For announcer, A’s playoffs part of growing up
Oakland-born Vasgersian says that he used to bleed green and gold
ESPN play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian was barely 8 years old when he uttered a curse word in front of his dad for the first time — and the Oakland A’s made him do it. Sort of.
It was early October 1975. Father and son had just watched, in their Moraga home, the A’s fall to the Boston Red Sox in the
American League playoffs, ending Oakland’s incredible three-year run as world champions. The elder Vasgersian, a native New Englander, was pleased with the outcome. His young son, who was born in Oakland and bled green and gold, definitely was not.
“I loudly proclaimed the Red Sox to be a bunch of … and I dropped an f-bomb,” Vasgersian recalls. “I don’t think I even used the word correctly. My dad wasn’t amused and promptly sent me to my room.”
Vasgersian cried himself to sleep that night, but the punishment — and the sting of that loss — hardly diminished his intense love for baseball, or the A’s. Tonight, 44 Octobers later, he’ll be back in his old East Bay stomping grounds, calling the American League Wild Card Game between the A’s and Tampa Bay Rays for ESPN.
Vasgersian claims that he’ll be an A’s fan “till the end.” While growing up in the Bay Area and attending Campolindo High School in Moraga, he made “30-ish” trips a year to the Oakland Coliseum. And his baseball/ A’s memories are still intensely vivid:
Playing wiffle ball in the backyard with a plastic kelly green batting helmet stuck to his head (“probably from some giveaway day”). … Going to school with a Shooty Babitt baseball card tucked safely inside his velcro wallet. … Arguing with his Giants-loving classmates about who the better Davis was — Chili or Mike. … Getting “hacked off” when Mike Norris was passed over by Cy Young voters, and fuming even more when the Raiders returned to Oakland and ruined his beloved cement saucer of a stadium (“Mount Davis sucks!”).
“The only reason I’m working in baseball now is because I fell in love with a brand early in life — at an impressionable age,” Vasgersian says. “… I was attracted to the colors, the success and the star power of those (1970s) dynasty teams.”
Still, when he slips into the broadcast booth tonight with ESPN analysts Alex Rodriguez and Jessica Mendoza, a former All-American softball star at Stanford, he swears that he will adhere to his duties to “be in the middle” as he calls the game, “and I say that with all sincerity.”
That won’t be as difficult as you might think because Vasgersian really digs the win-or-go-home matchup between the A’s and Rays, and admires how both scrappy wild card teams share a similar DNA.
“I love the idea that we’ll be able to, in some way, educate viewers about a couple
of teams that don’t have rosters full of household names and skyrocketing payrolls,” he says. “… They’re not blessed with all the resources that the bigcity bullies have, and yet they’re here because they were built by super-smart people and managed by guys who embrace the analytic side of things, but are also dirt-in-the-spikes baseball old-timers who trust what they see.”
A prediction? Vasgersian won’t give you one. (“That would be ridiculous. Anything can happen in a game like this.”) But he does think it will be a close, low-scoring struggle.
“What I hope doesn’t happen is that it comes down to a big mistake — someone kicking the ball, or a basesloaded walk,” he says. “But close games so often do.”
No matter what happens, Vasgersian is pleased that the much-maligned Coliseum, which doesn’t often attract huge throngs, will be packed for the wild card game.
“I’ve been tracking ticket sales pretty closely, and it’s heartwarming,” he says. “To have 50,000-plus there Wednesday night is going to be awesome.”