The crack of the bat. The sound of the baseball hitting the first baseman’s glove. The cheers of the crowd.These sights and sounds of the ballpark are part of the daily routine for Jesse Goldberg-Strassler, a Greenbelt native and the radio broadcaster for the Lansing Lugnuts, the Class-A minor league affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays.
A lifelong baseball fan, Goldberg-Strassler has broadcast minor league baseball for nearly 15 years and has been with the Lugnuts since 2009. He also broadcasts Central Michigan University basketball and has written several books, including multiple editions of The Baseball Thesaurus. His passion for baseball long precedes this,dating back to his days growing up in Boxwood Village. “That’s just how it is in my family, you’re a baseball fan,” Goldberg-Strassler said. “You are raised to love baseball.”
His father, Robert, encouraged him to be a San Francisco Giants fan, but Goldberg-Strassler latched onto the Detroit Tigers as a kid because of his love of shortstop Alan Trammell, despite, at the time, never having been to Detroit. From an early age, he was a walking baseball almanac of sorts, paying attention to every detail on the back of baseball cards and immersing himself in the history of the sport. “Jesse remembers the history of baseball like he was there living it, even from before he was born,” his mother Judy said. Goldberg-Strassler played Greenbelt Little League as a kid, Greenbelt Native Son Pursues Baseball Broadcasting Dream by Chris Rogers-Spatuzzi starting with tee-ball and working his way up to higher levels, ultimately marching in the Greenbelt Labor Day Parade as a Little League All-Star when he was 10 or 12.
When the Bowie Baysox, an Orioles minor-league affiliate, moved to Prince George’s County in 1994, Goldberg-Strassler and his family would attend games as often as they could. “When we’d go to baseball games, there was no leaving early,” Judy said. “We’d go with friends, and their kids would be running around the stadium. Jesse and his brother and sister would just sit there, watch and process the game, fully engaged.” During his time at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Goldberg-Strassler was involved in theater, developing an on-stage presence and commanding an audience. He learned to speak with emotion and excitement, Judy said, something that he would carry with him through high school and college into his broadcasting career. As a senior at Roosevelt, he was tasked to write, direct and star in his own one-man play. His show focused on the history of baseball cards and how collecting them has changed over time. It was a combination of his three passions: theater, writing and baseball.
By the time Goldberg-Strassler graduated high school in 2000, he figured out a career path that would combine those three passions in the same way that he
had in the play. So, he packed his bags and headed to Ithaca College in central New York to study sports broadcasting. He got involved with the radio station there right away, working his way up from producing shows to broadcasting football and basketball games. While he majored in television and radio with an audio production concentration, Goldberg-Strassler saw production and engineering as pathways for him to get behind the mic. “[My production experiences were] absolutely a means to an end, and still, though I try very hard to understand the technology and equipment, it just escapes me,” he said. “My brain just
doesn’t click the same way with it as it does with the sport itself, or with language. I love communication and I love language.”
Fresh out of college, Goldberg-Strassler got his first job in professional baseball in the spring of 2005 as the number three broadcaster and media coordinator for the then independent Brockton Rox in Massachusetts. He was in charge of the pre- and post-game shows for the Rox, operating the soundboard during
broadcasts and compiling game notes and stats before each contest. It was not a luxurious gig by any means, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. “The groundskeeper said, ‘well, why don’t you live at my place?’ I’ll move out, you stay here.’ His place didn’t have a lock that worked, the lights didn’t work,” Goldberg-Strassler laughed about his living experience in Brockton. “So, I had no lock and no lights … but I loved it.”
With a year of professional baseball experience under his belt, Goldberg-Strassler went back to the MLB Winter Meetings in December 2005, looking for a new role. He accepted a position as the number two broadcaster for the Montgomery Biscuits, the Tampa Bay Rays Double-A affiliate in Alabama. After a two-year stint with Montgomery, he made a pit stop in the Chicago area, where he served as the main broadcaster for the Windy City ThunderBolts of the Frontier League for the 2008 season. Then, in 2009, the Lugnuts hired him to be their number one broadcaster, a position he has held ever since. Now in his mid-30s, Goldberg-Strassler still has the same passion for baseball that he did as a kid on the little league field in Greenbelt, but with countless unforgettable memories from his 14 years in professional baseball.
When he was in Brockton, his boss gave him a challenge: call a game smoothly and precisely without watching it, using only the information fed to him by others, just as old-time broadcasters did in the 1930s and 40s. He did so successfully, which prepared him for the unexpected in 2008 with the ThunderBolts. A storm knocked out internet in the press box, which made GoldbergStrassler call the game, which ended up being a no-hitter, from the team’s front office. Now, it’s a tradition for the Lugnuts playby-play man to broadcast one game a year from the hallways of Lansing’s stadium. Goldberg-Strassler may have missed the first no-hitter of his career, but he did broadcast three consecutive championships, watching the Biscuits win the Southern League in 2006 and 2007 before the ThunderBolts won the Frontier League title in 2008. He’s seen numerous top prospects rise through the ranks of the Rays and Blue Jays systems, such as three-time MLB All-Star third baseman Evan Longoria, who sat behind Goldberg-Strassler on the bus to and from Montgomery.
“It’s easy to go with a big name, and I’ll name drop a little,like Evan Longoria,” he said when asked which players have stood out the most to him during his career behind the mic. “But there’s so many different things that can cause appeal for a baseball player, thinking about the different tools that a guy has,” he said. “You name the tool and I’ll say ‘boy did I love that from this guy!’”