My greatest home run call

Hello from Walla Walla, Washington where I spoke this week at the Walla Walla Sweets kickoff dinner.  People always ask "what's your greatest home run call?"  It came my first year in the minors with the Syracuse Chiefs, and it became sort of a legend.   The Syracuse Post-Standard even did a story about it as recently as last month.   So I told that story and will repeat it here.   Even if you're not a baseball fan (and many of you aren't -- I hear the complaints whenever I do a baseball post) you will enjoy this story. 

The Chiefs were then the AAA affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays (now they're the Washington National's top farm club).  My broadcast partner was Dan Hoard, now the voice of the Cincinnati Bengals and University of Cincinnati football and basketball.   In 1988 our station had a weaker signal than my home Wifi transmitter. At night you couldn’t hear it at the ballpark. When people complained I used to say that this was just the flagship station of the “Worldwide Syracuse Chiefs Radio Network”. I would pause for station identification every half hour and make up all this crap about how popular the Chiefs were in Norway and Bhutan.

We had a third baseman named Norm Tonucci. Sweet kid from Connecticut who was on a year long slump. He came to bat once and I said we had many listeners from Borneo because Norm was a folk hero over there. I then created some story that his father had parachuted behind enemy lines in World War II and single handedly saved the country. I said the currency of Borneo is “Tonuches”, that 90% of male babies and 70% of female babies were named Norm. Every time he came to bat I would reprieve this Borneo connection and night after night he would go 0-3, 0-4, 0-8 (doubleheader).

One night we’re in Oklahoma City and Norm hits a triple. When he came to bat the next time up I talked about how excited the people of Borneo were over the triple. The next pitch he just crushed. And this was my home run call:

“Tonucci swings and there’s a long drive to deep left field. Steve Kemp goes back…to the track…to the wall….NO SCHOOL TOMORROW IN BORNEO!”