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| Ohio University radio announcer Russ Eisenstein calls out the play-by-play of Friday's Northern Illinois-Ohio baseball game at NIU. (Beck Diefenbach – bdiefenbach@daily-chronicle.com) |
DeKALB – Russ Eisenstein always knew he would broadcast sports for a living.
Growing up in Bolingbrook, the now voice of the Ohio Bobcats made hundreds of trips out to DeKalb to watch Northern Illinois. When he wasn’t at games, even at the age of 6, he would write down scores and do a scoreboard show with his dad while his mom or dad fixed dinner.
Watching those games and reading the scores of the day into a tape recorder with his dad, Mark, led to little Russ Eisenstein doing his imaginary games featuring NIU basketball stars Kenny Battle and Allen Rayhorn.
“I would recreate fake games and fake shows that happened to center around Northern Illinois,” Eisenstein said, “or Illinois State or the Mid-American Conference or the Missouri Valley.
“I’m pretty sure I was the only kid in the world that did that.”
It led to a journey of six states in seven years and broadcasting minor league baseball, college athletics and handling pre- and postgame duties of the New Orleans Hornets when they played in Oklahoma City post-Hurricane Katrina.
Now he does baseball, basketball and football for the Bobcats, who were in town this weekend to play a three-game set against the Huskies.
And, for Eisenstein, it doesn’t get much better than baseball on the radio.
“I think baseball on the radio is a perfect thing,” he said. “You let your mind drift. I said on the air last weekend, that as a society, maybe we would be a lot smarter if we listened to baseball more on the radio, because it lets your mind drift and you can create all these pictures in your head and maybe that would translate to other things.”
THE BASICS
The visuals that television can bring with a graphic of the score, the number of outs, who is on base and who is up to bat obviously aren’t there for the radio broadcasters and makes those pieces of information a constant and necessary theme of any broadcast.
As he learned at Southern Illinois University, the play-by-play of any baseball game is the outline.
“You’re always going to know inning and score,” Eisenstein said. “You’re always going to know who is on base. You’re always going to know who is up. You’ll always know the absolute necessary stats when you need to know them.
“But you’ll hear our minds drift and wander and tell stories about the town we’re in.”
This weekend, it was stories from Eisenstein’s youth and even present day, as his parents live in Malta.
That intimate knowledge of the area played out in his broadcasts this weekend. A fastball from NIU pitcher Chuck Lukanen wasn’t right down the middle, it was “right down Annie Glidden.” A howling wind that played a role throughout Friday’s NIU victory reminded Eisenstein of the games he came to as a youth and how the strong winds of DeKalb haven’t changed since then.
One other basic thing Eisenstein knows he has to master: Name pronunciation.
Something that seems so basic but all too often gets taken for granted, Eisenstein said he’ll spend time with an official from whatever team the Bobcats are playing and pronounce each player’s name with that person, then make a notation next to difficult names to make sure he gets it right.
Friday, when NIU pitcher Andy Deain came in for the save, Eisenstein double checked during a commercial break that it was pronounced like dean.
“With a name like Eisenstein, I’m sympathetic to people butchering names or knowing what it’s like when my name is butchered by somebody,” he said. “You just kind of roll with it and hope you get it right.”
STYLE AND PACE
The varied tempo that often is a hurry-up-and-wait type of pattern in baseball allows Eisenstein to come back and fill in that outline while the game progresses.
It leaves open the opportunity to relay the stories behind the action, like how Ohio coach Joe Carbone had to call numerous scouts to let them know that top prospect Gauntlett Eldemire wasn’t playing this weekend because of a wrist injury or that the Bobcats stayed in Joliet the night before the game because it’s assistant coach Scott Malinowski’s hometown.
“Blending the stories with the play-by-play, the action happens so quickly, but the pace of the story is completely different from the action when it happens,” he said.
Preparation then, for a baseball broadcast, is dramatically different from football or basketball. Eisenstein will still talk to players and coaches before a game, but it’s in more of a loose manner than other sports.
“You’ve got all this time during the game to take a look at numbers and to take a look at this bit of information or this nugget,” he said. “In basketball and football, it’s so quick that you’ve got to have it right there at that moment, because that moment can be lost. But in baseball, you have the time to take a look at things.”
Eisenstein’s voice can best be described as commanding but not overbearing, like he knows he owns what he says. Maserati-smooth with the knowledge of a lifelong Mid-American Conference fan, he even goes without a signature home run call.
“Every home run has a different sort of trajectory, every home run is different,” he said. “I’ve never been one to have this signature home run call, which I think is different from a lot of guys.”
BIG MOMENTS AND HISTORY
While in Bloomington, Eisenstein called a game in which pitcher Mike Pelfrey took a no-hitter into the ninth.
This year at Ohio, he’s already called a Mid-American Conference tournament championship and an NCAA Tournament win when the 14th-seeded Bobcats upset third-seeded Georgetown.
Eisenstein said he used some of the things he thought he would use coming into those games, but allowed emotion to filter into those calls as well.
“You don’t know how you’re going to handle a Mid-American Conference tournament call until you do it,” he said. “You don’t know how you’re going to handle an NCAA Tournament victory call until you do it.”
And how about when Northern Illinois, a team he grew up cheering for, plays Ohio? There are some clear lines when it comes to that.
“I want Northern to do very well,” Eisenstein said. “Northern is very important to me. But I’m broadcasting for Ohio and when Ohio is playing Northern Illinois, I’m going to broadcast the game fairly, but I want Ohio to win.”
And having a sense of perspective and a little fun along the way certainly helps.
“We want to keep the listener around,” he said. “We want to inform the listener. But it’s sports, it’s not rocket science. I get to go on the air for three hours and talk about baseball. That’s not a real job. That’s not a real life. It’s amazing.”
