Courtesy Laconia Citizen

(September 7, 2009) Before the first pitch on a recent overcast Friday night at Fenway Park, Rye resident and Red Sox radio broadcaster Dave O'Brien looked out from his perch high above home plate, and his thoughts returned to 1976.

The Detroit Tigers were in town, with their star pitcher Mark Fidrych on the mound, and the 13-year-old native of Quincy, Mass., was sitting somewhere down the right field line, probably near the Pesky pole, with his father, Robert, a letter-to-the-editor-writing, hard-working salesman who knew every street around the ballpark thanks to his days as a postman. He brought his four boys to the game, giving a night's break to their mother, Barbara, a sharp lady who once took an overnight job at a Dunkin' Donuts when money was tight and later worked for a New Hampshire research institute dedicated to saving elm trees.

The O'Brien clan had box seats, a rarity for the "very decidedly middle-class" family, which moved to the Keene area when Dave was 12. Game tickets cost $5.75 a pop, and the odor of "spilled beers going back a hundred years" permeated the air.

The Sox took the game 2-0 after Carl Yastrzemski hit a homer. Dave O'Brien took away the idea that "it's really possible for someone like me" — who, at 11, sought tips from the National Association of Broadcasters and spent springs driving people "nuts" as he called games from the sidelines of his brothers' Little League games — to make it as a big-league broadcaster.

"I remember the lights being on in the booth over here — one of these booths — and that caught my attention," he said before the Friday game against Toronto as his partner, esteemed Sox voice Joe Castiglione, listened two seats away inside the small radio booth. "It was during the early part of the game, and I remember asking my father, 'What's going on up there?' And he said, 'Well, the guys are announcing the game, the guys you'll hear on the radio after the game wrapping it up — the play-by-play guys — they're working.'"

He was already intrigued by the profession, but so began O'Brien's own spring training as he cut a path into the broadcasting world that, in 1988, saw him become the youngest broadcaster in Major League Baseball, and nearly two decades later, culminated with a job with the Red Sox when the team won their second World Series of the millennium.

The winter before, in 2006, after searching several years for a new home, he and his high school sweetheart, Debbie, a Granite State native, found what they wanted, not far from the ocean, in Rye. He and his wife were always enamored with the Seacoast, he said.

"There are some great places in Portsmouth," O'Brien said. "The Library (Restaurant), we go there a lot. I mean it's a great restaurant town. It's one of the really cool places to hang out. My daughters love it. My wife loves it. They shop a little too much, but we love Portsmouth. It's become one of the hottest, trendiest places in New England. ... We love the Seacoast ... it's sort of a well-kept secret for how beautiful it is."

It was after the O'Briens settled on the home that, while driving along Route 1 back to Boston, he heard a report about an opening in the Sox radio booth. He had already made a name for himself in the business, so he figured he'd inquire whether the station wanted him for at least a few games. Everything was falling into place.

As a Sox broadcaster and baseball and college basketball television commentator for ESPN, O'Brien spends a lot of time on the road, a point hammered home when he recalled a night out — last offseason — with Debbie at the White Barn in Kennebunk, Maine, one of their favorite haunts.

"It's about the only time we could get to dinner," he said.

Between the 135 regular season games he broadcasts for the Sox and 75 events for ESPN, there can be weeks where the days are split across five cities, from Boston to Chicago, back to Boston and on to Dallas, Los Angeles and Toronto. It's enough to make his head spin at the end of it, he said, and it means he's away from his three children, including a daughter who attends Portsmouth High.

"On the other hand this is what I do for a living," he said, an empty can of Pepsi within reach, a plethora of pens and markers holding down the day's starting lineups and game notes. And, a lot of the time, he's doing it at Fenway, in clear shot of the Green Monster and the apartment buildings, offices and high-rises that surround the outside of the neighborhood park. When it comes to calling the games, words are his paintbrush, and what's happening on the field is his inspiration.

"What a palette and place to do it," he said.

Working from the "C" booth on the fifth level of the 97-year-old ballpark, O'Brien and Castiglione are heard throughout New England, from the porches of Dover to the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. They sit on the bottom level of a two-tier booth shared with an engineer and Jon Rish, who handles pre- and postgame on-air duties and occasionally fills in for O'Brien.

From up there, the crack of the bat offers a constant reminder to be on watch for screaming foul balls. Aside from the engineering technology, it's a simple space, with a few microphones and several pictures of past Sox legends.

In Boston, their calls are piped through the WEEI Sports Radio Network, but different stations pick them up throughout the region. In the Boston market, the broadcasts attract about 125,000, which measures to an average quarter hour rating that tops popular morning-drive radio shows, according to Arbitron Inc., a media research firm.

Thanks to satellite radio, O'Brien and Castiglione have heard from fans in Honduras and Argentina. O'Brien said he cherishes working in a sports town, and region, where fans truly pay attention.

"It's a good kind of pressure because there's a necessity to get it right," he said.

The partners are also heard inside the park, with their voices streamed into the concession area via small rectangular black speakers affixed to the ceiling, inches from pockmarked green piping that runs, like arteries, through the brick-and-concrete park. Outside, on Lansdowne Street where hot dog and Italian sausage vendors slave over grilled onions and peppers, workers rely on the radio feed to know when a home run is sent over the left field wall.

"There is definitely a timeless appeal to it," said Mike Palmacci, a Bay State resident who works one of the food booths.

In the age of on-demand television and iPods, baseball on the radio very much transports listeners to a bygone era. Maybe it's because it's free to tune in, outside the fairly nominal cost of buying an AM/FM transmitter and some double-A batteries. Maybe it's because, unlike sports on television, one doesn't have the option to view it in high-definition, with the benefit of instant replay delivered from a half dozen camera angles. Maybe it's just the nostalgia of it, an invitation to kick back on a hazy summer afternoon or during an evening lit by fireflies, and soak in a sport that's not dictated by a clock.

Dennis Wharton, executive vice president at the National Association of Broadcasters, said there's a connection between fans and their radio broadcasters that transcends generations in a "patriotic and uniquely American" way, steeped in the traditions of peanuts and crackerjacks and cold beer. To Carl Beane, the public address announcer at Fenway, radio is about the art of painting a "word picture every night. The folks who tune in give you this empty canvas between your ears and it's your job to paint those word pictures so you bring them to the game as much as one can."

For the melodic and booming O'Brien, that means using phrases such as "shot like a howitzer" to describe how a ball is hit and "churning the fire" to convey a pitcher's windup. There's also the "spongy grass" the players sometimes have to deal with, or the "fistful of beads" that slugger David Ortiz had to contend with after fouling off a fastball. There are words like "romp" to describe how Ortiz trots around the bases and countless vivid comparisons, such as describing a collision with catcher Jason Varitek as akin to smacking into a tree trunk. Descriptions of a "sparkling Sunday afternoon at Fenway," for those fortunate enough to know what that looks like, are able to put a little charm in a rainy day up north.

O'Brien has his thoughts on the timeless appeal.

"There's a connection between the voice and the ear that television doesn't translate as effectively as radio does," he said. "That makes our duty a little more important. I mean, we're more important to following a baseball game than television announcers are, and being a television announcer I say that with all humility. Nothing happens unless we say it happens. A pitch is never thrown until we say so."

Baseball broadcasters share a common language — "we all copy somebody," Castiglione noted — but that's not to say they are one voice.

"I strive to describe things a little differently," O'Brien said, "and I will look for different ways to describe a line drive. I don't think everything is hit the same way — it could be slicing, it could be hooking, it could be a low line drive, it could be a towering fly or mammoth fly ball. And I think we owe it to the audience to come as close to what happened as we possibly can, and that requires a lot of different word choices. And it's fun."

For O'Brien, his vocabulary is also honed away from the ballpark, in the pages of history books, particularly those of wars and presidents, and the information he picks up during family visits to museums from Paris to Rome.

"You never know where you're going to find it," he said.

There is also a very different rhythm to a baseball game, which, unlike the basketball games O'Brien works, isn't marked by a time-driven staccato pace. It's more walk in the park than sprint to the finish line, and that adds to the intimacy a radio listener, a "true fan," enjoys, he said. Plus, both he and Castiglione say they strive not to hit the listener over the head with too many statistics.

"I think as I've matured as a broadcaster I've realized that the sound of the crowd is a wonderful thing, and it's a great tool for an announcer," O'Brien said. "A listener wants to be here, and if they can't be here, they want to hear the sound of the ballpark. I think that's the reason we don't kill you with numbers."

"You have to be very careful with numbers," Castiglione said. "For some people numbers are work. You have to make sure they tell a story. If a number doesn't tell a story, don't give it."

It's practically impossible not to distinguish between the reliable raconteurs of summer. If Castiglione is the genial-sounding type, his delivery a cross between an excited, yet patient, inquisitive family member, O'Brien sounds like the authoritative, trustworthy type, a confidence-exuding lyricist who, as Beane put it, has got such storytelling "great pipes" that listening to him read a restaurant menu is a real treat.

The partners also share a chemistry partly developed off the field. That's why listeners sometimes hear them share tales from spots they visit on the road, whether it be the Alamo in Texas or a popular restaurant. Castiglione likened their on-air approach to two guys sitting in the stands — "you (chat) with the guy sitting next to you. It may not be about baseball."

Even before that game with his father and brothers in 1976, O'Brien recalled, it was a career in broadcasting that he focused on with "laser precision." Not even his role on a 1980 championship high school baseball team made him think of another profession.

His parents, who are both deceased, offered plenty of encouragement, always reminding him, "David, you can talk with anyone." He always loved language, sports and talking, especially aloud, even if it sometimes got him in trouble in school, where his election as fifth-grade class president served as a big confidence booster for the future on-air personality.

His formal training took shape in high school, when he worked the graveyard shift for a local radio station and the manager predicted his "sportsy" sound would serve him well. He resolved to go to Syracuse University, a premiere training ground for future television and radio professionals.

His parents couldn't afford to send him, so he worked two radio jobs to offset the cost of tuition, which included "huge" student loans that took a decade to pay back.

Upon graduation, O'Brien found work in South Carolina and then Atlanta. He was 23 when his big break came. He had his own afternoon radio show, but he wasn't content.

He'd go to the old Fulton County Stadium, the home of the Braves of the National League, and find a spot in an empty booth and call the games, before an imaginary audience, into a voice recorder.

Though Syracuse helped him temper his Boston accent, he was still learning the craft when there was a play-by-play opening with the Braves. On the advice of a program director, O'Brien converted those reel-to-reel tapes to a cassette and sent in his resume.

He was 25, had never called a minor league game, but he landed the job. He learned at the feet of some of the game's best broadcasters, including Skip Caray, Don Sutton and Pete Van Wieren. The Braves were pretty bad when O'Brien arrived, but the next year they went to the World Series, which brought O'Brien attention for his calls of "spellbinding" games.

The Florida Marlins came calling. Then he landed at ESPN. Then the New York Mets and then the Sox.

Before he landed in Boston, O'Brien had the call of the 2004 World Series for Major League Baseball's international television coverage. Of course that was the year the Sox cracked the 86-year curse and beat the St. Louis Cardinals. O'Brien's thoughts were with his best friend, his father, who's love of language meant his sons weren't allowed to use swear words, which "anyone can reach for."

"That was a tough final inning to get through because there was a lot of emotion there," O'Brien recalled, with Fenway's organ piping in the background. "I thought of my father the whole time and how much he would have loved it. He did love it. He saw it somewhere. ... I got on the phone with each of my brothers right after the game ... and they all had the same thought — this was for dad."

O'Brien said Red Sox Nation can expect to hear him for many years to come.

"They'll probably have to throw me out of the booth," he said in a subsequent interview from the road. "From the first time I walked into spring training, it felt so familiar. And every night at Fenway it's like I've been here forever."

Maybe that's because, since that night in 1976, the park has never left him.

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