Batterrrr UP!

By Barbara Marshak

Combining a love for baseball and an interest in broadcasting, Dick Bremer has carved out a career as "the television voice of the Minnesota Twins." As a young boy growing up in Dumont, Minnesota, Dick religiously followed Twins baseball.

"I probably watched forty-eight of the fifty games televised," he says. A few years later, the Bremer family moved to Staples, where Dick graduated from high school in 1974. He attended St. Cloud State University and soon discovered he would not have a career as a participant in athletics. "My baseball career came to a halt, so I needed another way to get into the games for free."

After college, Bremer worked for various radio and television stations. He broadcast his first year with the Twins in 1983 with Spectrum Sports. Except for one season since, he has called the games on television every year.

"There are only thirty people in the world who do what I do," says Bremer, "when you consider there are thirty baseball teams in major league baseball and each club has its own TV play-by-play announcer." Bremer believes he is very fortunate to have had such an extended career with the Twins.

Throughout the years, he has developed great relationships with some of the Twins players, traveling with the team during spring training and throughout the regular season. When Bremer first started broadcasting, he was close in age to many of the players and became good friends with them. Now there's more of an age difference, yet the camaraderie extends to a large circle of current and former players.

"Sometimes I'll run into a player I haven't seen in ten years," says Bremer, "and memories of a certain game will be as vivid as if the home run or the great catch or the shutout just happened the day before. That's one of the wonderful things about baseball. I think it has a way to permanently etch memories into your mind more than other sports."

Bremer's wife, Heidi, and their two children, Erik and Hannah, like to travel with him to Fort Myers, Florida, where the Twins have a permanent home base for spring training. A walk around Hammond Stadium in March will often find more Minnesotans than Floridians. The family also makes one or two trips during the season.

"It's nice because our kids have been able to see some neat places in the country," says Bremer. "But they've also seen that life on the road can be rough." On one such trip with the family, the team was scheduled to travel to Texas following a series in Anaheim, California. The night game in Anaheim went fourteen innings and they arrived in Texas as the sun was coming up.

"It can be kind of a grind," he says, referring to the schedule. "When we're broadcasting from Oakland or Boston, the kids can turn on the TV and it's almost like a three-hour telephone call from Dad. It helps make up for my absence somewhat."

The Twins' regular season schedule runs from the first week of April to the first of October with 162 games packed into six months. Half of the games are at home and half on the road, with the team moving from city to city as much as every three or four days.

For the past nine years, Bremer has worked side-by-side with the former Twins pitcher, Bert Blyleven. The pair provides colorful play-by-play and stats, but it's their friendly banter and good-natured humor that appeal to the television audience throughout the upper midwest.

"We had fun when the team was losing ninety games a season," he says. "It's been all the more enjoyable to see the Twins win the Central Division three years in a row. People tune in and they want to be entertained. I've got the best job in the world."

He feels that growing up in out-state Minnesota has had a direct impact on how he broadcasts the games. "I think I know what the Twins fans want to hear," he says.

He is the first to acknowledge there are better broadcasters out there, but none who work harder at it than he does.