Pittsburgh proud
Don’t let his Detroit-area upbringing fool you: Joe Block is a Pittsburgher, through and through.
Entering his fourth season as a Pittsburgh Pirates’ play-by-play announcer, Block is working in the town where he always wanted to work and living in the suburban area where he always wanted to live.
His wife, the former Bethany Blasiak, is a South Park Township High School graduate who’s made the move one municipality over, with she and Joe proud residents of Bethel Park.
How’s that going for you?
We love it. We knew we were going to love it. We just had to find a way to get here, and thank God that I can keep doing what I want to do career-wise. My wife’s a nurse practitioner, so she can work anywhere, and she’s now getting back into the game work-wise after we had two kids very quickly.
There isn’t a day that goes by when we are not verbally professing our gratitude for the way things worked out, because this is exactly how we would dream our lives to be, being able to pursue our careers the way we wanted to, but most importantly, and always paramount, being able to have our family in the South Hills and raising our kids here. That’s what we’ve always wanted.
Your favorite hockey team is the Pittsburgh Penguins, not the Detroit Red Wings. Why?
When I started to get into hockey, the Red Wings were in last place in the Norris (Division) that year. It was ’89-90. They were pretty lousy. And the Pens, the next year, of course, they’re going to win the Stanley Cup. They signed Jaromir Jagr, and for a kid, he’s just an exciting player to follow. And of course, (Mario) Lemieux. You had to choose (Wayne) Gretzky or Lemieux. I liked Lemieux. So between those two, I said, “OK, I like the Penguins.” They win back-to-back cups, so I’m definitely a Pens fan.
And I could get the games on KDKA. I could hear Mike Lange. I’m a teenager, and I’m really starting to develop an affinity for broadcasting. And I hear this colorful wizard of language calling an exciting team that’s breaking through and becoming a young dynasty. I was enthralled. And so I became a Pens fan, and so did my best friend. And we want to go to a hockey game. Well, we try to get Wings tickets. Now, the Wings were starting to be better and you couldn’t get Wings tickets. But you could still get Pens tickets more easily than you could Wings tickets.
So we ended up convincing our parents when he was 16 – I was 15 – to let us drive out to Pittsburgh for high school spring break. We stayed in Green Tree and we went to one game at the Igloo. It was the (Tampa Bay) Lightning. And we just messed around town for a few days, and did our spring break in Pittsburgh. Then we did it again the next year.
How will the Pirates perform in 2019?
The expectation is they are going to win more games than they in ’18. And when you go 82-79, it doesn’t take that much more to make you a playoff team. So I think if you do get a couple of things, if you continue to have the pitchers do what they did and you have a couple of guys return to form offensively, this team, I think, is a playoff team. The difference between getting cautiously excited and really excited is: Let’s see what moves they make. If the moves are right and some guys do return to form, now you’re starting to talk, OK, this team can win 90-plus and really make some noise in the postseason. At the very least, I think everybody should be optimistic about the forthcoming season, and I don’t think we’ve had that in the last couple of years. So it’s nice to know that the window is open again.
What is it like to work with the other members of the Pirates’ broadcast team – Steve Blass, Greg Brown, Bob Walk and John Wehner?
They’ve adopted me from Day One, which is great. You get to a point where you have your group, and it’s such a tightly knit group, I’ve found. Being a new person in it can be rather daunting. But they looked at it with openness, and I’m very glad to say that I feel like I’ve fit in from the get-go, because there aren’t egos. There’s pride in their work, but there aren’t egos. These are regular guys. We all get along very, very well. We got together at Steve’s cabin last month. We’ve seen each other every day for seven months, and two weeks go by, we need to see each other again.
I am so fortunate to be able to work with a bunch of classy guys, fun guys, really good at their jobs. They’re all my best pals, and they’ve allowed me to become one of their best pals, too, right away. And I’m really, really thankful for that – because it’s not like that everywhere. It’s rare.
What do you enjoy about calling baseball games?
It’s always been the sport that I’ve followed. It’s been the sport I’ve been most passionate about. It’s been the sport that I’ve loved since I was 8 years old. There was nothing really else that I wanted to do from that age on. When I was 8, I determined that I wanted to be a baseball broadcaster, and thank the Lord, I’ve been able to continue to pursue that. And 32 years later, I’m still at it, but I get paid to do it instead of just practicing into a tape recorder in my bedroom. I learn something about baseball every day. Now, I work with three of the best analysts around, and they teach me something every day, usually on the air. But also talking with our coaches and our manager and our players, I’m always learning something. And I’m one of those people who like to learn.
You called Milwaukee Brewers games for four years alongside a legend of television (“Mr. Belvedere”), the big screen (“Major League”) and the broadcasting booth, Bob Uecker. Can you share a story about “Mr. Baseball”?
Well, Harry, how many years do you have?
To work with such an elite entertainer, but also someone who has played the game – he was a very good defensive catcher, which he would never, of course, give himself credit for – his knowledge of the game is superior. So learned a lot about the game. I learned how to entertain.
I think this encapsulates what it’s like to work with him: We’re in Kansas City, and the way that booth is structured, it almost like a labyrinth to get to Ueck. You have to kind of come in through a narrow opening and go around the engineer, and there’s really not enough room to sneak behind him. So he kind of acts as a gatekeeper. Then you come down a narrow passageway downstairs, and then I’m sitting there, and then you have to squeeze behind me to get to Ueck.
There was this scraggly haired man, looks a bit disheveled, making his way through, and he has a warm smile on his face. First he talks to me. I figure if he got by Kent, our engineer, he’s probably someone who belongs there, but I don’t recognize who he is. I tap Ueck on the shoulder and say, “There’s somebody here to see you.” And he goes, “Al! Great to see you, Al! Meet my partner, Joe Block. He’s a Detroiter, too.”
So, he’s Al from Detroit. Who is this man? Scraggly hair. Not old, but not young. Probably a little bit beyond middle age. I’m not placing this. We somehow get into debating the merits – this is all during the half-inning break – of the Colavito-Kuenn trade, trading the home run champion for the batting champion. Harry’s note: The Detroit Tigers traded Rocky Colavito, the American League’s home run leader in 1959, to the Cleveland Indians for Harvey Kuenn. So we’re hashing this out in the 90 seconds that we have, and now the inning is starting.
So we come to a conclusion – I forget what it was – and the inning starts. Kent’s nudging Ueck: “OK, come on. We’re on! We’re on!”
And then he goes, “Coop, good to see ya!” and basically licensing Coop to take off. And he goes, “Coop, are you playing tonight?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m playing tonight.”
“Oh, that’s why you’re here. Good to see ya, Coop. All right!”
Then I figured it out: Al. Coop from Detroit. That’s Alice Cooper! And I say, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cooper” or something. He takes off, and I’m like, oh, my God! I was just talking with Alice Cooper and I didn’t even know it! And we’re debating the merits of the Colavito-Kuenn trade, in 2012.
But this was the kind of stuff that would happen like on a weekly basis. You just wouldn’t know who was about to walk in and have a conversation. That was what it was like a lot of times sitting next to Uecker in that booth.