More Eric Nadel comments
Staff writer Jacob Unruh interviewed longtime Texas Rangers radio broadcaster Eric Nadel last week for a story that ran in Sunday’s paper.
Nadel was in Oklahoma City Monday night at Academy Sports and Outdoors located on 7700 South Walker Ave. along with first base coach Dave Anderson and pitching prospects Justin Grimm for the Rangers Caravan.
Nadel offered more thoughts on former broadcast partner Mark Holtz, who made the phrase “Hello win column” popular in Texas. Nadel has only used that phrase once, when the Rangers beat the Rays in the 2010 ALDS for the first playoff series win in franchise history
Here some of additional Nadel comments that didn’t make Sunday’s story:
I learned how to let your personality come through on the air and that sense of joy in being there. I think most, if not all, of the great baseball announcers have that. They have a connection with the audience that’s based on their own personal warmth. Mark had that and it was very immediately obvious to anyone who listened to him, and that’s something I’m always striving for.
That was the first playoff series the Rangers ever won and to me that was the most significant win in Rangers history, that fifth game which indicated the Rangers were not the same old Rangers gone in the first round. That was my homage to Holtzy that day.
As far as my play-by-play, one moment that really stands out is the night the Rangers scored 30 runs in Baltimore in ’07. The three-run homer that Ramon Vazquez hit that got the Rangers to 30, which was an all-time major league record – that’s a moment that I won’t forget.
In ’09 I had a detached retina. It was a really scary. I started seeing floaters one night during the game at Yankee Stadium and so I went back to the hotel room after the game and Googled it, and it said there’s all kind of possibilities but if your eye sight starts getting blurry, you need to see somebody. Then the following day at lunch it was as if somebody had coated my right eye with Vaseline and I couldn’t get in to see a retina specialist until the next morning.
It was a really scary period of about a month. They told me it was probably going to be all right, but they had no guarantees. Even now after the surgery the sight in my right eye is nowhere close to what it used to be.
I met (my wife) in 1984. We were kind of introduced by a mutual friend and we got married two years later, so she knew what she was getting into.
We chose not to have kids and I don’t know if that would have been the case if I didn’t have this kind of job where I’m gone a third of the time. But we’ve never felt we had enough responsibility to raise children. Taking care of our dog is enough of a challenge.
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