Interview #26: The Miracle League, part 2
Drew Soicher, Program Director and veteran sportscaster
Intro
After I had interviewed Cassandra Switalski, the executive director of Miracle League of AZ, she had me reach out to Drew Soicher, who is now the program director for this chapter. I e-mailed him, he called almost immediately and within two hours I was in the stadium press box on a rainy afternoon hearing dozens of stories from a lengthy journalism career. With over 35 years in sports broadcasting and stops in several different major markets, Drew has done a lot. Once he moved to Arizona and decided it was time to hang up the headset, he got more involved with the Miracle League and eventually came on full-time.
This was the longest interview I’d done yet. When you talk to someone who talks for a living, I should have expected that. But he had a ton of fascinating insights into the broadcast journalism profession, what makes the Miracle League so great and tons and tons (and tons) of baseball stories. About the one hour mark is when he went into teacher mode and gave me a review on my amateur interviewing skills (I passed, first time I’ve passed a class on the first try since like 2007), as well as other tips and ideas that I should get working on implementing. So this project is about to get even better 😮.
Here’s links to get more information or involved with the program
Website: Miracle League of AZ
Instagram: @miracleleagueaz
Facebook: Miracle League of AZ
A sportscaster from day one
So you grew up in Brooklyn, then moved to Detroit?
“Yeah, moved to Detroit at about 10. So I considered Detroit home because I went to middle school, high school and college in Detroit. My dad was in the automotive parts business, so Detroit was where he got an opportunity.”
Were you in the heart of Detroit?
“On the edge, Southfield is the city, which borders Detroit. It's the same thing as the Detroit suburbs.”
So you're a fan of Detroit teams? Lions?
“I am, yeah. Huge. We made it all the way to halftime of the NFC Championship game. It was an exciting year. They stink every year so it was exciting.”
Did you go to college in Michigan?
“Michigan State for sports broadcasting. And I have an older brother who's also a sportscaster, 3 years older, so it was all we knew. We broadcast everything we ever did as kids. Every NERF basketball game, every backyard Wiffle ball game, Strat-o-matic Baseball. I still am addicted to Strat-o-matic baseball. We broadcast every Strat-o-matic game. Every game on TV we would watch with the sound off and then do it ourselves. It was an easy career choice when it was time to pick something, since we had been doing that since we could speak.”
So how long were you in Detroit? At least through ’84?
“Yeah, I was. That whole thing was awesome. I was there for the Bad Boys Pistons. The whole Bad Boys thing was fun. The ‘84 Tigers were my thing for sure. That was the best year of my life, I think.
The Tigers had a lottery for postseason tickets. There was a week left in the regular season and there was a thing in the Detroit Free Press that you had to fill out and send in $40 because it was $10 a ticket, maximum of four tickets. And you sent it in and they were going to do a drawing to see who gets tickets to what game. They were going to make the playoffs that year, but did not know if they were going to make it to the World Series, but they were going to draw tickets for every round. I got this thing back in the mail that you won four tickets to home game #4 of the postseason. So it might not even happen if they don't win the first round. And it ended up being the game when Gibby (Kirk Gibson) hit the homer off Gossage in Game 5 to win the ‘84 World Series.”
“I’m there with my 3 buddies in the centerfield bleachers. We jumped the fence and I had a square of Tigers centerfield sod. I was one of those losers on the field and it was in my mom's freezer in Detroit for 23 years until she finally said, hey, I'm moving and I'm not keeping this grass in my freezer.”
How did you get started?
“I was in the whole sports scene because I got, for lack of a better word, discovered, when I was 16. I was on high school radio and some guy called me from the local CBS TV station, called the high school on Monday saying that he had been listening to the football game on Friday night and wanted to know who that guy was and he needs an intern at the TV station. They handed me the phone in the classroom. I answered that call, and from age 16 to 52 never did anything but work in a television sports office.”
REACT
First, Strat-o-Matic baseball is this baseball board game that is really, really detailed. Here’s a link: www.strat-o-matic.com, I might be way off but Dungeons and Dragons for sports fans maybe?
There are so many things we talked about in our interview that felt like something I would have done also. Growing up in baseball-obsessed family, going to games, living and breathing baseball 24/7/365. I never figured out how to turn that into a career, mostly because I can’t stay focused long enough to stick with anything until it works. But then Drew’s story is what happens when you’re driven to do something and put in the work and do it so well that people can’t help but notice, and the rest is history. That would’ve been good to know back when I was 15 but I chose a different path.
Sportscasting
Drew’s got a page with various clips and reels throughout his career here: Vimeo Drew Soicher
How did covering sports change during your career as a newscaster over the years?
“How awful it became, you mean? You mean television dying? The last couple of years of my career were starting to get like that. But I got lucky, I did it during that period where TV stations had money, this thing (pulls out his iPhone) hadn't been invented yet. I got very, very lucky. Almost my entire career was in major markets. I only worked in one small market, Fresno, CA, for a few years.
But after that, I was covering pro sports the rest of my career. Seattle, Tampa, LA, San Francisco, Denver, and Phoenix. But yes, it has changed dramatically. I just only caught the very beginning of that at the end of my career. Of skeleton staffs and not really being able to cover stories properly anymore.”
So what do you tell the journalism kids at Walter Cronkite at ASU when you talk with them?
“I teach it, we call it a class. It's not really a class. We just get together for pizza or Chinese food, or we meet at a ball game, and we call it a class. I teach a class called ‘Shit They Don't Teach You in J School’. And I try to tell them everything. Just real straight, honest. But I never want to squelch anybody's dream. I encourage them all to chase their dream. I don't want to be that guy, but there's a lot they need to know. If you're going to do this, there's a lot you need to know now that isn't so great. And if all I tell you doesn't scare you off, then this is the right career for you, and I'll do everything I can to help you get started and I'll point you in the right direction and all that, but it's hard. It's hard to tell them.
Back in my day, says the old, fat, bald, short, Jewish man, you could be a sportscaster (note: he isn’t really that short or fat, but he did wear a hat… so maybe he is bald). I liked to write. I wrote every word I ever said for all those years on television. I liked to write, and I liked to present, and I could do that. But you had a producer or two, you had a photographer or two. You had a staff. Now the same guy does all that.
The good news is they understand that coming up, they weren't in the other world. So they come up kind of knowing that now and they don't expect to make big bucks. When we were kids, we would think, Oh my God, if we could ever make it to a big market, we could get paid really well. That's not even the case anymore for these poor kids. So they're kind of going into it knowing they’re going to be a starving journalist and they still want to do it. It's awesome.
There's a woman who did the weather, I did the sports, she did the weather for 20 years in Denver. Her name is Kathy Saban, and she's a super popular weather lady there on NBC. The last couple years we worked together, when she was just about to go on, I was two seats from her. And I would say, ‘Kathy, Kathy’, and she'd be in a zone getting ready to go on, and she fell for this every night for like 2 years. She turned, ‘What?’ And I go, ‘We don't need you anymore,’ and show her the weather app on my phone.
And then she started to, I'd be getting ready to go, and as I'm thinking of my first line, she said, ‘Drew’, and I turned and she goes, ‘We don't need you anymore’ holding the ESPN app up. It was true.”
Was there ever a time where you thought about quitting sportscasting?
“No, I was obsessed. I wish I was more satisfied with each step. Each step up the ladder, I'd be there for 15 minutes and then start thinking already what's my next step? I wish I would have enjoyed each stop on the tour a little more than I did, but I never thought about quitting.
I had a terrible anxiety issue early in my career, I'm comfortable talking about it. I talk to those kids that I mentor all the time about it, who pretend they're not nervous when they're on camera. And I was nervous all the time. It's funny because I had a big personality, I was always a real popular kid. But when the camera came on, I would freeze up like a lot of people do. My brother was a super shy guy, and when the red light would come on, he was money. He was more comfortable with the light and the camera than without it.
I kept faking it well enough that I was advancing in my career. It got really bad in San Francisco, like it was overwhelming anxiety issues that I was having. I was seeing someone for it. And my wife once asked me, like, why are you doing this to yourself? There's so many other things you could do. And I was like, I will not let this thing beat me. I’ve dreamt about this since I was a little kid. I am not going to let this thing beat me. And one day I sat down next to Dave McElhatton, a legendary news anchor in San Francisco. I just sat down and I did the sports and I got done and we went to commercial and I thought, OK, I didn't have problem breathing. I wasn't nervous. I just talked like I normally talk, and I never had another problem again. So I had this theory that we all have a number. Everyone in journalism has a number, and what I mean by that is, a number of times that you're on camera before you're truly comfortable. And for some people, who I hate, it's like 7. And for other people like myself, it's 17,622,809 (his exact number, that’s a long way to count). And then when you hit that number, you're fine. You don't have to worry about it again.”
REACT
We spent a lot of time talking about his time in broadcast journalism and how much it has changed. From listening to him and knowing how into the visual and media part of the job, not just writing and talking on TV, he was more able than most to survive the change that was brought on by the Internet and smartphones. Like he mentioned, his stories and work involved a whole team, and now journalists are being trained to be a one-person team doing everything.
Luckily I did accounting, because I don’t think I would’ve lasted very long as a writer or anything. I started college with a laptop plugged into a wired internet connection and graduated with an iPhone 3G that started to make a whole lot of other devices, jobs and businesses obsolete. I saw the start when I was working for the school paper for my last two years. The first year, there was 5 photographers on staff and one of us would get assigned to each story with a reporter. Towards the last portion of my final year, half the time the editors just had the student reporters take their own photos. They weren’t as good, but they were good enough, I guess. Now that daily paper is a weekly online-only tragedy of a “paper”.
Finding someone to balance out his sports obsession
“I have a wife who comes from a family that knows nothing about sports, a complete non-sports family. When I was younger, people used to try to fix me up with girls who were hardcore sports fans like, ‘Oh my God, I got the perfect girl for you. She's like a basketball encyclopedia’. I said no, you don't get it. I do all those things with my friends and my dad and my brother, it's all baseball and sports all the time. And then I go to work and it's sports. So if I marry a girl who's also a sports nut I will never get a break from this ever. So I married the perfect girl. Literally, cannot tell you the difference between a baseball and a basketball if you're holding the two of them. She knew nothing about baseball.
When the boys would have baseball games, she'd say, I'll stay home and get dinner ready. I'm like, no, you got to be there too. Like a kid, when you play baseball, you'd like to know your parents are in the crowd, where they're sitting. And she didn't understand it at first. And then after being around baseball and other moms and seeing how important it was to the kids, she started going and she went, for my older one, from age 4 to 22, every game. And I started to think in his last year of baseball, that she's finally starting to understand a few things about the game
And then in his last homestand, senior day of his college career, they took the field for the first inning and she turned to me and said, ‘It's just not fair. I don't understand why Peyton's team never gets to bat 1st,’ and I thought, Oh my God. All these years and I never taught her that the visiting team always hits first. She didn't pick up on that herself.
She was a schoolteacher. And she would say, just tell me where the elementary school and the grocery store is, and I'm good wherever you want to go. A lot of sportscasters are married four or five times as you bounce around a lot. It's not good for marriages, historically. I married the right girl.
She's not into baseball at all. I dragged her on Tuesday to the Dodgers-Giants game because we had a Miracle Leaguer throwing out the first pitch. So she came with me. To talk her into coming with me, I have to bribe her with peanuts and Coke.”
REACT
I don’t have much react here, it’s just a sweet love story between those two. There’s someone for everyone. Or so they tell me. (I do remember having to bribe my baseball-hating ex with like a three-course meal and club seats if I wanted to watch the 45-70 Padres at Chase Field in mid-August… 😢)
Getting involved with the Miracle League
“I came out here to work at 12 News NBC. I was considering retiring, we were going to move to Scottsdale. And then just coincidentally, I got offered this job here at 12 News. And my wife and I are like, well we're thinking about retiring there anyway, why don't we go out there with a job instead of without one. See how it goes.”
That’s not where Kari Lake worked, was it?
“No, no. She was at another station. God, I don't know if I’d have lasted five minutes if she'd been the news anchor there.
I always volunteered at the Miracle League, every town I ever worked in. I just think it's the greatest thing ever. I was volunteering here a couple days a week. And the guy who was running it took a job somewhere else and someone said, hey, I hope they get someone good to replace Alex. And this bell went off in my head. And I said to my wife, ‘You're not going to believe this’, and she said, ‘You're going to quit your job at NBC and go run the Miracle league’. I'm like, ‘Huh? How did you know that?’ She said, ‘I've been waiting for you to tell me that for 15 years.”
This is your first job with a Miracle League then?
“Yeah, most Miracle League don’t even have employees. They're all volunteer-run. But this one is so big that they have to have a couple of employees. There's just two of us, me and Cassandra. There's a couple other part-timers who are essential to what we do. But there's only two full-time employees.
But that's two more than literally 95% of Miracle Leagues. I think there's only a handful of Miracle Leagues around the country that have paid employees. It's all volunteer-run. The one in Denver that I volunteered at forever, my wife was the volunteer coordinator. I was helping coach two teams and helped organize the league a little bit and was the stadium announcer. It was just volunteer-run, and you can do that if there's 30 to 70 players, which is what most Miracle Leagues have. We got 400. We have a stadium, by the way, only stadium in the entire world built just for kids with special needs.
Just to give you a little background on how this whole thing works: in Conyers, GA, in 1999, there was this family with a child with special needs who loved baseball, who always wanted to play baseball, and couldn't play baseball because of his physical disability. And the mom and dad came up with this idea of asking other kids in Conyers with special needs if they wanted to play baseball on Saturday mornings behind some school, or maybe it was a park, whatever it was. And they just played on grass and dirt and they got some nice people in the community to come out and help, and they called it the Miracle League. It was, I think, 6 or 8 kids.
So Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO used to have a reporter named Frank Deford, who's one of the all-time great sports writers, and he was a correspondent for Real Sports. And Frank Deford had a child with special needs. So he heard about this thing and it caught his attention. And he said, I'm going to do a story for Real Sports on this. In 1999, this story aired about this little group of people in the back of some who-knows-where field playing ball and they call it the Miracle League. Around the country, everybody said we got to do that.
This one didn't pop up right away. They waited for 12 years, in 2011. So it took them a decade until this group came together and said, hey, we're going to do it, and let's do it right. This place is unbelievable, and it's all completely unnecessary. I get phone calls all the time, we have this awesome, enormous social media following and so I get contacted all the time by other Miracle Leagues around the country and by new Miracle Leagues that are just starting up, and they want to know, how’d you do this? I saw a picture of this, a video of that, how do you do this? How do you do that? The scoreboard is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The field, oh my gosh every kid's got jerseys with names and numbers on the back and you're playing walk-up songs. So how do you do all this?
And I tell them all the same thing: You cannot screw this up. It is the greatest formula ever invented. Kids, who otherwise would never have an opportunity to play baseball, getting to play baseball. They are so excited. These kids have never been on a team before in their lives. Notice I didn't say baseball team, they've never been on a team. Swimming team, chess team, baseball, nothing. Many of these children with special needs, they're isolated and lonely. It's hard to make friends sometimes, and so here they are on a team. They are so excited to be there. Their parents cannot believe they're watching this child, who has never been able to do anything like this before, never included in anything like this before, they're watching this child participate on a team, making friends, smiling, having fun. And did I mention that the parents can relax and enjoy this in the crowd because nice people in the community come out and help volunteer and make the game even more special. How can you screw that up? You could play on a mud field with ripped T-shirts and these kids would love it. All this stuff we have is awesome and I'm proud and grateful that we do have this presentation, but it's totally unnecessary.
In fact we've been very successful in spreading the word and getting more and more players. And I always forget, like every time we get another player, we need another volunteer. Like there needs to be a buddy with them. So we're lucky. We have a lot of Miracle Leagues contact me saying, Oh my God, every photo I see, you got 30 volunteers in the field. Where do you get these people? We're dying for volunteers. I'm like, well, that is a good problem. We have a lot of people out here who are generous with their time.
I've covered, Olympics, World Series, All Star games, Super Bowls, everything. There's not a sporting event I have not covered. Nothing is a better story than the Miracle League.”
Why do you think it took off?
“It's just straight fun. It's just good, clean fun. In sports today, never mind the world today, there's no such thing as good, clean fun. There's an asterisk next to everything. This would be good clean fun if... dot dot dot. There are no ifs here. It's good, clean fun. I believe that the word miracle is the single most overused word in the English language. OK, the Miracle on Ice was pretty special. But there were some pretty good hockey players who beat another team of pretty good hockey players. I don't know that it's a miracle. They're going to beat them one out of 10 times, that just happened to be the night.
But you come out here and you watch for a game or two? You'll probably see multiple legitimate miracles, and that's why it takes off. No one comes once. Anybody who comes once comes again.”
Did you get involved right away?
“I got started with the Miracle League in Denver, like 2007 or so. I was involved with theirs for from 2007 through 2017. Any time I ever moved, I always looked into Special Olympics, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Miracle League. Those are my three things.”
What was your reason for getting involved with these organizations?
“I love kids. I’m sympathetic and empathetic to people who had it a little more difficult than I have in life. And I'm a baseball freak. I've been a baseball freak my whole life, and so it's just a natural fit. And I was the guy on the news, I was a sports guy on the news in all these different towns I worked in. So I thought it made sense. They seemed to appreciate and think it was cool to have the same guy they watch on the news at night announcing their games, so I was usually the stadium announcer. Sometimes I coached or did whatever they needed, but I was usually the stadium announcer.”
Note: We talked about my experience volunteering and my buddies specifically, so those are in the previous article, so we can pick it up towards the end of this section. But my buddy James apparently downgraded. Former Rockies catcher Tony Wolters was his buddy for a few seasons before me. Wolters just retired this past January.
(he shows me a pic of James and Wolters at the field): Yeah, there's my buddy!
“There you go, you share that with a Major Leaguer. It’s that old cliché, you don't know what's going on in someone else's life that day, you should be nice to everyone. You don't know what they've been through or what they're going through. Here it's like that, times 1000, like there'll be days where I see kids like you're talking about who are completely different than they were a week ago. And I think, how did that happen? And then I find out about something terrible they're going through this kid’s going through this, or he just came straight from the hospital, or whatever.
It's just good clean fun, I'm glad you're doing it. It's very rewarding. I had the greatest job in the world. I will never complain about 3 1/2 decades in television sports. And now I might have a better job. This one is so much fun. It's so rewarding. It's so nice to know that you're able to do something to help make someone feel special. It really is. The people I'm surrounded by are so much more pleasant and grateful and appreciative than a professional athlete ever would be. I got really, really, really lucky and got to chase my dream and do what I wanted to do all those years as a sportscaster, and now I somehow have a better gig than I did all those years.”
Why do you think baseball works so well for this kind of program?
“Baseball’s magic, man. Baseball's magic. Baseball’s been my whole life. I grew up in a family with a brother and a dad who are all about baseball and introduced me to it. And my dad happened to work for a company that had Mets tickets when I was a kid. And so he would snag them whenever they weren't being used, and we went to Mets games all the time in the 70s, in the (Tom) Seaver, (Jerry) Koosman days. Tommy Agee was my guy, then Lee Mazzilli.”
“Then we moved to Detroit and the ‘84 Tigers happened and my dad worked for a company that had Tigers tickets and would take us to Tigers games all the time. I think 9 out of the 10 greatest childhood moments I can recall everything that happened between the lines on a Little League baseball field. It was the most important thing in the world to me. The opening day parade through town I was in, and I remember those. And I remember playing every single pitch of every single game I ever played. It was so important to me. And then I went into sportscasting for all those years. Now I'm running a Miracle League program for baseball and I still play Strat-o-Matic baseball. I play senior baseball in Arizona on Sundays. A buddy of mine is a scout, and he hired me a few years ago. I worked as a part-time scout for the Phillies. In fact, the day after I started working for the Phillies, Bryce Harper signed. So I take credit for that. That was the day after I started working there.”
Good work.
“Yeah. Thank you. I coached youth baseball for more than a decade in Colorado, I coached my son's teams, including a team that I kept together for 10 years called the Mighty Bobbleheads. It was like the Savannah Bananas before the Bananas. I have one of the largest private collections of bobblehead dolls in the whole world. I am in the Bobblehead Hall of Fame. I was inducted in the inaugural class in 2016.
I have every baseball card from my entire life, 1965 to today, I have every Topps card. Everything revolves around baseball. I run a video service for high school sports to help kids get recruited in college. I'm a photographer as well, and everything's baseball. I often wonder if Abner Doubleday didn't stumble into Cooperstown, NY, in the 1880s, if you buy that story, what I would have been doing all this time.”
One-armed baseball stars
“There's one I want you to watch on our website on the Meet a Miracle Leaguer about a kid with one arm who plays out here, who drums in his free time. He's a drummer.”
Big Def Leppard fan?
“Yeah, and just like the most inspirational kid. I know Jim Abbott, and he didn't know… him and his dad didn't know anything about Jim Abbott. I’m like, you’re a baseball player with one arm and you don't know Jim Abbott?”
I love how he has like 3 RBI's in his career.
“I was a sports writer and producer behind the scenes at ABC in Detroit. One day, there was a feature guy, John Gross, and he says, ‘Will you come with me. I got to run out to this field and do the story about this high school kid. He's from Flint, but he's playing down here in Detroit this weekend so while he's in town I want to get some video of him. He's pitching today, he's got one arm.’ I'm like, holy shit, yeah, I’ll go. It's like the top of the first, we pull up with the news van and the bases are loaded and I see a kid walking to home plate with one arm. And I say to the cameraman, ‘He's coming up to the bat right now! Just get the fuck over there! He jumps out of the truck and runs up to the backstop and starts recording and I just started walking over there. And I watched Jim Abbott, on the second pitch, hit a grand slam with one arm in high school baseball. I told him about it years later. He's like, I remember that, I did it once in my life. Anyway, I contacted him and he's been great corresponding with this kid here. Sent him his book and a bunch of autographed stuff and I spoke to him on the phone a few times. He's been awesome.
He's a great fielder. Marcus Klepacki is his name. He catches the ball with his hat, flips the ball in the air with his hat, so his hat goes flying, catches it with the same hand and throws it.”
REACT
What shocked me when we really started talking about the Miracle League was that the Arizona one is an outlier. There are over 300 leagues throughout the country and only a handful actually have paid full-time employees. Very few of them have stadiums, scoreboards or even jerseys. But the leagues as a whole do very well because of the core mission, which is to provide a chance for individuals with special needs to get active, be part of a team and have fun.
Also, I remember when we were kids, Jim Abbott was in his prime. So sometimes playing out in the yard, we’d try to pitch like him. We’d bend our non-throwing arm and put our a glove on it, throw the pitch then immediately try to put the glove back on and field a ball. Then figure out how to get the ball back into your hand and throw it to first. It’s practically impossible. And then he actually had two hits in the Majors swinging one-handed! It was always this marvel when you would talk about Jim Abbott, but to him and Marcus, it was just baseball. It’s crazy to think that something that looks so impossible to do is just second-nature to people who’ve overcome these kinds of challenges.
Drew and his curse on mascots
“You're a Sharks guy. Cool. I took my kids to a game that I'm sure you've heard about. It would have been like a ‘97, ‘98.”
Please tell me it's Sharkie dangling from the rafters.
“Yes. I was there.”
How were you gonna explain to your little kids that you were about to watch a shark go splat?
“It was when they were warming up, and they had to leave the ice. All the players were looking up and they were told to leave the ice. It was just before the game was going to start. And they didn't get to come back out here and start warming up all over again, it was like 45 minutes ‘til they can get it done again.
I was at another one in Denver, Rocky, the fantastic mascot for the Nuggets, it was the same thing. He was going to come down from the rafters and the cord choked him out. And so he came down limp, everyone thought he was joking because he's a really great mascot. And he got to the ground and just crumbled, and all these paramedics were on top of it. Yeah, he was out.”
REACT
Obviously this has nothing to do with anything. But Baxter, I would be careful if Drew is at Chase Field this season.