It's Downright Shocking To Me That Joe Davis Started His Broadcasting Career With The Schaumburg Flyers (And Never Got Paid)
Joe Davis is the new voice of MLB baseball and he joined us this week to tell some stories about the broadcast booth and talk about his experiences working under Vin Scully. He's the #1 Dodgers guy and now FOX's #1 MLB guy with Joe Buck's departure to ESPN. He also calls NFL with Moose Johnston and I'm pretty sure that's just about the sweetest 1-2-3 broadcasting punch anybody's throwing right now. And he's doing it at 34 years old which makes Joe that much more relatable. As he explains, he didn't get there because somebody owed his dad a favor, etc. as you see so often in broadcasting. He got there by following a passion and being relentless.
Along the way he tells a story that quite literally hits close to home. Joe got his start in 2009 with the Schaumburg Flyers, an independent baseball club based in the northern suburbs of Chicago. They folded in 2011 after getting evicted from Alexian Field for failing to pay nearly $1,000,000 in rent over the last few seasons. For all the disfunction in Chicago professional sports, nobody comes close to the Schaumburg Flyers in the late 2000's. Leadership cut corners at seemingly every level from taxes to vendors to payroll and game day operations to the point that they just stopped paying bills while simultaneously trying to sell the club. By all measures, metrics and considerations, the Schaumburg Flyers were an unmitigated, fraudulent disaster of unparalleled comparison in my experience. Allegedly.
So with all of that said, you can naturally understand how interesting it is to me that Joe Davis started his career with the Flyers in 2009 in the midst of their demise. And without prompt, Joe gets into the experience of working a professional broadcasting job and not getting a paycheck. It's a great story about how badly he just wanted to be in a broadcasting booth working on his game. Honestly it doesn't come across much different than what you'd hear from a minor league pitcher that's destined for the big leagues.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Go listen to the full interview to find out.