Best Friday the 13th horror story I’ve heard all day

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

How many people do you know who’ve been an Emmy-winning TV writer-producer, a successful screenwriter and -- and this a big and -- a baseball play-by-play announcer? That’s the resume for Ken Levine, who has worked on shows including ‘MASH,’ Frasier’ and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ co-wrote the Tom Hanks film ‘Volunteers’ and was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles, the Seattle Mariners and the San Diego Padres.

Levine is also a blogger, giving him the opportunity to wax eloquent about the TV trade as well as offer comical accounts of his baseball broadcasting misadventures. Since it’s Friday the 13th, the perfect day for misadventures -- and since you can hear Levine doing play-by-play this weekend for the Dodgers spring training games on KABC and here at Dodgers.com as well -- it seemed fitting to link to his post about a classic misadventure he had on his debut broadcast for the Orioles, during a spring training game in 1991.

Levine says he practiced his opening remarks for three days, then recited them verbatim, which as he puts it, probably made him sound ‘like Sheldon in ‘Big Bang Theory.’ ‘ His big test came right away. The first batter, the O’s slugger Randy Milligan, was thrown out at first after hitting a routine ground ball to third, but when he ran past the first-base bag he tripped, did a header, twisted his ankle and lay groaning in agony in the dirt for a good 20 minutes.

If you think that’s a big deal for the injured player, imagine what it was like for the rookie announcer, who had 20 minutes of dead air to fill, with no game to recap, since Milligan was the first batter in the lineup. Normally, the play-by-play announcer’s partner would help out, but in this case, as Levine recalls, his partner, the veteran announcer Jon Miller, was ‘just gazing out at the field, mike turned off, a sly little smile on his face. The message was clear: ‘OK, kid, you wanted this job? Let’s see what ya got.’ ‘

The next 20 minutes was all a blur for Levine, who managed to survive his trial by fire. He jokes that if a similar incident happens this weekend -- let’s hope it’s not Manny Ramirez who does the header -- he’s prepared. As he put it: ‘If you tune into Dodger baseball this weekend and hear me reviewing this week’s ‘American Idol,’ you’ll know why.’