Miami Sports- The City of Champions

Boog Sciambi. He’s here folks. The voice of the Atlanta Braves, ESPN college basketball play by play man, and the former host of the best sports show Miami airwaves have ever heard. He really needs no introduction around these parts, so excuse our gasbaggery. As always, our questions in bold. Enjoy. No seriously. You’re going to enjoy this. How do we know? We’re psychic. (p.s. : In honor of hearing from Boog, we implore you to fire up his old intro music for his radio show while you read the interview. See?  The Boog Sciambi Show is back! Sort of

1) We’re always interested in digging deep into broadcaster’s career paths, and the routes they took to get there. How long have you wanted to do play-by-play, and how did you go about doing it? Was there ever a moment post-college where you thought it wouldn’t work out for you?

Honestly, I was more interested in doing talk than play-by-play out of
college.  After I began doing a show at QAM, I started going into an empty booth at
Joe Robbie Stadium and broadcasting Marlins games into a tape recorder. Eventually, I shared the tape with some people and it led to a minor league job. I remember giving my initial tape to Dave O’Brien for a critique and when we sat down, he started by saying, ” You know, I thought this was really gonna stink…and it didn’t.”

Hilarious. Obie is a close friend and has certainly helped in mentoring me. As for struggles, that first year in Boise was rough, those tapes should be burned. It’s such a slow game but for a broadcaster, it can get real fast in a hurry.

2) We have always maintained that your old radio show was the best sports show Miami, (and any other market, to be honest) has ever heard, and readers of the site, including us, miss it desperately. Talk a little about how you got into radio, and why you left it. Have you missed the interaction at all since departing, or is the draining noise of NFL-Draft-Grade-shows evaporating your hearing one Mel Kiper hair follicle a second?

My first chance to do talk radio was filling in for Joe Zagacki when he was sick
back in 1994. I knew I’d love it–I was as much of a gasbag then as I am now.
I got some weekends and then co-hosted a nightly show and it went from there.
The bottom line for me now is that play-by-play is the priority. Once the Braves gig went to 105 games I just decided I didn’t have enough time to do both.

Do I miss the show? When something interesting happens in sports I miss having a voice. As well, I miss being connected directly to South Florida and the fans.  But the NFL draft or high school recruiting? I would rather be doing play-by-play of skeet shooting.

3) You introduced many listeners in south florida to sabermetrics, and the growing community surrounding sites like Baseball Prospectus. What is the biggest misconception you hear from the common fan, now that ESPN infiltrates the viewers broadcast with OPS stats, constantly trying to stay young, while the informed baseball fan laps around the track, throwing VORP to the left, and EQA to the right?

God, there are so many misconceptions about the advanced stats I don’t even know where to start. It’s not just fans by the way, plenty of media members and people inside the game don’t “get it” either. I would boil it down to this: Too many people think there is a choice here–they think it’s,” you like strawberry and I like vanilla.” Or, “I like RBIs and batting average to evaluate and you like that weird OPS and VORP stuff.” It has been studied and proven that OBP is the stat that correlates most with run scoring. Period.  So, strawberry is better than vanilla…I just don’t think everyone understands that.

4) How do you go about mixing the common joe-blow-couch-potato baseball fan’s opinion into a broadcast, while weaving together forward thinking analysis?

I guess I don’t really frame it in those terms. I think I analyze on-air more than the average play-by-play guy and when I give an opinion I strive to present a different perspective. I do think my time doing a talk show and interacting with fans helped to teach me what the average fan thinks and likes.  I’m certainly not going to drop EQA or WARP2 on the air because it’s just a giant tune out and it’s too complicated to do in that setting. I still think one of my main jobs is to entertain, tell stories and humanize the players.

5) Picture this: 3rd inning, Braves:1, Marlins:14. Is it hard to keep up an entertaining broadcast as the action becomes less enticing, even for you and Joe Simpson? Is there a time you remember just saying to yourself “bleep this, there’s no way I can put up a veneer like this game is ANY kind of entertaining?

Those are absolutely the games that are the greatest challenge—“ It’s where announcing ends and broadcasting begins,” someone once said. Or something like that. I think.  You empty your bag and all your material comes out and sometimes you still don’t have enough. Again, this is where the talk show experience comes in handy to generate topics and discussion…But hell yeah, there are times I’m thinking that.

6) The highlight of your professional career?

Gotta be the 2003 playoffs and World Series with the Marlins.

7) Why is it so hard, even now, for teams to understand basic thought processes. If player A doesn’t get on base, player A can NOT be a leadoff guy, no matter his speed (cough, Emilio Bonifacio, cough)

I think you’re being a tad harsh here. Let’s start with the idea that lineup construction is of little consequence, right? Still, I understand the frustration of watching Bonifacio’s  parade of outs.  But who would you leadoff? Most teams just don’t have a Tim Raines-type leadoff option—a guy who can run AND get on base.  Here’s an interesting one…Is Jimmy Rollins a good leadoff guy? His career OBP is around .330 and  that’s probably a little below league average over that stretch. But Jimmy Rollins average season is 40 doubles, 11 triples, 16 homers and 38 steals at an 83% clip. Forget OBP for a sec and think about the doubles and triples—that’s 51 times he’s putting himself in scoring position without even considering the stolen bases efficiency.  I’m guessing you’d subscribe to the Red Sox “organizational philosophy” yet they don’t exactly leadoff an OBP machine–Ellsbury is around .335.

8 ) Ever considered jumping back into radio, perhaps a part time gig?

I would almost guarantee that I’ll do a talk show again at some point, I’m just not sure where or what format.

Check-downs:

1) The 5 smartest play-by-play guys in the biz:

5 guys…Len Kasper, Mike Breen, Ian Eagle, Joe Buck and Dave O’Brien.

2) I grant you the money to buy tickets for any sporting event out there. What sport, what game, what team(s) are you picking?

I actually keep trying to plan this one…Hands down, UNC/Duke @Cameron.