Dodgers announcer tries to fill huge shoes
Raised a Cubs fan, Davis got advice from Scully to ‘be yourself.’
CHICAGO — When Brent Barry signed a six-year, $27 million deal with the Chicago Bulls the first season after Michael Jordan’s retirement, Heat coach Pat Riley wasn’t too impressed.
“If he does well in Chicago, then obviously they think they have the next Michael Jordan,” Riley said. “Whatever.”
Barry wasn’t brought in by general manager Jerry Krause specifically to replace Jordan, but as the new shooting guard, obviously comparisons were bound to be made.
“It has been said hundreds of times that you can’t replace the guy,” Barry said. “There’s only one Michael. I’m part of a plan and a piece to the puzzle. They’re going to try to put together a championship team again within the next three or four seasons.”
That didn’t happen, of course, and Barry wound up being just a footnote in Bulls history.
Replacing the greatest player of all time isn’t easy, nor is replacing the greatest baseball broadcaster of all time, as 29-year-old Joe Davis is discovering.
D a v i s , t h e D o d g e r s ’ T V announcer, already has been asked a million times about replacing Vin Scully, who retired last fall after 67 seasons behind the mic with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers.
“If you look at it as replacing (Scully), you have no chance, because nobody is going to replace him,” Davis said before a game at Wrigley Field. “When you look at it as a responsibility to be one of the next people in that chair, for an organization with as much history as the Dodgers have, and an organization whose history is as closely tied to its broadcasters as the Dodgers’ is, when you consider Vin’s 67 seasons, and before him another Hall of Famer in Red Barber, it is a tremendous responsibility and part of what made the job attractive to me.”
Davis grew up a die-hard Cubs fan in Potterville, Mich., listening to Cubs announcer Len Kasper on TV and Pat Hughes on radio. He attended Beloit College, where he played football.
In his sophomore year, Davis came to a game at Wrigley Field with a note to Kasper but lost the letter before he got to the press box entrance. Fortunately, the manager of the Wrigleyville Taco Bell called him and said someone had found the letter and turned it in. She delivered it to Kasper, who emailed Davis back and became a mentor to him.
Davis joined the Dodgers’ broadcast team last year, doing 55 road games, as Scully mostly worked only home g a mes. Davi s a l s o works games for Fox and previously worked for the Schaumburg Flyers, ESPN and three years of minor-league play-by-play with the Montgomery Biscuits, a Rays farm team.
While stepping into a legend’s shoes c an lead to some unfair comparisons, Davis said he has been “blown away” by the positive response he has received from Dodgers fans.
“Of course your worst nightmare is that people aren’t going to like you,” he said. “So far, so good. People have been very kind with their feedback.”
Scully’s support also has helped. In an interview with Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke, Scully gave Davis some good advice.
“My prayer for him, for anyone, is maybe the hardest thing: Be yourself,” Scully said. “When he starts, and for the 100 years he might be there, the big thing is to be yourself.”
Now that he has to bleed Dodger blue, Davis has been forced to put his Cub fandom in a blind trust of sorts. He admitted it was strange last June doing a Dodgers game at Wrigley after he had grown up rooting for the Cubs.
“What kind of timing is that?” he said. “You sign away your Cub fandom before the 2016 season?”