Josh Lewin, 35, is a play-by-play announcer for Fox TV’s Saturday Game of the Week and the television voice of the Texas Rangers. As an announcer, he’s worked with legendary broadcasters Jon Miller in Baltimore, Harry Caray in Chicago, and Ernie Harwell in Detroit. He’s also a job-hunting survivor of the winter meetings. His first book, Getting in the Game: Inside Baseball’s Winter Meetings, published by Brasseys, tells the tale of three go-getters seeking their first paying jobs in professional baseball at the 2002 meetings in Nashville’s Opryland Hotel. With this year’s event starting this weekend in New Orleans, BP chatted with Lewin about the challenge of baseball job-hunting, the scene at the winter meetings, and how he found his own broadcasting career.
Fall and winter are times for football, basketball, and snow. For New Englanders, it’s a time to mourn another summer that died late, as Roger Angell once said. The only baseball news around for fans are awards announcements, manager firings and hirings and the Hot Stove League league, which doesn’t always burn so hot. But for a few million obsessed fans around the Caribbean basin and the Mexican pacific coast, it’s time for “the other” season, one that’s even more important in terms of passion and loyalty than the major leagues of the United States. We do have baseball year-round, but the only time we feel the sense of emptiness that the people in Canada and the United States are feeling right now is the 10 days between the end of the Caribbean World Series and the time pitchers and catchers report.
Following up on yesterday’s article, here is the definitive list of every transaction made at last weekend’s Mock Winter Meetings in Chicago. The list of moves includes a blockbuster trade for Mark Teixeira, cheap contracts for Trot Nixon and Juan Gonzalez, and a surprise new home for Vladimir Guerrero.