Patrick Long

Former D1 assistant baseball coach. I'm a Ramblin' Wreck just trying to pay everything forward..

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

@JunksRadio forgot who was trashing Kuzma this morning but didn’t want anyone to miss this

[MD @mike_daddino]

The Top Five WORST Plays from NBA Opening Night

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

@GrantPaulsen if only you could have done this with DQ this week!

[98.5 The Sports Hub @985TheSportsHub]

Joe Mazzulla wanted your live calls today and the listeners did not disappoint😂

@ZoandBertrand

[George Jarjour @GeorgeOnTap]

A Phillies fan paid $22,010 at a charity auction to call one inning on the radio, and everyone's joking "give this man a job." Here's why that joke is funnier than people realize: the job he'd be applying for is statistically harder to get than making the major leagues as a player.

Run the math on the actual position. There are 30 MLB teams. Each carries roughly two or three play-by-play voices on radio. Call it under a hundred jobs in the entire country, in the entire sport. Meanwhile there are 780 active roster spots for players, and hundreds of them turn over every single year. The booth doesn't turn over. Vin Scully held his chair for 67 years. Bob Uecker held Milwaukee's for over 50. Harry Kalas called the Phillies until the day he died, in the booth's press box, before a game. When a broadcaster gets one of these jobs, he keeps it for a generation. In a given year, the number of genuine openings across all of baseball is a handful. Some years it's zero.

Bleacher Report did the definitive piece on this path and the headline says everything: hard and long for players, harder and longer for broadcasters.

Now the actual road, because it's brutal in a specific way. Calling games in college isn't a nice credential, it's the minimum requirement just to get an interview in the low minors. Then the minor league job, if you get it, pays somewhere in the range of $25,000 to $40,000, and the broadcasting is maybe a third of it. You're also the media relations department, the stat sheet printer, the sponsorship reader, and in some towns the guy helping pull the tarp. You ride the buses. You do this in Lancaster, San Jose, Durham, Pawtucket, for years, producing a demo tape after every season and mailing it to teams that are not hiring, because the guy in the chair above you is 54 and plans to die in it.

Dave Flemming's brother Doug called Stanford baseball in college, then spent eight years in the tech industry before finally packing everything he owned into one U-Haul and driving to a Single-A job in Lancaster. That's a normal version of this story. The abnormal versions don't make it at all.

And here's the economic trap that makes it worse than the player's path: a minor league player who tops out gets released and gets on with his life by 26. A minor league broadcaster can be good enough to stay employed forever and never get the call, because being good isn't the constraint. Scarcity is. There are hundreds of Triple-A-quality voices and single-digit openings. The industry runs on a decade-plus of underpaid apprenticeship as the price of a lottery ticket.

Which reframes the auction guy completely. $22,010 sounds absurd for one inning. It's the cheapest anyone has ever paid for that chair. The men sitting next to him, Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen, paid with decades. The going rate for one inning of big league play-by-play isn't $22,010. It's fifteen years of buses, a U-Haul, and a demo tape nobody asked for.

He got the deal of the century. He just had to be ready when it arrived, and by all accounts, years of calling youth games in New Jersey for free meant he was.

The most expensive seats in sports aren't in the stadium. They're the two behind the microphone, and they're not for sale. Except, apparently, once a year, for charity.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

@tw804 Can’t believe they would have the auction end in the middle of a game!

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

@GrantPaulsen

[Uggg @Uggg_uggg]

The person who came up with the idea to invite Alexander Ovechkin to their beer meet-up showed how it all went down. I translated this video for you.
Ovi is a legend. So many emotions!!!

📽️ the _green_mamba_club / ig

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

In case any HS player is wondering what P4 and top mid majors are looking for in a prospect. That’s big league physicality.

Until you look like this physically, they will continue to pluck guys out of the portal.

[The College Baseball Show @CollegeBSBShow]

Dominic Santarelli is exactly what you’d expect at the MLB Draft Combine BP cage… violent, thunderous bat speed. Massive power. Seven balls north of 114 MPH for the @LSUbaseball commit.

🎥: @cdorney

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Meanwhile, the Hi-A Brooklyn Cyclones get to face Gerrit Cole tonight and Carlos Rodon tomorrow.

[Sarah Langs @SlangsOnSports]

By facing Tarik Skubal today and Paul Skenes on Friday, the Brewers will be the second team to face the reigning Cy Young Award winners in both leagues in consecutive games, joining the 2025 Red Sox

h/t @EliasSports

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Without getting technical or taking a deep numbers dive, the xBA on ANY “close” pitch can’t be more than .200 yet the probability of it being called a ball is always .500.

[Robert Stock @RobertStock6]

@ScoringChanges Absolutely NOT too close to take. A batter can’t be extending the strike zone by multiple inches against a guy throwing 102mph. Even if he swings he doesn’t do anything with the pitch. The best play by him is to leave it in the hands of the umpire. And that’s why we have ABS now.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Watching this game was peak 2025 Pirates.

Skenes shoves and only gives up one run.

Bednar has everyone yelling at their tv and wiggles out of serious trouble.

Cruz goes hitless.

Don’t know how those fans do it for 162.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Why is the best game of the opening round of the WBC on some bootleg streaming service and not on FS1 or FS2? Spare me the 7-10 matchup of some mid-major CBB conference tournament. @FOXSports

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Jack Hughes gets some teeth cracked and still scores the game winner for a gold medal for USA Hockey…LeBron would never

[Pittsburgh Pirates @Pirates]

Couldn’t make it to visit us at PiratesFest today?

REPOST THIS for a chance to win a SIGNED Paul Skenes jersey!

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Soldier: What is a catch?

Commander: Nobody knows.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

If DEI were a college football team, it would be Tulane. Notre Dame falls victim to poor CFP policy.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Lane Kiffin would never….make it at Michigan.

[Brett McMurphy @Brett_McMurphy]

From Michigan: Sherrone Moore has been terminated, with cause, effective immediately. Following a University investigation, credible evidence was found that Coach Moore engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. This conduct constitutes a clear violation of University policy, and U-M maintains zero tolerance for such behavior

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

Day in the life at the Athens Driving School

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

Football palette cleanser: Sherman the dog fell into the hole not once, not twice, but three times.

Lil guy was just having some fun

https://t.co/pQMoonoNT2

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

I just wish my kids appreciated this as much as I wanted to.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

If there was ever a night to get an extra hour of sleep from daylight savings time, tonight is the night after the World Series this week.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

If there was ever a night to get an extra hour of sleep from daylight savings time, tonight is the night after the World Series this week.

[Patrick Long @PatrickLong27]

The @NFL is all the wayyy back not even 5 quarters into the season!