21st of Jun | Story

Talking b.s. and baseball

BY CAROLYN LaWELL

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee | Larry Ward and Will Poindexter place their headsets over their ears, turn the volume knob and welcome Tennessee Valley listeners to another night with the Chattanooga Lookouts.

Ward and Poindexter are in their sixth season together, 70 home games from opening day to Labor Day, which makes them one of the few two-man booths and one of the longer-tenured broadcast teams in the minors. They sound fantastic now, lobbing lines and stories back and forth, but at first, “It was teacher and pupil,” Ward says. “Now, it’s two guys standing by a backyard fence b.s.ing.”

“Two guys watching a baseball game,” Poindexter says. “It’s been great.”

♦          ♦          ♦

The first time Ward talked into a microphone more than 40 years ago, he called a football game so poorly that he almost got fired. He improved and moved to basketball, then improved some more and, during a stretch as a daytime broadcaster, moved to baseball after he had to call an afternoon game.

"Larry welcomed me with the phrase, ‘I was really looking forward to working by myself this year.’ I knew after that we were going to hit it off just fine." - Will Poindexter, Lookouts broadcaster and director of stadium operations

“My first baseball game was a district little league tournament in Oregon,” he says. “That was in 1972.”

“I was born in November of ’78,” Poindexter says, whispering from the other side of the booth.

“You would start the broadcast half an hour after the game stared,” Ward says. “What our guys used to do was they would pay a guy $10 — say we were in Portland in the studio and they were playing a game in Spokane — to call after every inning and give the details of the inning to the producer, and the producer would type it up and hand it to you, and you’d sit there and do the play by play. You recreated the entire ballgame. It was the hardest damn thing I ever had to do.”

It was old radio theater. “My deal was you have to have something for a foul ball,” he says, “so I took a matchbook and put a rubber band around it and would pluck that away from the microphone and it would sound like a foul ball.” Ward has called more than 4,000 baseball games since then. He is 65 and in his 25th season with the Lookouts.

Poindexter is 33 and in his sixth season with the team. He grew up around Chattanooga and listened to Ward’s broadcasts. He spent most of his summer nights standing outside of old Engel Stadium waiting for foul balls to fly out the right side of the ballpark. After high school, he served four years in the Air Force, then came back to Chattanooga to finish school, find a job and start a family.

“That’s when Larry and I started together,” Poindexter says. “The following year, I was the stadium operations director, which just kind of happened.”

“Somebody had to do it,” Ward says.

“You always look to make yourself as irreplaceable as possible,” Poindexter says of taking over stadium ops. “I was into aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, so I’m kind of handy.”

“The problem is,” Ward says, “we don’t have an aircraft for him to fix.”

“Larry had a partner when I got here,” Poindexter says. “The day that I interviewed, they found out Mick Gillispie was leaving. Larry welcomed me with the phrase, ‘I was really looking forward to working by myself this year.’ I knew after that we were going to hit it off just fine.”

♦          ♦          ♦

Poindexter comes from a radio family. His father Bill, known on air as “Dex,” is one of the top small-market personalities on country radio. Not wanting to follow his father in music, Poindexter thought about a career in sports radio. Save for calling some basketball games during his years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and reading news updates on local radio stations, he had little experience on the air when he arrived at the Lookouts. Ward helped change that.

“Larry is the kind of person who, if you’re doing something wrong, he’s going to tell you,” Poindexter says. “I remember he would do an inning, he would throw it to me, and the whole time I’m on, he’s writing stuff down. That’s really unnerving. We would go to break, I would set the headphones down and he would say, ‘OK, Don’t do that, that’s ridiculous.’ He would rattle down the list. He did that the whole first year.”

“Pretty much,” Ward says.

“It was on-the-job training with someone who is brutally honest and going to tell you the truth,” Poindexter says.

“The one thing that every young announcer does not do, especially with baseball, is give the score enough,” Ward says. “With him, and with everybody else that I’ve ever had, I’ve said, ‘Look, after every batter, you have to give the score and the inning.’ I would reach over and turn off the microphone in the middle of an inning and say, ‘Score. Inning. Start doing it.’”

♦          ♦          ♦

Ward welcomed his first partner into the booth a decade ago. Over the next four seasons, two broadcasters helped him call Lookouts games. Both saw the job as a start in radio. Ward helped them move on to call baseball in other markets. Poindexter has other responsibilities in and out of the stadium, and is not as quick to move to another team.

“I have a family,” Poindexter says. “I have two kids. I’ve had the opportunity to move and go do other things, but I don’t want to. I’ve taken my wife all over the place with the military life. She loves it and she’s actually from here also. So I’m not looking to go anywhere.”

“You always look to make yourself as irreplaceable as possible,” Poindexter says of taking over stadium ops. “I was into aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, so I’m kind of handy.”

“The problem is,” Larry Ward says, “we don’t have an aircraft for him to fix.”

“The other two were from out of the area,” Ward says. “Will was born and raised here, so it makes a big difference.”

Because of the time needed to raise his sons and care for a stadium well into its second decade of play, Poindexter no longer travels with Ward to road games. At home, though, the two have turned listening to the Lookouts into a nightly conversation about baseball. It is rare in the transient minors to find one veteran broadcaster, let alone two.

“The first thing, you have to have an owner who likes that combination,” Ward says. He stops for a second and shifts from a straight delivery to comedy. “And an older announcer who, I guess, needs a crutch and somebody who can help them up and down the stairs.”

Poindexter gives Ward a look that only comes after thousands of hours together in a hot booth. “If I ever have to help him up here,” he says, “I’m out of here.”

Carolyn@AMinorLeagueSeason.com ♦ @CarolynLaWell ♦ @AMinorLgSeason

Want to read stories about the other teams on our schedule? Click here and scroll to the calendar.