Interview #52: Andy Pollin of DC Sports Radio
And 1969 MLB All-Star Game attendee
Andy Pollin is a sports radio veteran who grew up in Washington D.C., born in 1958 just after the original Washington Senators moved and when Senators 2.0 left town after 1972, spent most of his early life without a baseball team until the Nationals sprouted up in 2005. He is a huge football and basketball fan, so when I reached out to him he made sure to mention his baseball fan level isn’t at the same heights as the diehard crowd. But when he got into talking about his early days before the Senators left, and his dad’s connection to baseball, that was a lot more interesting than I think he presumed it would be.
Also, with his career spanning back into the 80’s, he has been part of and witness to a lot of big shifts in the sports media landscape. From DC to Texas to New York City and back to DC, he’s seen sports radio go from non-existent to the 24/7 business it is today with major and minor markets nationwide saturated with talk shows and podcasts. So hearing some of the stories about the early days where people had serious doubts these stations would survive and the moments that fueled its incredible growth was also fun.
I had never talked to Andy before, but I’d listened to his show with Steve Czaban from time to time, even though they were focused on the DC market and I’ve never lived further east than Arizona. They were always entertaining and I was thrilled to get an hour to pick his brain about the radio business and mid-Atlantic sports scene. He currently has a radio show in DC on ESPN 630 weekdays from 9-11.
You can find more on Andy Pollin here:
Radio Show: The Andy Pollin Show
Weekly Czabecast spot (link is to his most recent appearance): Tis’ The Season For Ye Olde Bowl Logs!
Twitter: @andypollin1
Growing Up in the DC Baseball Market
You're going to write this up?
I'm going to transcribe it. I wanted to just start getting people’s stories from around the country, from all different generations, all different backgrounds and show everyone's got a lot of similarities when it comes to their American experience. And baseball is the way to kind of get them to open up about it.
That's interesting, too. Some of the popularity of the Brooklyn Dodgers was, at that time there were a lot of immigrants that were coming in, and that's how they were able to assimilate with baseball. That was something that they could participate in and hand down from father to son. I'm a sports fan I'm sure because of my dad, but his dad was from the old country, from Russia. He came here when he was 17 years old and just worked. They thought sports was ridiculous, a waste of time. So it's kind of cool that my father was able to break away from that. His father gave him no support on that, never went to a game with him or anything. For me to have that advantage of him taking me to games was something that wouldn't have happened if I was in his situation.
So you're like a second-generation sports fan.
Yeah. I'm related to Abe Pollin, who owned the Bullets and the Caps. We're a big family here. And the story, Abe’s brother was a good athlete. He played basketball and baseball in high school and got an offer to try out for the Pirates but didn't take it, went to college. When he was in high school, Abe was finally able to convince his father to take him to a game to watch the younger son play. And so they're sitting there on the bench, on the bleachers, and he's playing first base. His name is Harold, he goes, ‘What does Harold do? He just stands there.’ He didn't get the whole thing and he just thought it was a waste of time. And then both sons got really into sports and they bought teams. It just shows you what they had to go through. It's a very American story. That's really the story of our country, people coming from different places and baseball did have a lot to with it.
When I was a kid, I know it's different in New York, my friends who grew up in New York, they were able to watch all the Mets and the Yankees games. But we only had about 20 games a year for the Senators on TV, and then the game of the week on NBC, which was at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. And the playoffs and the World Series, that was it. So when baseball was on, that was a special event. Well, now, you know.
I'm not really a baseball guy. I'm 66, and I went to my first game with my dad when I was 6. We didn't have baseball here in Washington for 34 years. But I worked in Dallas, so we had the Rangers when I was there. And I worked in New York for five years, which I was really stunned at how big baseball is there.
When did the Senators leave?
‘71.
Growing up, were you into baseball at all? Or were you into other sports?
My dad grew up in DC, actually grew up in the city. So even before he could drive, he could get on the streetcar and go to Griffith Stadium. He used to go to games and baseball was his favorite sport. So by the time I was seven years old, it was called DC Stadium, opened up in ’61. It was part of that cookie cutter period where you had The Vet in Philadelphia, Riverfront opened about the same time, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh.
Is that the same thing as RFK Stadium?
It became RFK after Kennedy was killed in ‘68, but it opened as DC Stadium. It's on federal land, which is another interesting part of the whole story. When we went in ‘66, that was my first baseball game. We could go to two or three a year. In those days, it's the same price as the movies and they never sold out. I mean, even a big game would have like 20,000 people there. So sometimes we’d decide on Sunday morning, ‘Hey, let's go to the baseball game’, and somebody's dad in the neighborhood would pile a bunch of kids in the car, and each of the moms would give you five bucks, and you can go to the game. It just seemed more accessible then.
We went to the ‘69 All-Star game. That's the last one that was played in the afternoon. It was a Tuesday night and it rained like crazy and the dugouts got flooded. The game was postponed until 1 the next day. I saw Frank Howard hit a home run. Willie McCovey hit two. There's a great story about that game. Denny McLain, who was due to start for the American League, when it got rained out on Tuesday night, he flew home to Detroit because he had to get 9 teeth capped. He used to drink cases of Pepsi all day so his teeth were rotting out. The appointment was at 8 in the morning. And he thought he could get it done and then get on the plane and fly back to DC and make it in time to start the game. Got delayed and so he didn't make it back in time. Mel Stottlemyre I think started and he got lit up. Blue Moon Odom came in. By the time McLain came in the game was over. Seeing Frank Howard hit a home run was really cool.
Is that your favorite player?
Yeah. The Twins, the original Senators, which started maybe 1900-whatever, after the 1960 season they moved to Minnesota to become the Twins. In ‘61 baseball expanded. So you had the Los Angeles Angels, and they just called them the Washington Senators. So there was no gap in Washington Senators. Problem was, the original Senators were becoming pretty good. You had Harmon Killebrew and Jim Kaat, guys like that. So they wind up in Minnesota and they make it to the World Series in ‘65. The expansion Senators, any expansion team is terrible, right?
The ‘61 Senators were bad. They had only one good year, which was ‘69 when Ted Williams came in and they finished ten games over .500. But there was no wild card and the Orioles won 110 and ran away and then played the Mets in the World Series. So yeah, the players that were there, there were a few that were pretty good, but he was an actual star, and he was always battling Harmon Killebrew for the home run title. The home runs that he hit wasn't just home runs, they were mammoth shots and they would paint the seats out in center field where he hit the ball. That's how far he hit it.
And then, when I was 13 years old, they left. And actually at the time, and if you listen to the end, the broadcast is up on YouTube, the last game where the fans tore up the field and everything, it was pretty much in the wind that the Padres were going to come; they were having trouble there. The guy who owned the big grocery chain in town, Joseph Danzansky, had a deal to bring the Padres here for the ‘74 season, so we would have only been without baseball for two years. There was a lease issue with San Diego and that’s when Ray Kroc swooped in and bought the team. And it just continued with a lot of false hopes over the years until the Expos finally showed up.
So your dad was a lifelong Senators fan?
Yeah, he was such a Senators fan that when they went to Texas, he would tell me what the ex-players did, he would read the box scores in the morning. There was a couple of guys that hung on for a while that had just come up at the end, Toby Harrah and Jeff Burroughs, so you could kind of keep an eye on them.
He watched football with me and he took me to Redskins games, but he grew up in a time, he's born in 1928, and football really didn't overtake baseball as the most popular sport, probably until the late 70s, maybe even the early 80s. And then also, Washington didn't have a basketball team until 1973. We didn't have hockey until 1974. So it was baseball and football, and believe it or not, there was a long period of time where baseball was the more popular game.
Is it back to a high level of popularity with the Nationals back in town for 20 years?
Yeah and they won a World Series. They draw pretty well, they draw over two million, usually. And they've been bad since they won the World Series. But the ballpark is nice. I wouldn't say it's as nice as Camden Yards, but it's good and accessible, right off the metro. The focus of the fans right now is the stadium for the football team.
Was football your favorite sport growing up then?
Yeah, I hit the sweet spot because after the Senators left in ‘71, at the same time, George Allen (head coach of the Redskins from 1971-77) was in Washington. The team had been terrible for a long time because the owner, George Preston Marshall, was a racist and he kept it all white until 1962. And without free agency, you had to rebuild through the draft. Vince Lombardi came in in ‘69, led them to a winning season, but he died. In ’71, Allen comes in and they win their first five games, and the town goes crazy. Baseball's left. We didn't have basketball yet. We didn't have hockey, so that was it. So that helped to cement the fan base and the love for the team. From the Allen Era, which started ’71, until Gibbs left the first time, which would have been after ’92, 22 years, it was mostly good football. That's really why football took a strong hold here. And you know, I wasn't a good athlete, but I played on the football team in high school. I enjoyed it.
You didn't play baseball?
I played Youth League. We didn't have Little League. It was called Kiwanis Club.
I actually didn’t know about the riot at the last Senators game that they ended up having to forfeit. Luckily, history didn’t repeat itself when the A’s ended their tenure in Oakland in a less than amicable divorce for their fanbase. And the other part where Major League Baseball moved the good Senators to Minnesota and gave them the expansion Senators feels wrong. They technically had no interruption in baseball service from 1960 to 61, but their team went from up-and-coming to a roster that lost 100-plus games each of the next four years. Between that and the Redskins Football Team Commanders going on a 22-year run from 1970 to 1991 of 13 playoff appearances, 5 Super Bowl appearances and 3 championships, you can see how football took over the town.
And the other part he mentioned which is something baseball needs to look into making a reality again was when he talked about the neighborhood kids and families piling in and going to a game because it was a fun way to get out for a day. When movies and sports tickets are the same price, a sports game sounds way more fun on a nice day. And even non-diehards like Andy still love that aspect of baseball, even if they don’t actively seek to go to tons of games with season tickets or buying streaming packages. But now that piling a cul-de-sac’s worth of kids into a minivan and going to a baseball game is gonna cost you $500…
An Impressive Radio Career
Do you have a journalism background?
Journalism background is an interesting way to put it because when I was going to Trinity University, I was working at WOAI, which at that time was the news talk station. We did news blocks in the morning and the afternoon. I was the overnight crime reporter, so I would start work at 11 at night. I’d go to the police station, find out what's going on, sometimes interview cops, write stories for the morning. I was a working journalist. And then I also did fill in sports.
Then I would go to school and try and catch a nap on the couch in the student union for an hour, and then go to class, try to get all my classes in in the morning. I would go to these journalism classes and just sort of sit back and roll my eyes because that really wasn't what was happening, but I promised my parents when I went to Texas that I would finish school. I knew how to write and ask questions. There are a lot of people who succeed in journalism who never had a journalism class. It's all about writing and knowing how to ask questions, and the other stuff you learn along the way.
You started your career in Texas?
No, we had really good media here (in DC). The real trailblazer, doesn't get enough credit for what he did, was Warner Wolf. He started here and he was wildly popular. He eventually went to ABC and then carved out a second run in New York. He was sort of like a hero to me. I didn't really know how far I could go with that. I also was doing a lot of acting in high school and so I thought, I was 18 years old, I'll stay doing community theater in Washington and also see what's what with the radio. I went to an organizational meeting at AU (American University), which is only about 20 minutes from where I grew up, and before I knew it I was spending all my time at the radio station and I realized that's what I wanted to do.
There was a guy there who was the station manager, I’m still really close friends with him, and we became roommates. His name is Joe Fowler. He was from San Antonio, TX, and he went home in the middle of my sophomore year to take a job broadcasting the San Antonio Dodgers. He really loved baseball. While he was home that Christmas break, he was offered a job in Port Arthur, TX, which is about 90 miles east of Houston. Talk about Friday Night Lights, high school football was king there. He said to the guy who offered him the job, he said, “I'm going to do the Dodgers, I'm not going to move there, but I have a friend.”
And he called me and he said, it’s a long shot, you're 19 years old, but send the tape, see what happens. One thing led to another, and a week later I was on my way to Texas. I worked Port Arthur for a year. Then I went to San Antonio, finished college at Trinity University, which, by the way, won the D-III Baseball championship several years ago (note: 2016 D-III Champs). From there I went to Dallas, back to DC, helped to start The Fan in New York, and then helped to start sports radio here in Washington. That's when I hooked up with Czabe, probably 1999, 2000.
Sports radio wasn't big when you went to Texas, right?
Didn't exist, no. This is common in the business: the station I was at in Dallas was covering the Rangers. At the time the team was horrendous, but the beat writers were big stars. Tim Kurkjian, Richard Justice, Paul Hagen, Randy Galloway. I was there and covering those teams, too, which was kind of ironic because that was my Senators in Texas. I did that a couple of years and then there was a format change at the station, so everybody got fired; that's the way that works.
I came home to Washington and UPI (United Press International) hired me and we got to cover big events. Covered Kentucky Derbies, Final Fours, Super Bowls. And so then I saw a two-line story in the Washington Post that said that there was a radio station in New York that carried the Mets games, WHN, it was a country station that was going to flip to all sports. And I don't know if you’ve ever seen it, but something called a blue book, we didn't have Internet then, it was 1987. It was a book that had the listings of all the people who worked at the various radio stations. I saw a name and a phone number, and I called the phone number and the person I was trying to reach answered. He spit out the address and the person to address it to and hung up the phone. His name was Howie Rose, the Mets announcer, great guy, great talent. One thing led to another and I got a job there and we launched that in July of ‘87.
Those days, this is again pre-Internet, so it's hard for young people to imagine this, but they looked at the listenership for the two all-news stations, WCBS and WINS, and they said 35% of the listeners tune in just for the sportscasts, :15 and :45. What we'll do is we'll do them every 15 minutes so they never have to wait to get scores and updates. And it was very intrusive because you get good talk show guys, like Jim Lampley's doing a talk show and I'm butting in every 15 minutes to blab about nothing. That was the concept of it, and it's since evolved to what it is now. I was there for five years, and then they wanted to start one here, so I came back to help this one off the ground. I was there for 25 years and my contract wasn’t renewed in ’17. I did freelancing at the big sports station here, plus the news station, and for the last five years, I've been at what is basically the third sports station, which is fine. I don't need to work anymore. I just work because I like it. So it's all good.
Was there any culture shock when you went to the New York media market, sports wise?
Yes. I didn't have a full understanding of how big baseball was. I'm coming from a market that didn't have baseball at all, and my previous media experience was in Texas for what was one of the worst teams in baseball. Plus, it’s Cowboys country, and they were still good. Still had a big high school football element in Dallas, and college football, with SMU, was a big deal where everybody was cheating and the Pony Express. If you saw the 30 For 30 that's when I was there. Baseball was not that big. We didn't have hockey in Dallas, but the Mavericks were just getting off the ground and they were getting sort of popular even though they weren't very good.
So I came back to Washington for a few years and then go to New York; I was just amazed at how much people were into baseball there. The other sports, people would stay with them as long as they were winning. Once the Jets and the Giants would start to go south, they'd immediately start talking about the Knicks. And then if the Knicks weren't doing well, by January, then they couldn’t wait for Spring Training to start. And Howie at that time was doing the night show. He was the Mets pre- and post-game show host. Then in the offseason he just turned his show into hot stove and that was wildly popular. I was really taken, I didn't really realize the extent of baseball mania in New York. At that time, by 1990, the Yankees were horrendous. The Mets were really good, they were defending champs when I got there, they missed the playoffs in ‘87, made it in ‘88 but lost to the Dodgers. Then Gooden and Strawberry started having their drug issues and they didn't contend while I was there.
Did you enjoy covering baseball year-round in New York?
I went to some games, but most of what I did at that time was doing updates in the studio. I would fill in talk shows on the weekends, but as far as going out and covering games, in 1990, I was working for Sports News Network. The idea was basically what ESPN News became. In 1990, I covered the lockout of 1990, when the owners locked out the players attempting to get a salary cap in place. They didn't succeed, but one of the movers and shakers was the then-owner of the Brewers, who was not yet the commissioner, and that was Bud Selig, had a small market team in Milwaukee, and he badly wanted a cap, and he thought he could pull it off. At that time, Fay Vincent was the commissioner. I also had been to the news conference in ‘89 when Rose was banned by Giamatti. And so I was covering that and the way that would work is the two sides would go in to talk. When you're doing TV, you got to be there when they come out. So you could sit there for hours and hours just waiting for them to come out. One weekend there was some movement and I wound up covering this all night as they got an agreement in 1990. That was a really interesting experience, going through that.
When you started WTEM in 1992, did that cover the whole DMV?
Yeah. It was interesting. The owners, they're two brothers. One of them is the second biggest owner of the Commanders, name is Mitch Rales, and he and his brother Steve, they owned a company called Danaher. They would buy and sell various businesses. They didn't really have a radio background, but they knew business. The two stations that they owned were WGMS AM and FM, they were simulcasting classical music on the two stations. They looked at the success of WFAN and they said, we want to start sports radio in Washington.
They were shrewd businessmen and they wrangled away the rights to the Redskins, the radio rights that had been on WMAL for 40 years. What's happened with the evolution of sports radio, you don't need play-by-play as much. If it's not football, they pay you to be on. But anyway they thought that was key, so they got them. They were big time wheelers and dealers and they got it off the ground. It took about six years until we got on a stronger AM signal and survived. But meantime I was Tony Kornheiser’s sidekick. And then he went to ESPN in 1998 and he took me with him. I did shows with him and weekend shows with Mel Kiper, so that was big for my career. And then when that ended, I went back and stayed with 980 and Czabe and I had a really good run in the afternoons for about 15 years.
Did you see your radio career becoming as successful as it was when you started out?
I didn't know what was going to happen. I looked at radio when I started sort of like minor league baseball. The glamour was, each market in the country had at least three TV stations, and that meant a weekend sports guy and a weekend guy. In most markets you're going to have 9 jobs and you gotta get one of those. I was doing OK in radio and when I got to UPI, at the time it was decent money. I didn't really want to keep doing what I was doing. It was cool to go to events, but the day-to-day was sort of dull. When sports radio came along, that was like, hmm, what is this and where is it going to go? It lost, at that time a significant amount of money, like $4 million in the first year.
One of the investors was David Letterman, so they had very successful radio people and good people. But they didn't know. They didn’t even go into it thinking that they were going to make money. They thought if we just break even, we'll have a hell of a good time doing this. It's an AM radio station. Our business is FM, they were doing music. And at the end of the year, they were thinking maybe they were going to fail. But this is how crazy things happen: they bought all the NBC owned and operated stations. NBC at that time was owned by General Electric, and they decided to get out of the radio business. So they sold the stations they owned, including the ones in New York, to MS Broadcasting. One of them was 66 WNBC. WNBC had a deal with Don Imus that said, no matter what, you have to pay Imus' salary. It had probably at least a year, maybe another two years to go. And he was making over $1,000,000, which was a hell of a lot of money in 1988.
Nobody knew what was going to happen, but Imus came with loads of sponsors. So that's what really saved the format. He stopped playing records and changed his act to political talk. He had big movers and shakers, a lot of reason to believe he got Bill Clinton elected because of what he did in his campaign in ‘92. So he reinvented himself, he was coming out of rehab, too. And then the Mike and the Mad Dog thing happened by accident. I can tell you that story too if that interests you.
Yes it does.
Imus, when he would go on vacation, they would have Russo fill in for him. He came to the Fan and was doing weekend shifts and fill in. So he's filling in for Imus one morning and Francesa… enormous ego, not a good guy at all, give him a lot of credit for his success. Russo's a great guy. Francesca is not. So Russo’s filling in and it's the last healthy year for Don Mattingly before Mattingly’s back went bad. Probably 88, maybe 89. And Russo's going on his story of how he became a Giants fan, his father was a salesman who traveled a lot, and they wound up in a hotel on the road where the Giants were staying. And he got to meet them when he was a little kid. So Russo is, to this day, a big Giants fan.
So he's going on and on about how Will Clark is a better first baseman than Don Mattingly. And Francesca is driving in to do his show. He's a big Yankee fan. He grew up going to see Mickey Mantle. So he walks into the studio, and they go back and forth arguing about who's the better first baseman. The program director Mark Mason heard it and said, hmm, that can work and they put them on in the afternoon. And so you had that, plus the cross promotion they got on Imus, and what started out as an idea in ‘87 that they could break even and just have fun, at one point they became the highest billing station in the country. Amazing.
And it started with an argument over Will Clark and Don Mattingly.
That was probably the germ of the idea. There were political shows where you had people arguing back and forth, but in those days before sports radio, it was usually a guy who did a show from 6 at night to 9 and he would take phone calls. And a lot of it was, because pre-Internet, he was just answering questions about sports. The arguing show sports really wasn't… but that's what sports fans do. And then that launched later shows like PTI and all the other screaming shows that Stephen A does, but they were the first to do it and they were wildly successful. I think at one time each of them were making close to $5,000,000 a year.
What was your approach to radio?
With Czabe, I was pretty much the straight man with him and could tee him up and we’d go back and forth. And I was the foil for some of his stuff. We did some calls. It was my idea to start the show that we actually did, it's called the Sports Reporters. So I was at the Super Bowl with Tony, and he brought on at the same time, Mike Lupica and Hank Goldberg, who were both also regulars on the show at the time. And I just watched them do their thing in a three-way conversation.
I said, let me do a daily show where I got two people in from town, newspaper, TV, whatever. Two other people in the studio with me and let me try and do that. And it was good if you had two good people, but if you had one that wasn't so good, it was inconsistent. And Czabe came in and was doing some things like Bullets pregame shows. The program director says, let me try and put him in as the permanent second guy and we'll have a third guy with him. We were The Show for a long time in the afternoon. You don't have to get big numbers. You just got to get the right demographic and the advertisers have to get results, which they did. It worked out pretty well for both of us.
Now you get an idea of all the work behind the scenes that turned the sports media business from the land of beat writers and columnists to one of TV analysts, radio shows and now podcasts on demand. You have to be two things to do well in an industry with that much evolution in a short period of time: be open to change and be good at what you do. To start small in DC, wind up in Texas, which compared to DC is basically a different country, and then be part of the New York City sports radio scene that is known nationwide, to going home and starting up things there with names like Tony Kornheiser, there’s some risks along the way. And then obviously people have to want to listen to you, and like what you have to offer, and he’s really fun to listen to, very good with research and details and history. I’ll leave with you with this clip after Vin Scully’s passing where he had some great research and stories queued up for his show: