By: Grace Zheng

In two months, Joe Davis would get the job of his dreams: the lead play-by-play voice for baseball on Fox News. He would replace Joe Buck, who has called the last 20 All-Star Games and left for ESPN. Many people think that he prepared very diligently for the job, and that is how he got it.

“Davis has not made many on his path to filling the chairs of industry titans,” an article in the New York Times says. “He has been the full-time television voice of the Dodgers since Scully retired after the 2016 season, his 67th with the team.”

But he tirelessly listened and observed four baseball broadcasts, each by a different person, and took notes.

When the Fox Sports executive Brad Zager first heard of Davis’s work, he noticed how he understood the craft. Zager was very impressed.

“There were two things: the actual tone of his voice, the cadence and all that, but also I was caught off guard by a young broadcaster who actually wasn’t over-talking,” Zager said. “He wasn’t being over-descriptive. … he was laying out on a big 3-pointer and letting the crowd be part of the broadcast. …he had it naturally. He was a student of the game.”

“We’d go out on a Friday night, have a good time, a couple of beers, and there was Joe up in his room, watching baseball on YouTube, recording himself calling the game,” said Rick Krajewski, a college friend who now works in the booth with Davis. “We’d be like, ‘Hey, Joe, come on, let’s do something fun.’ And it was: ‘Nope, sorry guys, gotta do this.’”

Source(s): https://nytimes.com/2022/07/17/sports/baseball/joe-davis-all-star.html