Schulte touches them all: Play-by-play man calls his 3,000th Diamondbacks game.

The way Greg Schulte remembers it, his tiny hometown of Silvis, Ill., was so small, it wasn’t big enough for a kid to get into any kind of trouble. But it had everything a young boy could want.

And it all led to Wednesday night, when Schulte called his 3,000th game in the Diamondbacks booth in San Diego against the Padres.

In Silvis, there was the soda fountain parlor on the corner, the ice cream shop down the block, a bike store somewhere in the middle and of course, a baseball field at the park.

“All the kids in my neighborhood played baseball,” Schulte, the longtime radio play-byplay voice of the Diamondbacks, recalled. “We’d get up early in the morning during the summer and we’d play baseball until either the mosquitos got too bad at night or it got too dark to see.”

In between, Schulte spent the rest of his free time listening to baseball on the radio, particularly broadcasts of St. Louis Cardinals games, as called by the great Harry Caray and Jack Buck.

“Early on, I dreamt of being Stan Musial or one of the Cardinals,” Schulte said, “but my fascination was listening to Cardinals baseball. I’d listen from the dugout interview pregame show, through the game and through the postgame show just to hear highlights from a game I just listened to for three hours.

“That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to broadcast St. Louis Cardinals baseball. I wanted to be the next Harry Caray or the next Jack Buck.”

Ultimately, that’s exactly what happened for the kid from Silvis. After relocating to the Valley and starting a family, Schulte dedicated himself to a career in radio. He spent several years at KTAR, calling Arizona State basketball and baseball games and also served as a color commentator during Phoenix/ Arizona Cardinals and Phoenix Suns broadcasts.

Schulte was at the radio station when Jerry Colangelo, who was in the process of landing a major league expansion team, offered him a job as the as-of-yet-unnamed franchise’s lead radio play-by-play job.

“I was kind of taken aback,” Schulte said. “It was really a big moment that I’ll always remember.”

He’s been with the Diamondbacks ever since.

Three-thousand games. What do you give a guy who’s called 3,000 baseball games for the same team? A golden microphone, perhaps?

“That would be kind of a nice,” Schulte said during a phone interview from San Diego on Wednesday morning.