Eric Nadel | Texas Rangers Radio PxP Voice

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For important information, visit Principle.com slash disclosures. On Rangers Radio, the team of Eric Nadel and Matt Hicks getting to call the final out of the 2023 World Series as the Rangers are champions. And we are so pleased to have Eric join us now from the desert, from Arizona, where the party continues, but he's taking a couple of minutes for us. Eric, what's it like to hear that final call back on the radio? I got goosebumps, Amy.

I really did. I heard it once on our postgame show. I haven't heard it since.

But, oh man, I still can't believe it. You know, this is my 45th year on this job. 45 years. And, you know, we've spent, I think, three generations of Ranger fans over the course of this franchise's 52 years in Texas. And so to actually get to say the Rangers have won the World Series is, to say it was a bucket list thing for me would be a gross understatement. From the beginning, this team has had some character, of course.

They've got some really impressive individual talents. Bruce Bochy added to the mix, though, and he's an old timer like you are. Actually came out of retirement to guide this team. How do you summarize or even begin to explain his impact on the Rangers? Well, he has a calm but really assertive presence.

I guess that's the best way I would put it. And, you know, as the Rangers were going through all that adversity in the second half with a bunch of guys getting hurt, particularly their All-Stars, and having this incredible roller coaster of winning streaks and losing streaks, you know, he kept everybody calm. He kept people from panicking. You know, he stayed pretty constant in his lineup.

You know, he didn't show any signs of panic to the team. And it just seemed he's got the magic touch. There's something about him that, you know, instinctively he just makes the right move, starting with spring training when he took Josh Young, a raw rookie, and put him in the number five hole in the lineup. And just about everything he's done since then has worked out right.

He's got a gift. He's obviously great at handling people. And the game strategy is fantastic. We've had some really good managers in Texas, Buck Showalter included. You know, one of the best game managers of all time. And, you know, Boach has everything. He's got the ability to handle the players better than anybody else. And the game strategy, he misses nothing. And he just, he's got the touch. And now will soon have a fourth World Series ring. You will have your first. What does that feel like to know you're going to have a World Series ring, Eric?

It's crazy. I honestly never thought it would happen, Amy. Chris Young got the job as the general manager. And I knew Chris when he played for us in 2004. And he's one of the very few players who I stayed in close touch with. Because he, you know, he lived in Dallas.

He grew up in Dallas. And when he got the job, he told me, you've got to stick around for a few more years. Because we're going to win this thing.

And it's not going to take that long. You know, he knew he had the commitment from ownership to go ahead and go for it. And honestly, I love Chris. He's super intelligent.

He's super competitive. And I didn't believe him. I really didn't believe him. And I was thinking all along that, you know, there's no way, when we lost over 100 games two years ago, there's no way that he's going to turn this team into a champion, you know, in any time soon.

I'm 72 years old. And for him to have done it as quickly as he did, you know, with the help of John Daniels, who really built the nucleus of the team, and the majority of the players on the team were acquired during John Daniels' regime, the fact that they have done this, it's just absolutely unbelievable. I mean, it really is still unbelievable.

It's four hours since the game ended. And I'm still in disbelief. Incredulous. But it's a good feeling.

It's certainly a good thing to be incredulous over something positive like this. Eric Nadel is with us from the desert, where the Rangers have just wrapped up the World Series in five games, their first ever in franchise history. And Eric's been with the team for 45 years as their play-by-play announcer.

It's after hours on CBS Sports Radio. Why do you still do it? What keeps you coming back to that microphone? Well, Amy, it's actually still fun. You know, I honestly can say that it started dragging for a while, for a few years, but the new rules this year, with the pitch clock in particular, have really revitalized the game. You know, I think the fans feel that way, and I feel that way too, and I think almost all the announcers feel that way also. There's just less dead time. You know, when you look at an average game time going from about 3.05 to about 2.40, that's 25 minutes of time when nothing was happening that has been pulled out of the game. And all of a sudden now, this year, the game has a rhythm again. The game, you know, feels like the game felt when I started doing these games in 1979, and that's about what the average game time was.

It was just over two and a half hours. And as an announcer, you don't have all this dead time to fill. The game just moves along at a decent pace, and it made it so much more fun this year to work with the pitch clock than it's been the last couple of years. But, you know, basically, I get paid to watch baseball games, you know, and shoot off my mouth about it. It's fun.

I've got two great partners who I love working every day, and I don't do a full schedule anymore, and as long as the Rangers, you know, work with me on the number of games I'm going to do, why would I not keep doing it? It's still fun. I want to ask you, if you don't mind, about 2011. For baseball fans, they certainly remember the Cardinals' iconic rally. It's considered one of the best World Series in baseball history. What do you remember about calling that series? Oh, game six was the biggest, you know, biggest nightmare that I'd gone through. And I really, you know, if you had asked me about this yesterday, I would have said I really don't want to talk about it. But today, today, now that the Rangers have won, you know, it really did erase the demons for me.

Now I can talk about it. But, you know, I thought it brought Ranger fans together, you know, as a grouping, having gone through that thing. And I know a lot of the fans who were Ranger fans in 2011 probably aren't with us anymore, and I feel really badly that they didn't get a chance to experience this. But it was a horror show. You know, the Rangers had never won.

They've been around for 40 years in Texas, and 51 years, you know, including their time in Washington, they've never won. And they were a strike away, not once, but twice, and didn't get the job done. You know, a fly ball to right field, didn't get caught in the ninth inning, and then in the tenth inning after Josh Hamilton hit a two-run homer, Lance Berkman hit, you know, this little lucky bloop hit that tied the game up, and it just ripped our heart out. And, you know, we've, as Ranger fans and announcers, we've been haunted by that since 2011. And now, just as the Red Sox fans, you know, could release the demons of Bill Buckner when they finally won the World Series after their long drought, I think Ranger fans can do that too. And, you know, I never wanted to hear the name of David Freese.

It just made me shudder. And now you can say David Freese as many times as you want, and it's not going to bother me. Redemption is sweet, that's true. But yes, the Rangers and their fans have had to suffer to get to this point.

I'm sure you've been asked this question a thousand times if you've been asked it once at all. What made them such incredible road teammates? What made them so good on the road? I have no idea because during the regular season, they weren't that good on the road. You know, they had a losing record on the road. They didn't score runs on the road.

They scored far more runs at home than they did on the road. But all of a sudden in the postseason, they put it together. Maybe it's because the season ended with a seven-game road trip and, you know, they lost the final game of the season. And by doing so, they lost the division and had to play in the wildcard round instead of having that bye. They had to go to Tampa Bay and play a team that had won 99 games. And, you know, maybe that experience brought the team together.

They went directly from there to Baltimore. We were on the road for 15 days, starting with the final Monday of the regular season. And I've got to think that it was some sort of a bonding experience, some sort of an experience of believing in each other, especially when they beat Tampa Bay, two games to none. And the Rangers were heavy underdogs in that series. I think maybe that was the key to winning on the road.

Nobody seems to have any plausible explanation. You know, Mitch Garber said maybe it's the hot dogs. At home, the Rangers have this fancy executive chef, but they don't have hot dogs in the clubhouse. But on the road, they order hot dogs in and he thinks maybe that has something to do with it. Eric Nadel is with us from Arizona, where the Rangers have just captured the first World Series title in their franchise history.

It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio. You talk about the travel and the number of days away. I'm always so blown away by the idea of a 162-game schedule where these guys spend more time with each other, because it's long hours at the ballpark in addition to traveling. They spend more time with each other than they do with their families during a season.

That's double the number of games of, say, the NBA or the NHL. I can imagine, you know, like all the long hours traveling. That's what that can wear on you, too. But what would you say is the spirit, the character of this group of guys? Well, the word that keeps getting used, and you know, it's a bit of a cliche, but it's true, is resilience. You know, they bounced back from injuries in the second half to five of their six All-Star players. You know, they kept dropping like flies. In the first half of the season, they lost Mitch Garver and Corey Seeger, each for over a month. And somebody always stepped up and filled in for them. You know, Ezekiel Duran did a tremendous job filling in for Corey Seeger. Jonah Heim became the everyday catcher and just hit like crazy and won a spot in the All-Star game. Then in the second half, Heim went down and Josh Young, the third baseman, went down. Seeger got hurt again. Nathan Iwaldi, you know, who was on his way to a Cy Young Award, it appeared, missed six weeks. And then finally, Adolis Garcia missed 10 games. And that might have been the best thing that happened to the Rangers, because it caused the Rangers to call up Evan Carter. Carter would not have been called up most probably if Adolis hadn't gotten hurt in early September. You know, all Carter did was hit over 300 during the regular season in 23 games and hit over 300 in the playoffs too, batting third or fourth or fifth in the Ranger order. It's just unbelievable the way things happen this year. Now, the Rangers have won the division previously three times in the 90s and in 2015 and 2016, but it was never as improbable as this year with all the ups and downs in the second half. So Eric, how will you celebrate when you actually have a chance to get home and unpack, because we talked about being road warriors so you've been living out of a suitcase, what will you do to mark this occasion?

Well, it's a good question. We've been told that there will be a parade in Arlington on Friday. And, you know, I was talking to Bruce Bochy about that tonight, because this is actually the 13th anniversary of the night when Bochy won his first World Series with the Giants. And it was the first World Series win for San Francisco back in 2010.

It happened on November the 1st. And I was asking Bruce about it on the manager's show today. And he said, you know, it was an incredible feeling. It was totally surreal. And then the next day he woke up and there was no baseball.

He didn't know what to do. He said, I had dreams about what the lineup would be the next day. And it was over.

So I imagine I'll probably go through some of that same stuff once we get home tomorrow afternoon and then after the parade is over on Friday. But I'm more than willing to deal with that after 45 years of not having it in this way. Did you shed some tears? You know, I did on our postgame show. I'm so fortunate in that Jared Sandler, who's one of our three announcers, grew up listening to me. And I mentored him from the time he was in college at USC.

And some of the things he said on the postgame show about how happy he was for me and how he wouldn't be doing this as a result if it wasn't for listening to me growing up. That was that was pretty much too much. And the emotions kind of kind of spilled over. But the whole idea of the Rangers being the world champions is just so unbelievable to Ranger fans who have followed the whole thing because, you know, there's been more losing than there has been winning. And we're all just so elated now. It's just we're just over the moon. And you don't know whether to smile, laugh or cry. But right now we're doing a lot of all those things.

Yes. And also just wanted to mention it was very kind of you, generous of you to talk about Greg Schulte in his final broadcast, too, and what a ride the Diamondbacks gave him as he retires. He's such a great guy and such a great announcer, too. It's so much enthusiasm, even this year in his final year. I remember talking to him at the start of the season and he said, you know, I think we've got a chance to, you know, maybe make the postseason and I'll get a chance to do some postseason games again before I retire. And, you know, like the Rangers, they lost over 100 games two years ago and had a losing record last year, too.

And they weren't close to 500. And, you know, we're both thinking, you know, this is crazy. And here we are in the World Series and, you know, getting a chance to visit with Greg every day and talk to him.

And Tom Candiati, his partner, was really fun for me. And Greg came in while we were still on our hour and a half postgame show tonight. Greg came in as he was on his way out of the building and, you know, shook our hands. And I'm sure I'll talk to him tomorrow and, you know, process some of this.

But for him to go out by doing a World Series, man, that's the way to go. Absolutely. Well, you've been talking for a really long time, so we appreciate you spending a few minutes with us. We are hearing from Rangers fans on our Twitter to say we can't wait to see Eric at the parade, send him our best.

We can't sleep. We're still listening. So, yeah, lots of excited fans and you've been their voice for decades.

So, Eric, congratulations on this moment and your opportunity to not just earn a ring but also to call a World Series again that ends in victory. And thank you so much for a few minutes. Thanks, Amy. Thanks so much for giving me a chance to talk to you. I really appreciate it.

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