By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2018

Major league pitcher-turned-broadcaster Jim Kaat has a story illustrating the dilemma facing retired professional athletes aspiring to the broadcast booth.

“I had a little brief period of chilliness between Alex Rodriguez and myself,” says Kaat, who turned to broadcasting in the mid-1980s after playing 25 MLB seasons, 14 with the original Washington Senators/Minnesota Twins franchise. “Eventually he came across the line and wanted to talk to me a little bit more, and I had to point out to him that I’m not your cheerleader. I’m not your PR firm. I work for the viewer, and it’s my job to tell the viewer what I see, honestly and objectively.”

Go too far in one direction and you burn a player. Go too far in the other and imperil your fan credibility. Critical balance is a thin, greased line not quite taut on a windy day. Some never toe it while others, like former catcher John Flaherty, BA ’91, appear to find it by intuition.

“I’ve always been a person who, I think, is very self-evaluating,” says the 50-year-old Flaherty, a New York City native who’s called Yankee games for the Yankee-owned YES Network since 2006. “I’ve always been kind of critical of myself as a player. I never gave myself a whole lot of credit and I was very aware of what my role was on every club that I played for, and I’ve taken that same attitude up to the booth.

“If I see something, I’m going to call it like I see it. Every player struggles. We’re all used to being criticized a little bit, but if you can balance it out with a reason why that particular player is having a tough time, I think that goes a long way.”

Flaherty, drafted out of GW by the Boston Red Sox in 1988, finished his five-team, 14-year career with a three-year run with the Yankees (2003 to 2005) that included a World Series appearance in 2003 and a tour as Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson’s personal catcher.

An adequate hitter—his best offensive season was 1998 with Tampa Bay when he hit .278 with 14 home runs and 71 RBIs in 117 games—Flaherty had a reputation as a superlative defender and a cerebral player of baseball’s most polymathic position, one believed to produce the best managers and TV/radio analysts. A.J. Hinch, manager of 2017 World Series champion Houston Astros, is a former catcher, so is Tim McCarver, among the first and best-regarded ex-pros to turn broadcaster.

Flaherty retired during spring training in 2006 and quickly landed a handful of TV auditions before YES hired him as an on-the-field reporter for that season.

“As a color analyst—that’s his bread and butter,” New York Post sports media columnist Andrew Marchand says. “That’s where he’s best, as a former player. … Flaherty sees the game a certain way and he sees it through the eyes of someone who had a catcher’s mask on for a long time. He’s thinking with each pitch what the pitcher’s going to do, where the infield is, what base runners are thinking—and all players do that, but I think a catcher has a unique perspective because they’re involved with each play of a baseball game. I think you see with John that that translates into his broadcast, and he’s able to give you the insight into what a player’s thinking and he does it in a way that’s easy to understand.”

Flaherty’s transition from field to the broadcast booth seems charmed. He says he got into it at the urging of his agent Alan Nero who, Flaherty says, believed he could be a “really good broadcaster” and encouraged him to do a bit of preemptive brand-building.

“I was concentrating on being a player and I thought I’ll figure out the retirement stuff afterwards,” Flaherty says. “But [Nero] gave me great advice. I did a lot of on-camera stuff the last three years with the Yankees. Obviously some people were watching because I had four auditions right away when I never even told anybody that’s what I wanted to do.”

Flaherty says the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner got involved at one point, ensuring Flaherty ended up working for the Yankees instead of the rival Mets, for whom he had one of his first TV auditions. YES hired Flaherty as an on-the-field reporter a few weeks later, making him then the latest ex-pro to jump to TV.

Today, with 24 hours of lots of cable sports channels, countless studio shows and the proliferation of league- and team-owned networks, former athletes and their varyingly informed opinions fill time everywhere. Some pros make it on the largesse of their Q Score but Flaherty, according to Kaat and Marchand, made it on natural ability and then worked at it.

“You can tell when a guy is conscientious,” Kaat says, “and he’s just not there because, Hey, I was a ballplayer and they know who I am and I’ll be able to just sit and do this and I’ll get by on my name. And then you found that, Oh, you have to put the same amount of work into this that you did into being a player if you’re serious about making a career out of it.”

Marchand describes Flaherty as honest, articulate, studious and affable. Marchand’s only quibble with Flaherty’s style is the same one he has with many retired athletes in broadcasting.

“Could guys go a bit further? Yeah, I think they probably could,” says Marchand who covered for the Yankees for 11 years, overlapping with Flaherty’s time in the Bronx. “I do think that former players, for the most part—[Charles] Barkley’s like the guy who doesn’t really seem to care—but for the most part, I think he could go a little bit further sometimes in terms of his criticism. But at the end of the day, I think he’s pretty good.”

Flaherty says he didn’t take speech or media classes to get ready, only that Kaat, a YES alum who now calls games for the MLB Network, mentored him.

Kaat taught Flaherty not only the importance of preparation but also the equal importance of letting that preparation go during a broadcast. Kaat says it was John Madden who advised him to not rely on notes in the booth because it encourages the indelicate forcing of minutiae where it doesn’t fit. Flaherty says he used to struggle with this.

“Do your homework and do your research, have everything prepared,” Flaherty says, “but when you get to the booth, put that in your briefcase and just talk. If all the homework that you’ve done is important, or if it’s something that’s going to come up in a broadcast, you’ll remember it and it’ll be conversational and it’ll come across a lot better to the viewer at home.”

Flaherty now does both play-by-play and color for YES, making his first full-game play-by-play outing this year in spring training. In the past, he had just done a few innings at a time. Retired pitcher David Cone, who threw a perfect game for the Yankees in 1999, was his color man.

Over 13 seasons, Flaherty has cultivated a diplomatic, somewhat self-effacing tone that scaffolds his credibility in the occasionally bloodthirsty New York media market. It also helps him when he has to be critical.

“My first interviews on the field were with Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada—guys that I played with. Jorge, I consider one of the best baseball friends that I’ve had,” Flaherty says of the former Yankee catcher. “So when I was calling games and those guys were struggling, it’s not the most comfortable thing to do. But I think that one of the things that I realized—and I think growing up in New York helped me—is that you have to be honest with these fans. These New York fans are very knowledgeable. They know the game. You can’t lie to them. You’ve got to call it like they see it.

“When you’re critical of a player, you can always balance it. And by that I mean, if someone is struggling—say someone out of the bullpen has a tough night—you can acknowledge that they had a tough night but you also have to balance it and say he’s worked three out of the last four games. I’m sure he’s fatigued a little bit. If you find that balance, I think the players will respect that.”

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