Lanny Frattare gears up for another high school season

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Lanny Frattare was 12 when he decided he’d be a baseball broadcaster one day. At his older brother Ron’s games in Rochester, N.Y., Frattare sat in the front seat of his family’s car with his father, who had strategically parked facing the field, and announced the action. Being a New York Yankees fan, he tried to mimic the delivery of play-by-play man Mel Allen.

“On my brother’s team, the catcher was Yogi Berra, the second baseman was Bobby Richardson, the shortstop was Tony Kubek,” Frattare said last week. “When I got the Pirates job at age 28, I had an awful lot of people say, ‘Boy, you’re awful young to get a Major League job.’ I said, ‘Well, that may seem to be true, but I’ve been preparing for this for 16 years.’ “

These days, Frattare, 69, is again calling high school games, but now he’s getting the names right. Since stepping away from the Pirates broadcast booth in 2008 after 33 years with the team, Frattare has stayed busy. On his calendar currently are the West Virginia state baseball championships, the PONY League World Series and the start of his seventh season calling WPIAL baseball, basketball and football games for MSA Sports Network.

“I get a great deal of satisfaction from putting on the headset,” Frattare said, explaining he was approached by MSA operations manager Don Rebel in 2010 and asked whether he’d be interested in dusting off the microphone for another go-round. “I said, ‘Sure I would!’ I’ve been inspired by Don. He’s so committed to high school sports that it’s been infectious for me.”

That Frattare’s second act brought him back to broadcasting can’t be counted as a surprise. But he also ended up somewhere else he hadn’t expected to be — in a college classroom.

The way Frattare tells the story, he was flipping through a