At some point shortly after Monday’s game and while still in the home television booth, Brewers’ play-by-play broadcaster Brian Anderson allowed his mind to drift back to a rainy morning more than 30 years ago.
If not for that day, Anderson thought, so much might be different.
Maybe if a certain scout wasn’t as persistent, Anderson’s brother, Mike, would’ve never had a career in baseball.
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And if Mike never made it, Anderson surely wouldn’t be the longtime television voice of the Brewers or the widely known multi-sport national announcer.
The self-reflection wasn’t anything new. Anderson comes across as introspective and thoughtful, particularly regarding his path and how he can help others; in the early stage of the pandemic in 2020, for instance, he critiqued reels upon reels of tracks submitted by students and minor-league broadcasters. But Monday presented a different reason to think back on how things all started for him.
It was the first time Brian Anderson, Mike Anderson and Chuck LaMar were all at the same major-league ballpark.
- Brian Anderson returned to American Family Field from a hiatus while announcing NBA playoff games to call the Brewers’ game against the Braves.
- Mike Anderson, a former pitcher and pitching coach, was scouting for the Texas Rangers.
- LaMar, the scout who signed Mike Anderson in 1988, was doing advanced scouting for the San Diego Padres.
Explaining why the occasion mattered so much to all three men, and why the two others shared similar thoughts to Brian Anderson’s during their drives to the ballpark, requires untangling an unusual origin story.
Baseball is full of them. It’s equal parts weird and charming like that: Every transaction has its tree; every decision has its effects. But few stories are as unlikely as the one involving the Andersons and LaMar, and the tale also stands out because, as the 65-year-old LaMar put it, “It is an extremely unique situation to have two brothers reach the true pinnacle of their industries within baseball yet with neither of them being players at the time.”
They have him to thank.
“It was totally Chuck LaMar who is responsible for both our careers,” Brian Anderson said.
In 1988, the Reds held an open tryout — think, guys in blue jeans, teenagers, the plumber from down the street, anybody and everybody — at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Mike Anderson had just finished his collegiate pitching career at that school. By the time the Reds’ tryout camp arrived on the calendar, the draft had ended. As a pitcher at Southwestern, Mike Anderson was solid with some up-and-down seasons but went undrafted. He contemplated a different career. Maybe a stockbroker. Whatever. Anything else. But he also kept throwing, with Brian Anderson, who is five years younger, often serving as his catcher. He showed up to the Reds’ tryout feeling better about making a change with his mechanics, which resulted in him throwing harder.
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LaMar, then the Reds’ scouting supervisor, was in charge of the tryout, and he took things seriously. He wanted to find a player, the player worth finding. Not even some rain was going to stop him. That day, there was plenty of it. There was so much rain they had to pause the tryout. But LaMar, along with Southwestern’s coaches, fixed up the field in time for pitching tryouts.
The school’s bullpen allowed for two pitchers to throw simultaneously. At one point, Mike Anderson was throwing as Brian Anderson, a catcher in high school at the time and at St. Mary’s University later on, was catching another pitcher.
As Mike Anderson threw, Brian Anderson, glancing at the catcher next to him, started thinking to himself, “Oh my god, I never seen him throw harder.”
A different Reds scout had a radar gun.
“94,” he said.
Then, “95.”
Hearing this from afar, LaMar shouts, “95?”
“95,” the scout repeated as Mike Anderson kept throwing.
Meeting with the other scout, LaMar asked him, “So, this guy, did he ever show this?”
It didn’t take long before LaMar thought to himself, “OK, I gotta see this again.” So he invited Mike Anderson to the following week’s tryout, held at Texas A&M. There, Mike Anderson would throw to live batters, advanced college hitters from College Station that LaMar picked out. Brian Anderson went along for the drive. Mike Anderson was one of the first pitchers tabbed to throw.
“And Mike freakin’ dominates,” Brian Anderson said.
With a howling laugh thinking of the scene recently, LaMar recalled, “I remember to this day, he started to throw, and instead of thinking, ‘Man, how lucky am I to have found this guy in this tryout camp,’ I started thinking, ‘How did I miss this guy?’ I lived 30 minutes away. I was driving 60,000 miles a year for the Cincinnati Reds, covering Texas and Oklahoma. And he’s 30 miles from my house.”
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After Mike Anderson threw, LaMar told him to wait in the dugout. So, the Andersons did — for five hours. After the tryout ended, LaMar asked more questions about what went wrong in college, and why he wasn’t throwing as hard the year prior. Mike Anderson said the truth: There were no great reasons; he just didn’t perform well and tried to improve.
“There were no excuses and I did grill him,” LaMar said. “My experience was, if you were trying to sign guys out of a tryout camp like I was trying to do, they better have a love for the game and they better be extremely competitive. He’s gonna have to fight through the minors as a non-drafted player.”
Mike Anderson did just that. After signing for a whopping $1,000 and after Brian Anderson located a pay phone to tell their parents the news, the Andersons headed to Florida for rookie ball. Over the next five years, there were a handful of minor-league cities Mike Anderson called home — Billings, Greensboro, Indianapolis — before debuting with the Reds in 1993.
Every summer, Brian Anderson visited his brother at each of them. Around 1991, with aspirations of a playing career quickly fading, Brian Anderson started to consider what else he could do. When he visited his brother, Brian Anderson would often sit with the minor-league broadcasters, like Chattanooga’s Larry Ward. The more often he’d sit, observe and listen, he started to think, “I can do this.”
Said Brian Anderson, an English major in college, “I had no aspirations of becoming a broadcaster before that.”
Mike Anderson debuted in the majors for the Reds on Sept. 7, 1993. He gave up two of Mark Whiten’s four homers on the day and went 4 for 5 with 12 RBIs. He pitched in just two other major-league games in his career.
Just seeing his brother make it on a big-league mound, Brian Anderson thought: “If he can do it, then I am going to figure out something I can do that is meaningful.”
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“It blew my mind,” Brian Anderson said. “We think of paper ceilings when it’s in our way and we only think we can ascend so high. He busted through that paper ceiling in 1993 and my perspective on life changed.”
In the early 1990s, after picking the brains of minor-league broadcasters and doing mock games in auxiliary booths, Brian Anderson’s college was leasing their field to the Double-A San Antonio Missions. One day, he went to their front office and asked, “Hey, I’ve been shadowing all these minor-league broadcasters, can you introduce me to your broadcasters?”
He graduated college in 1994, and the Missions hired him to be their No. 2 radio person. That started his career. He spent nine years in San Antonio, before announcing for the Spurs and then the Golf Channel. Brian Anderson took the Brewers job in 2007. As his national profile and workload have both increased, he’s remained with Milwaukee, just on a smaller schedule; he’s likely to do around 50 games this season, with many of them still to go.
Meanwhile, after Mike Anderson’s pitching career — he also played overseas and was the closer on the first Korean team to feature American-born players — he became a minor-league pitching coach for the Cubs until 2006 before joining the Rangers as a pitching coach in their farm system. He was so good at writing reports on pitchers that the Rangers’ front office thought he would be most helpful in the scouting department. He’s been a highly respected scout ever since.
It all started with a tryout camp run by LaMar, who is surely tied to dozens of fun origin stories from his days with the Reds, as the Rays’ first general manager and more than 40 years in baseball as one of the industry’s most respected evaluators.
With laughs over the memories during the batting-practice sessions and moments in the television booth preceding the games in the Braves-Brewers series in Milwaukee, their worlds once again collided.
Only in baseball.
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“We always joke around now, saying, we don’t know whether to hug him or slug him because look at what he got started, more than 30 years ago,” Mike Anderson said with a laugh. “There’s a pretty good chance I wouldn’t be in baseball and I don’t think Brian would’ve even gone down this path. That day, who would’ve known what was ahead of us?”
(Courtesy photo of Brian Anderson, Chuck LaMar and Mike Anderson)
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