson) used to do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well, that’s not Cal. It’s obviously not Cal. This guy’s like, five inches shorter anyway.’ Well, it was Damon Berryhill! I’m looking at No. 8 thinking it’s Cal Ripken and then thinking, ‘God, I really gotta be careful here.’”

Miller did stumble a few times while adjusting in his initial season in San Francisco.

“I don’t think I ever called the Giants the Orioles in that spring or that year,” he said. “But here in Baltimore, we had the Esskay out-of-town scoreboard. It was sponsored by a local meat company. And that first year (with the Giants), maybe once every two weeks, I’d say, ‘Meanwhile, down in L.A., on the Esskay out-ahhh … the Toyota! out-of-town scoreboard… I didn’t even bother trying to explaining it. Who knows what Esskay is out here?”

Even now, 24 years later, a visit to Camden Yards causes some of the black and orange to blend together.

“It happened at least a couple times last night,” Miller said. “I said, ‘The Giants will be home at Oriole Park a week from Fri…uhhh Oracle Park.”

Miller spent Wednesday morning at Butler University where his longtime attorney and agent, Ron Shapiro, was hosting the annual Butler Conference of Leaders. Ripken was among the other invited guests. Karen Silverman, an expert on artificial intelligence, was one of the keynote speakers. One of the AI presentations featured Olympics highlights with Al Michaels providing the commentary. Miller knew that Michaels didn’t work the recent games in Paris. It was an AI-generated version of his voice.

“It sounded just like him,” Miller said. “The thing is, Al wasn’t offended or upset by it. They paid him to get his approval to use it. He didn’t have to do anything other than say, ‘Yeah, fine.’ That’s the easiest gig that Al ever had.”

Five decades of baseball broadcasts would provide ample programming for an AI version of Jon Miller. For now, there’s no need. The real version is still reading promos like they are Shakespearean works of literature, gazing out on the diamond below, mindfully choosing and enunciating each descriptive word from the sublime to the mundane.

Ball two, lowwww.

Turns out Reggie Jackson was right about Jon Miller all along.

“The great thing about doing this is that, No. 1, I’m a baseball fan,” said Miller, who was honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame with the Ford C. Frick Award in 2010. “Probably if I wasn’t doing this for a living, I’d want to live somewhere near a ballpark and go to as many games as I could. I’d always want to be around baseball.

“Even when you’re tired, when you get back in the middle of the night from a road trip, there’s another game the next day. You’d maybe like to have that night off. But as soon as you’re headed to the ballpark, even reluctantly, you start thinking about things you want to ask the manager about, or maybe you want to go ask Mike Yastrzemski about a play he was involved in, or Brandon Crawford or Buster Posey or Hunter Pence. You start thinking about maybe what you might want to ask a manager or whether you want to talk to the manager of the other team, maybe get some information about somebody over there that might be hurt. You’re already engaging and you haven’t even gotten to the ballpark yet.

“So every day is fresh.”

(Top photo of Jon Miller at the Willie Mays celebration of life: Maddie Harrell / San Francisco Giants / Getty Images)