Major AND Minor league baseball season!

That little promo on the way back was our version, I guess, of Hillbilly headlines. And that's a perfect way to bring in Ryan McGee of ESPN. Marty McGee on the SEC Network and the radio. And he's got books and he covers football and he covers racing.

The new book is called Welcome to the Circus of Baseball, a story of the perfect summer at the perfect ballpark at the perfect time. Mr. McGee, how are you? I'm doing great.

It's great to talk to you. And yeah, here in Charlotte, it's a beautiful spring day. And, you know, it's not 150 degrees yet. It's kind of perfect minor league weather. So I'm glad to talk about minor league baseball.

It is. And North Carolina is probably more than any other state in the United States, maybe California, in terms of the number of minor league cities. And your book is based on your year. As an intern with the Asheville tourist, but there's something and you grew up in Raleigh, there is something about minor league baseball, and the state of North Carolina.

Yeah, and it's honestly it's why I love it so much. I mean, you know, my, my dad, you know, I wrote a book with my dad a couple years ago, and, you know, dad was was a college baseball player, he's Carolina, my brother walked on awake, we're a baseball house. And so, you know, if you wanted to get to the Atlanta Braves, I mean, that's a trip, right?

You're, you're, you're booking them you that's a hotel room. And if you want to go to Baltimore, that's a trip. But if you wanted to go see the Burlington Indians, or you want to get out into Kingston, or you want to go to Fayetteville or Asheville, or even over to Martinsville, Virginia, and Danville and Richmond. I mean, from Raleigh, we were kind of epicenter, man, you know, and of course, the bulls were there and the mudcats moved there when we were living there.

And so yeah, it was just easy to get to. And so that's where my obsession with minor league baseball continues to this day. I've been 129 minor league ballparks. And I booked my travel around it. Like when I'm booking, I'm booking trips for the summer for ESPN.

And the first thing I'm doing is looking at the minor league schedule. And that started, you know, again, in Raleigh, it'd be it'd be a Wednesday night, Wednesday afternoon, and dad will get the News observer out and go well, you know, the the fabled generals are home, we never been there. And we get in the car and go, you know, or, you know, go to Asheville, go to Burlington, go where, you know, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, wherever. And so yeah, living there. We even dad used to work at Gardner Webb College, University College back then back in when I was a little bitty guy in the 70s. We had a minor league baseball team in Shelby with the Shelby Pirates that played at Shelby High School. And so yeah, that's what I grew up with.

And it's why my obsession with it continues to this day. So you and Ryan McGee from ESPN is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show. When, when you first got out of school, and you tried to get a gig with ESPN, that that didn't that didn't fly.

What, what essentially landed you with Asheville? Yeah, I write about it in the book, I was fortunate enough right out of college, to get an interview at ESPN, or just starting ESPN, too, and needed people. But I bombed my interview so bad.

I mean, it was awful. They asked me all these hockey questions. And this is obviously this pre hurricanes, the whalers are still in Hartford, and they're talking to me about the Seattle Mariners pitching rotation, I mean, everything that didn't have a southern accent on purpose they were asking me. But all of my friends and colleagues and mentors were like, gosh, get to the winter meetings and baseball's winter meetings to this day.

I've been this way for 100 years. It's it's the off season baseball convention. And there's kind of three aspects to it. There's the business meeting part of it for the for the people involved in baseball. There's the, you know, the trade show that where everybody's trying Morgana the Kissing Bandit and people selling peanuts and all that they're trying to get you to book them for their for your ballpark.

And then there's the job fair part of it. And so I went to I went to Atlanta with my awful cassette tapes of me trying to do that. I went to high school football play by play looking for radio play by play job. And big surprise, no one wanted someone with my accent to be the voice of their baseball team.

But I did land $100 a week internship with the actual tours. The first of all, Red Barber was southern. Yeah, Lindsay Nelson, my all time favorite ballplay actually taught at Tennessee. I know you're a Tennessee guy. He taught at Tennessee after his career was over. I mean, all these guys there. Ernie Harwell was from Atlanta.

What are we talking about? Mel Allen, the voice of the Yankees. Yeah. And so so my feeling was I you know, I can do but keep in mind now this is the this is the 90s.

And in the 1990s. If you didn't sound like Tom Brokaw, like if you didn't sound just straight flat Midwestern, you know, no dialect, then you probably were not going to have a chance or unless you just sound like you just a straight up, you know, New York Yankee, but it was in those days, it just was not that was not an option even for you know, southern minor league teams. But yeah, but but the actual tourists, they offer me $100 a week job. I took it and and the idea was, hey, maybe we might start a radio network. And if we do, we'd like for you to help us with that. And they didn't. They have one now. And I tell you, the funny part is the whole the whole point was I want to be the voice of the actual tourists and do actual tourist baseball on a radio. And I didn't get a chance, you know, 30 years ago, but I threw out the first pitch and I threw out the first pitch. In Nashville, last Thursday for their opening night to promote the book. And and part of that was going to be I was going to get to go up into the booth and call a couple of innings of actual tourist baseball.

And the power went out in the press box. So you're still to this day, 30 years later have not called so much as one pitch on the radio for the actual tours. Did you have a home run call? If one planned obviously didn't get a chance to do it. Did you have one planned?

No, I know it's a good question. Honestly, I was so obsessed with Tom Suter growing up that it probably I don't know what it would have been, but it would have been something. I probably would have worked Jam Burger in there somehow, like awkwardly for a home run. Because I'm telling you, if you go back to if you can go find a box full of VHS tapes from Enloe High School back in the 80s. And I was I did a little bit of we tried to do basketball games on a radio or close circuit TV and it was it was gosh, I was so painfully trying to sound like Tom Suter.

And I wasn't great at it. Ryan McGee is joining us here on the atom go to the reason I asked about the home run call. This goes back, I'd probably only been here in in town about two, maybe two years. And the mudcats invited me out to do an inning.

So I think it was Pete Chopin was was the voice of the mudcat from time. And they invited me out to do an inning. And it was we were just kind of being baseball I grew up playing and watching and pretending to be in a now a baseball play by play guy. And so I had to have a home run call plan just in case. And sure enough, and my one inning, we got a home run. And my home run call was Kramer's giddy up from from Seinfeld. And that I think that felt like lead on people, but I can't believe I remembered to do it. So that was my own little story. And it's funny, and you and I both over the years have worked with tremendous, you know, play by play sportscasters over the years.

And, and they'll tell you that when you try to think of it ahead of time, and you try to script it ahead of time, it comes off like you tried to think of it ahead of time as opposed to, you know, reacting in the moment. But that being said, you know, toward the end of the book, and welcome to the circus baseball I did, I did do one half inning of radio with the team and in New Britain, Connecticut, back in the New Britain Red Sox, or the Hartford Yard goats now. And, and, you know, I did half of an inning. And I was leaving the ballpark that night. They were doing a replay of the game on the radio and I pulled over on the side row to listen and I'll just say that that the game of baseball is better off not having had Ryan McGee in the booth trying to play by play.

I'm going to disagree having not heard it I'm going to disagree on this on these grounds. There's something about minor league baseball, and I'm glad you spent the year in Asheville and I mean you I'm sure you can tell, and maybe even the listeners can I have not seen a copy of the book yet I know one's coming. And if I if it doesn't come I'll get it because I know how you are going to write about your year with the tourists, there's something that is so wholesome about minor league baseball, which for me as a baseball fan, kind of mad the way major league baseball has treated the minor leagues in there, and they're just taking cities away from from that, which ultimately hurt those cities, too, but I, there's nothing polished about minor league baseball.

And that's the way it's supposed to be the Savannah bananas you from you're familiar with them, those guys. That's the way minor league baseball should almost be. Well, it's just what minor league baseball is. And that's what, yes, my book is about me in a particular summer with a particular team and a particular ballpark. But what it really is is a love letter to what you're talking about, which is what makes minor league baseball unique in the world, let alone the world of sports. And we get so obsessed, you know, you know, I cover college football, and it's all right now it's transfer portal and NIL and rules changes and whatever else and, you know, in the NBA it's teams throwing it throwing games at the end of the season to try to get a better draft pick and it's you know, it's arrests, and you know it's it's, you know, Daniel Snyder having to sell the Redskins it's something like that all the time. But when you go to a minor league baseball game. None of that is there.

None of that matters. And people don't even really at the minor baseball level, they don't really care if the team's any good, where they are in the standings you know if it's late in the year and they got a chance to win the Carolina League or whatever fine. But in the middle of the summer, it is we would call baseball the national pastime. And that's so true in minor league baseball so one place in sports where you can just chill.

You just take a call by five bucks to get in, you're probably going to see something you've never seen before. And you see this cast of characters right out of the Simpsons, like I write about you know in my book. Chill, and to me it's kind of the last place left in sports, where you can just be. And and that's the beauty of my league baseball and that's really what the book is about but you're right Major League Baseball for folks who don't know. Two years ago took over management of my league baseball and immediately shut down 40 teams, and they're probably going to shut down more I was in Asheville last week, Asheville, had to raise more than $30 million to save the team.

And that's what they had been told if you don't do this, this, this and this to the ballpark. We're pulling your team. They've had a team of McCormick field since 1924. And so the hope is that the people who run Major League Baseball will actually leave Rockefeller Center, which is where their headquarters and go to Zebulon and go to Kenston and go to Rancho Cucamonga and go to Lansing and go to Amarillo and go to these places and get to see how much these teams mean to these towns because it's so much a part of their identity. Can you imagine during without the bulls. Can you imagine Asheville without the tourists. If you imagine Hickory without the crawdads you can't.

But I think it's, it's a lot easier to make that decision staring at a spreadsheet, instead of actually going out and experiencing it so I hope that people who run Major League Baseball, you know, will actually get on a plane to go some of these places instead of just you know getting a Sharpie out and just, you know, Xing out teams. Was there a star who played at Asheville, the year you were a future star there are no stars, necessarily in the Carolina League but was there a future star that you saw in that one year. We had about 40 players come through that summer, and three made it to the big leagues.

There were no stars. This is not a good baseball team, or there was a guy named Jamie Wright and Jamie Wright was our nuclear loose. This was a Colorado Rockies affiliate. Jamie was a first round draft pick, he had a six figure signing bonus and Jamie pitching the big leagues almost 20 years for like 15 different teams and john Thompson, who braves fans will remember what was an integral part of their division winning teams, you know, in the early 2000s john Thompson was on our team and then we had a guy named Ed guard Velasquez, who later changed his name to Ed guard Clemeni because he was Roberta Clemeni his nephew didn't speak it didn't speak a word of English, and it was about 18 years old and his, his locker was completely wallpaper with pictures of Roberta Clemeni and, and our pitching coach was a guy named Jacqueline Maeve and jacket play with Roberto in Pittsburgh and said you know that's Roberta Clemeni's nephew, and he didn't want to get special treatment.

So he changed his name to Velasquez, but I will say it a couple years later he changed it back to Clemeni and got called up to the big leagues like two weeks later. You probably shouldn't lean into that but but the biggest star in the south of landley that year was Jermaine Dye Jermaine Dye was playing for Macon braves, and it was very obvious that he was going to be a big deal but the biggest star in baseball was Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan was in Birmingham and double A. We actually sold out all of our games that summer against the Hickory crawdads on the off chance that Michael might be demoted at some point. And, yeah, it was, I saw him playing green wall right about in the book. I never saw the bills.

I did take my daughter to see the Jonas Brothers. I've never heard screaming, like I heard the night that I saw Michael Jordan stroke a single still base in Greenville, South Carolina. Let's see before I let you go, I go back, Michael Jordan hit like 217 in his year with the Birmingham Barons, and I don't think people understand how great it is for somebody who hadn't played baseball for like 15 years, organized baseball to step into a professional field at the double A level, where still a lot of teams have a lot of prospects and be that successful like that isn't bad for for not having played any minor league baseball, any professional any, any organized ball for, you know, 15 years or so. The best part of that is in fact I still have it I still have the media guide, I never throw anything away as my wife will tell you, and I still have the media guide for the Hickory crawdads and the Birmingham Barons that summer, and every other player in the league. Their biography is all about they were drafted here and they played college baseball here they did this in the big leagues and Michael Jordan's bio was that he won Mr. Baseball in some Dixie Youth League in Wilmington when he was 12 years old.

That was all they had. I think about Michael like that night I saw him playing Greenville. He had a base hit, stole a base was called stealing one time. I don't know how he hit it at night, simply because of the camera flashes. Every single pitch in a night game was like a struggle like all the camera flashes that went off so it was already hard enough to hit it and when I saw him in April in the first month of the season he was still hitting, he was in like a 12 game hitting streak and was hitting 300. It just had a big hit, you know, in an exhibition game against the Cubs. And so yeah, there was still a chance, but uh, yeah, he said he saved baseball that summer, because that's also the summer that the major league baseball was like and so Michael, the biggest star in baseball at any level was a basketball player.

Yeah. What 20 years later Tim Tebow for in the Met system and actually until Tebow got hurt that summer. He was hitting over 300, and there was actually some talk that he might actually progress to the point where the Mets might call him up. Ryan McGee, I appreciate your time we got to get you a hockey game. I need to get there with you. What's funny is when I moved to Connecticut to work for ESPN. The Hartford Whalers were still in Hartford, and I became a huge Sean Burke guy and all that and then when I moved back in North Carolina. The whalers followed me down here. So, so yeah I've always taken credit for the fact that the hurricanes are there. Come up here wind the siren I'm sure yet the the hurricanes would love to have you do it. Welcome to the circus of baseball, a story of the perfect summer at the perfect ballpark at the perfect time, Ryan McGee. Hey, thank you very much man I hope this book absolutely kills it.

It's already discounted on Amazon, which means that it is. So, congratulations on that. Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time buddy. I'll talk to you soon. Ryan McGee from ESPN.